What is Silkscreening?

Series Summary

Have you ever looked at the t-shirt designs at your local department store and thought, “I can do better than that!”? Have you ever been frustrated that you can't find any t-shirts with the name and logo of your favorite band or movie? The solution to these problems is to take matters into your own hands and start printing your own t-shirts. Then you can print whatever you want! Silkscreening, or screen printing, is exactly the skill you're looking for!

In this series of free crafts videos, our experienced screen printer takes you through all of the steps involved in creating a silkscreened t-shirt. Manda Claire begins with on overview of screen printing basics, then discusses all of the steps involved in the process. Learn how to make a screen for your inks and a stencil with your own design. What kind of inks and fabrics should you use to get the best results? Manda answers these questions and more with her approach. You learn about glues, brushes, inks, paints, and tips. It's all here to set up your own t-shirt factory!

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: All right, so let's just define what we're going to be doing here today. So we're going to be doing a type of screen printing and there are many different kinds of printing that are used for different applications. I mean there's printing on, you know, there's publication type printing, you know your newspapers, your magazines, your books and all that but there's also a lot of different types of art printing. You know, lithograph, engraving, and screen printing is kind of within that category of art printing and screen printing is used for--it's used for fabric a lot, so anytime you get a t-shirt or you know or a fabric that kinda has a design on it, you know usually-like this is like one example of that, you can tell it kinda has a--kind of a paint on it, that's a screen print. And it doesn't have to be one color; it can be several colors and so let's kinda talk about how the process works to achieve that. Screen printing is also used on--in some art prints, like a lot of rock posters, rock and roll posters, art prints are done in kind of a screen printed way. And so in the next clip, we'll kinda tell you basically what screen printing is, how that type of printing is done and how it differs from other kinds of printing."