Preparing Your Image for Silkscreening on T-Shirts

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: All right, so the way--remember think about how silk screening works, okay? You're--it's kind of like having a stencil, but it's at a very fine scale because there's all these holes in the fabric and some of them are open, some of them are closed, okay? But, silk screening is also kind of done in blocks of color, right? So, I mean, look at this shirt I'm wearing. I mean, there's one color here, okay? You know, there's white and it's you know, it's on a black shirt. So there's just kind of single color, block of color. You can do multiple colors you know, but if you're going to do multiple colors; you kinda have to have multiple screens. That is to say a different screen for each color and you kinda would have to layer them on top of each other, so I don't know next time you look at maybe one of your printed t-shirts you can kind of see how that's done. That it's done in sort of solid kind of blocks of color and there's not really any kind of blending or shading or anything like that. I mean, there are some methods that let you do that, but so when you're thinking of a design for screen printing, you want to kind of think in those terms, right? That just you know--so things like line art is really good. Photographs are a little bit more difficult to work with. You can work from them and I'll show you how you can do that, but line art is really good. You know, clip art--anything that is made out of kind of bold shapes, bold strokes, bold lines, works well. So when you set up your design, you can either free hand something if you want to, just again with your brushes--you know paint, you know you can--well actually what you would do is you would you know use like a pencil to just kind of draw the outline of the image you do want to print with the ink and then you kind of, you know paint the rest of it with the glue or you can use your computer. I mean, here's kinda one example of a fairly simple image. This is just the Japanese Kanji symbol for wind. This is Kaze, so I don't know it might make a cool screen print. That's a fairly simple image, so you know we can work with something like that. You could also work with photographs if you kinda know how to use you know graphics arts program. This is an image of--this is actually from Werner Herzog film, Fitzcarraldo. This is kind of this crazy guy who was in the Amazon and he has his gramophone here, but anyway this was a photograph and just through using a graphics program, I was able to kind of turn it into this block of color image, kind of this black and white image and something like this would be good for screen printing, okay? So I can transfer this into print so. Just think about that in terms of image design and remember the other thing I said, just a reminder about the squeegee, you want there to be kind of a match up between the size of the squeegee you have and the image you're using. So in this case, you know I've got a good match up here and in this case, same thing. I mean, it'll fit across that image in kind of one stroke rather having to like, stroke it all over the place, so just some things you want to think about when you're setting up your image."