February 5, 2013

Screen printing for Date's coat symbol pt.4

I should have written this already yesterday but I got home late and was tired as crap all day so.. lolnope. I will write it now instead but the actual process was done yesterday in school's art class. Oh, and excuse me most photos are a bit blurry...

Okay, so last time I said it's ready for test printing and this is what I did!
First up I cut out a fitting piece of black cotton fabric (from school) and then taped a piece of paper on the table where I would be printing to guard the table from.. well, getting paint on it. I used black fabric because then I could print with white fabric paint and that's better because Masamune's symbol is white.

cotton fabric and taped paper underneath
After that I put the fabric on top of the paper, stretched and taped it tightly along all corners. There was no iron in school so that was the only way to get the wrinkled fabric a bit less wrinkly lol. Oh, and obviously to hold it in place while printing.

Fabric taped in place
Okay, now ready for test printing! Here's the preparation and all items I would need. The white can is obviously fabric paint and those wooden things.. *googles* .. they seem to be called 'squeegee' in English. Sounds funny to me.. xD And then of course I'd need my printing frame.

Preparations complete
I took a spoon and put a row of paint at one of the edges of the frame...

The paint placed out (I used some extra.. you don't need that much)
And then took the squeegee and spread the paint so it fully covered the symbol.. wiped off the excess that was on top of the symbol and made sure there were no "paint lines". I left the remaining excess paint at the edge because I would be printing more than one.

It should look something like this..
When you lift the frame carefully the frame will look like this:

The symbol is almost transparent
I printed another symbol directly after the first. Can't wait too long between the prints or the fabric paint, especially the white for some reason, could clog up or something.. I'm not 100% sure of that but whatever. After the second test print my creations looked like this:

MAH BABIES 8DDDD
I had room to print a third one in the bottom center. Oh, and when test printing I put a paper on top of the already printed symbols so that the frame, complete with paint on it, wouldn't get on the already printed symbols. Then again if I were printing seriously (aka non-test) I would not do this because the paper catches up some of the paint of the already printed ones.. they don't dry in a second lol. If I wanted to print several ones close to one another I'd have to wait between each one so that the previous one would be dry. But yeah, because this was just a test to see that everything works as it should I did not care about slightly ruining my prints.

After printing the third symbol. Two previous ones still covered..
As you can see the printing is very exact and doesn't bleed or anything. Totally worth the extra effort at the start because after the printing frame is ready it's super chill; you could pretty much mass-produce almost perfect prints with little effort! Imagine how tedious it would be to handpaint each of these every time...

Oh, and after I had test printed enough I had to wash the frame. I used a sponge and just carefully rubbed the frame free of the paint under tap water. For some reason my tapes (which I put on earlier to conceal the holes) didn't peel off lol. I put it to dry in that same box I used earlier when developing the symbol with the water jet.

Drying drying.. (if you look close you can see the tapes on the other side)
And that's it. Next time I can print on the real thing!

2 comments:

  1. Woot~ Your print looks so perfect and awesome! <3 It was definitely worth all that extra effort you took at the start! Oh man, I sure as hell can't imagine what a nightmare it would be to handpaint that thing. XD

    Squeegees are FUN to use! lololo XDD

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    Replies
    1. Thank you and yes, totally worth it!

      Also there are some super small mistakes (you can see them if you look very closely) but that's because they are on the frame (I derped sliiiightly during the process) and thus will always show when printed, not because of paint derp. I think I'll use a pencil to fill those parts close to the fails so I don't get them on the real fabric.

      They are! lolololo xD

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