How to Test a Screen Print Design

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Melina and welcome to Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to make a screen print design on a t-shirt. In this next step, we're going to do a test print. So you're going to take some paint. You're going to put it on some foil or on a flat work surface. Mix it up little. Get it ready for printing. If the paint is too thick, you can water it down a little. It should have a nice smooth consistency. You don't want it to be too chunky, but you also don't want it to be too watery. Then you want to take a piece of cardboard or any flat surface that you don't mind getting dirty. This is going to be where you're going to print on. Take your test print fabric. Place it on your board. Then you're going to take your screen print and your going to place it on the fabric. Then take some paint, put a little bit on the end of your squiggly. Your going to start with the farthest point out. You're going to press down pretty hard. Go across each area that you cut out, where you want paint. It's always good to use less paint. You can always add more. But once you have a big glob of paint on here, things get a little messy. So you can see there's this one part of my design, the center of the whale, I don't have any paint there. I'm not going to bother just doing a whole squiggly of paint because I want to save paint. Lift up your box and see how your test print came out. There's a little paint missing from this edge, so now when I print on my t-shirt I'm going to make sure in that edge that I press down especially hard."