How Commercial Companies Silkscreen

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: So in standard screen printing, like the screen printing where professional print shops that make a lot of t-shirts, or you know a lot of art prints, posters, the way that works is though they take a fabric, again, you know, silk or polyester or it's gotta be something that doesn't stretch, that has a uniform hole size to it, uniform pore size. We'll talk about that later. And in standard screen printing, they prepare them on these screens and they actually just kinda looks--kinda like a picture frame with the fabric stretched across it and then what they do is they coat it with a chemical called the photo emulsion, which is basically kinda like what the emulsion that's on film but it's a light sensitive emulsion. And so think of it as like a glue or a paint that kinda goes over the entire screen, so they coat it with that, and then they let that dry, kind of in the dark and then what you do is then you would take your image, you know, whatever it is, something in black and white and you put it on a transparency, you put that on the emulsion, okay? You expose it to light, right, so light's going to you know hit, it's going to go through what's transparent and not go through where you've got black on the transparency. And then when you wash the image out with a hose, it will wash away where it wasn't exposed, that'll wash away where it was black and it will stay where it was white. And so then when you apply the ink on it or the paint, it will be forced through the areas of that emulsion that were washed away. Okay? So again, think of it kind of as a stencil. The problem with that method is its quite labor intensive and it can be quite expensive. I mean, the fabric you use for regular screen printing is, you know, sort of expensive. You have to either know how to prep those large screens or buy them. The photo emulsion you have to pay for, that's also quite messy. You have to kind of build your light box, you can expose it to light and you know, hose it out; there's a lot of steps. And that's really not the way we're going to be doing it in this kind of simpler DIY method which takes a little bit different approach, but the DIY--the do-it-yourself method is a little bit cheaper. The materials are cheaper and the methods are a little bit different, but you know, I think you'll like it."