All You Need To Know About Screen Printing

Screen printing is an ancient but popular technique of transferring the ink on a surface. This technique finds a broader application in the textile industry. It is used to transfer ink and designs on fabrics like cotton, polyester, organza, silk, etc. These fabrics are then used to create finished product. If you are planning to start a fabric printing business like t-shirts printing, customizable printing, etc., then you can choose this as a method to create beautiful designs. One of the reasons the designers make use of this technique is that it is very cheap and effective.

How Screen Printing it work?

Screen Printing

The working of this technique can be summed as:

Ink + screen (mesh stencil) = screen printing

An important point to note while you use this technique is that your artisans must have the knowledge of fabrics and colors. This helps them understand how a particular ink will look when imprinted on the fabric.

Brief History Of This Technique

This technique was initially used in China and Japan, centuries ago. Although the traces of this age-old technology go back to 1860s, when it comes to the commercial application of this technique, it started in 1910 in the USA. It gained popularity over the years and developed during World War II. Later in the 1950s, its usage expanded from textile printing to a method of printing for advertisements, labels and for printing objects. However, it has another competitor, digital printing present in the market. But the conventional forms of printing continue to hold its position strong.

What Are The Pros And Cons Of Screen Printing?

1.Designs last longer - One of the reasons that make this technique of printing popular technique is because it is a long-lasting technique. Because of the thickness of the ink and its chemical composition, it lasts longer on the fabric it is imprinted.

2. Finesse – The best part about this technique is that the prints produced by this are vibrant and its quality is hard to match. There are other printing techniques like direct to garment (DTG) use cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) dots is a good way to imprint a design, but over a period of time, these designs tend to lose color and gloss and don’t look good. It is not the case with screen printing.

3. More Ink - As mentioned above, it has more thickness of the ink which makes the designs of better quality and gives it a perfect finish.

Disadvantages

1. Not for small vendors - If cost is a constraint for you, then you should probably not invest in this type of printing technology. If you are looking for a colorful design, then the process becomes more expensive.

2. Not environment-friendly - While there is so much emphasis on adopting environment-friendly techniques of printing, this technique involves a lot of water used for mixing ink and cleaning the screen, and this will result in wastage of water.

Areas of Application

Screen Printing

This 2000-year-old technology has been used for printing designs on textile. But over a period of time, it has evolved and now finds application in other industries as well. Here are some of the uses of this technology:

• Printing of designs on cushion, t-shirts, and fabrics remains the conventional application of this technology.
• Screen printing is a fairly economical method of printing and hence its growing popularity
• It is used to draw graphics for promoting businesses
• In the sports industry, this technology is used for designing logos on t-shirts.

Conclusion - Although digital printing is gaining usage and popularity, when it comes to quality and long-lasting effect, then screen printing still takes an edge over.