Impressions - March 2010 - (Page 30)

What’s With Water-Based Inks? By Dan and Kevin Corcoran, Contributing Writers Learn the secrets of successfully printing designs with waterbased inks. l ike many screen printers, we started our careers in the decorated apparel industry mostly using plastisol ink. Unfortunately, we were printing on a manual press and many of our shirts wound up with “bulletproof” designs. That all changed about four years ago when we were out at stores looking at the work of other printers and we were struck by the soft prints we saw. Once we were introduced to the world of printing with water-based and discharge inks, we never looked back. Top left: With water-based inks, halftone dots bleed into the fabric and spread out just a bit, unlike plastisol, which makes for softer tonal transitions and gradients. Top middle: Mixing water-based colors can be tricky. You might start with 450 grams of a liquid base and add as little as 0.3 grams of a particular color. Although colors ship in quart-sized containers, we transfer them to bottles with tapered tops to more precisely add these tiny drops of color, and also use a scale to control the amount of pigment we add. Top right: Printing water-based or discharge inks on darks can produce dynamic results with a super-soft hand since no white underbase is required. Water-based WIndfalls Most of our water-based jobs on darks are done with discharge inks. The fact that we offer discharge and water-based printing has opened the floodgates for work because so many customers crave the soft hand and muted tones. Printers also like water-based printing on darks, in particular, since there’s no need for an underbase because colors discharge out the fabric. An important note: We use the words “water-based” and “discharged” synonymously. The two are technically different because discharge inks require a special activator. Otherwise, we use the same ink base, printing technique and so on. For instance, if we’re printing the same design on light and dark garments, the only difference between the two processes is that we use a discharge activator on dark garments and not on the light ones. Another key advantage of using water-based inks is that we can achieve a softer tonal blend. A design’s halftone dots bleed into the fabric and spread out just a bit, unlike with plastisol ink, where the dot sits on the fabric instead of blending. This tonal blend makes for softer tonal transitions, resulting in a design that looks less impressionsmag.com Impressions >> March 2010 http://www.impressionsmag.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Impressions - March 2010

Impressions - March 2010
Contents
First Impressions
FYI
Product Gallery
Add Shine to Womenswear
Reverse Decorating With CAD Materials
Tech Tips Embroidery
Tech Tips Screen Printing
What’s Up With Water-Based Inks?
Technique
Production
For Screen Printers Only
Online Directory
Change Digital Workflow to Keep Profits Flowing
On Design
Business to Business
Classifieds
Ad Index

Impressions - March 2010