Orienting the Image for Silkscreening T-Shirts

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: All right. So here's my finished screen. It's--the fabric's nice and tight. It's stretched across but I haven't really pulled it too much to stretch it. Also, all the wrinkles are out of it. It's kinda like a little drum head. I've cut the corners off so I don't have any fabric that's really going to touch the surface of the screen, okay. So now let's think of an embroidery hoop. With an embroidery hoop, you have one side of it is where the fabric is sort of flush with the top. The other side of it, you know, you can see it's kinda like looking down into a bucket or something. The fabric's down below, but you have the hoop rising up, okay? So what that means is when you're printing, you want the screen to be up against the t-shirt or the paper or whatever it is. So that means, I don't know, if I was printing on, well, here, I've got my t-shirt right here. If I was printing on my t-shirt, okay, I need the screen to be touching the shirt while I'm printing. So it's going to be like this when I'm printing. Therefore, my image needs to be correct, you know, right side up, left to right, not a backwards image or anything when I'm looking at this side of the screen, right? Do you understand what I mean, you know? I want to make sure that when I'm painting my image, if I want it to look like this, then I paint it on the inside of the hoop because that's the way that I'm going to be doing the screening. If I were to do it on this side, well, then I set it up to screen and it'll be backwards. Right, the image will be backwards, okay? So that's really just kind of the concern. So what you do--once you've kind of figured out what side of the screen you're going to do, you know, you've cut the corners off and everything, then you start setting up your image. And so we're going to be doing this in the next clip but just briefly. I'm going to take, actually I think I'm going to do this image here, Fitzcarraldo from the Werner Herzog film with the same name. I'm going to kind of lay this on the table, put the screen, fabric side down right on top of it, get it nice and centered, and then, you know, when I kinda get the image on here, then it'll be in the correct orientation for printing later."