Hi everyone, this week we have decided to tell you little bit more about the screen printing technique i.e work that we all @ Fresh Air enjoy doing and is the nature of our business.

This week we’ll take you through the process very quickly and in the following weeks we’ll dig deeper into every part of the process.

So for the start here is something we have found on internet: Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas. 

This sounds easy but before we get to print t-shirt there are many things to be done. 

It all starts with our customer who come with their complete design or only an idea which we than transfer into some illustration design. Then he will decide what type and colour of garment we’ll be using so everything is set to start producing the tees. 

Firstly the artwork needs to be separated ( splitting the design into it’s individual colours )made into photo-positives and placed on the screen, 10 colours in the image needs 10 screens, with modern technology this can now be done in a few different ways. 

We expose the screens from the photo-positives using Ultra violet light resulting in sharper images this whole process needs to be done with exceptional skill so everything is shown at the end on the t-shirt as a colour every single spot needs to appear on the final design.

After all the screens(colours) are ready we can start producing samples where we try to catch all the bugs – make sure the colour is correct, nothing is missing from the art, choose the right squeegee, play about and get the best result and this is all done by hand. Once our customer approves the sample we can go onto produce the final product We have 8 fully automated screen printing machines and our printers have many years of experience to set the machine with the right pressure,squeegee angle to make sure that the ink is not missing anywhere and that everything is in register. Then we dry the shirt and do a wash test to make sure the print is fully cured.  

And Voila! The T-shirt/hoodie/sweatshirt/bag is complete. 

Hope you will enjoy and don’t forget all the questions suggestions comments are welcome

Everyone @ Fresh Air says Hi