We know that the screen printing process can be hard to understand so we wanted to take a second and go over the key factors involved.

All projects start at the art and garment, we need to discern what process would be ideal to render the screen stencils and to what material the print will be applied.

First we create what we call separations, this is the process of dividing your art into the positives also known as films that will represent the screen stencils. There are several different ways to do this depending on the complexity of the art.

Next we use those positives to expose the information from each color into individual screens creating the stencil, the stencil is then the positive information that the ink will pass through to the garment.

Now that the screens contain the stencils we aline all the screens on the printing press so the art fits back together like a puzzle, this is called registration.

Once we have everything on press we can start test printing the project. Setting up the squeegee pressure, pre-cure temperatures, print speeds and final touches to registration.

Creating quality screen printing is all done in the setup stage, when mindful steps are taken by experienced printers the production stage is smooth sailing.

Check out the infographic below showing the basics on separations, exposure and registration.