So you say you wanna print some shirts?

This page will acquaint you with the Screen Printing process and help you navigate your way to your own custom printed apparel!

If you prefer, you can skip right to our Get an Estimate page and answer the simple questions to receive a speedy pricing quote via email or phone.

SOLID TONE vs. HALFTONE

Most designs employ solid tone, bold shapes and lines. This will produce the clearest, cleanest, most striking printed image.

Computers display tone through transparency, but in printing this is not possible. In order to create the different tones (or shades) of a design we use a half tone (think Pop Art or newspaper printing), where the illusion of tone is created by a pattern of dots of varying sizes.

Some aspects work best with a solid tone (such as type and heavy outlines) and vice versa. It is sometimes necessary to employ both processes simultaneously to achieve certain requests.

FULL COLOR PHOTOGRAPHIC

Half tone dots are also used to create the illusion of seamlessly blended shades/tones of color on light colored shirts. In order to achieve a photo realistic reproduction we use what is known as Four Color Process. This uses the 4 standard print colors of CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) to create the illusion of all the colors in the rainbow.

When printing color photographic images on dark colored shirts, we use a process that utilizes half tone dot patterns of up to 8 select colors to acheive the same end result.