printed discharge on gildan 5000's and American Apparel

[jsheridan]

Just curious of the print order. Care to divulge? 

what was it... hmm..

black, brown, green, blue, yellow white. All inks were based with 15-20% H20 to encourage blending and less pick up on other screens.

[Evo]

I've still got to try the CCI base, it's all I hear lately but my home brew white mix with the matsui is perfect now.

Call CCI and get some of their pre-mix white and their clear base. You won't look back.

The pre-mix white is everything Matsui should have been. I used to take the Matsui and base it down, add water, some fixer, a little Pringen C, etc then whip the hell out of it trying to get it smoother and easier to print. The CCI is EXACTLY what I was going for, straight out of the container.

And their clear base plays well with my existing stock of Matsui PMS pigments.

[tonypep]

CCI is working on a pigment line and will probably be releasing it early next year. It will purportedly be sold in easily dispensible containers.

[ebscreen]

CCI is working on a pigment line and will probably be releasing it early next year. It will purportedly be sold in easily dispensible containers.

Followed shortly by partially used gallons of Rutland WB99 pigments for sale.

[ZooCity]

CCI is working on a pigment line and will probably be releasing it early next year. It will purportedly be sold in easily dispensible containers.

I think I'll hold out for cci's pigments, sounds like a good thing. Thx for the update Tony.

[squeegee]

After reading all this, one thing I can add, at least for Wilflex users...printing plastisol over discharge all wet, if any of your colors contain an appreciable amount of maroon pigment (PC, Eq, MX maroon), watch out for color shifting, discharge will eat away at that pigment and cause the color to come out off.  You can avoid this by flashing, but the smell and the fumes, we have 2 pretty large exaust fans in our roof that will pull out most of the fumes quickly, one is set center between and above presses.  Also, don't count on discharge colors always looking great WOW, I've seen more than a couple of cases where a strategic flash or 2 makes the print go from ho-hum to really nice, as mentioned sh!t happens.

Our dryers have fume hoods front and rear (built in), forced air and stong exhuast, so when we run discharge without flashing the smell is not that noticable.  Hope that helps ya Zoo.

Here's a 9 color we did back in the spring (sorry for partial censorship), meshes were all 150, print order I believe was black, purples, royal, maroon, orange, yellow, red, flash, white.  All sericol ink except the white.  The black was for the drop shadow on the text for the other color shirts we did.

[ZooCity]

That does help, thanks squeeg.  Since I've been having sh!t luck all year I may as well plan on flashing discharge right now and vent appropriately.  While I shoot for the moon in terms of production and encourage my staff to do the same on every job I frequently find myself on the phone with my printer saying "just get it done, that's fine if you have to flash it 3 times." etc.  Just try an learn how to avoid it next time seems to be a pretty constant theme around here.   But it can be a little bit lofty to expect no more than a single flash on any job...or no flashing ever like some out there advocate. 

That print looks like a prime candidate for the over printing method Tony's always talking about (and doing).  Maybe could get that 9 color down to a six?  I'm banking on using the living hell out of this method once initial r&d gets done.  I think I'm actually going to build a set of stock discharge color mixes, test on all the shirts 'till I find a couple of sweetheart brands/colors and only (mostly?) offer or do that style of printing on those brands/colors with those stock inks in various overprint configurations.  It'll probably be a six color set plus white and black... but I'm not exactly sure on that part yet, need to get my feet wet and do some studyin up on color theory as well. 

[Evo]

It'll probably be a six color set plus white and black... but I'm not exactly sure on that part yet, need to get my feet wet and do some studyin up on color theory as well.

Discharge and water base ink in general is very forgiving for printing wet-on-wet to mix colors. Just try to keep white pigment out of the mix until the last screen. (it builds up on the screens really quick)

This was done with 4 colors on Gildan "sand" shirts. The gold and orange are discharge, (the make them "pop", the black and light blue are regular Matsui wb.



The gold and orange fade down and up respectively from 100% to 0% to simulate a split fountain. The blue, orange and gold mix at varying percentages to make secondary and tertiary colors. (light and dark greens, light blue, browns, tans, etc.)

Most of the extra colors are buried in the details... hard to see in the pic.

This was mostly separated in GIMP, then pulled into Corel Photo-Paint to do the fades/channels.

[squeegee]

That print looks like a prime candidate for the over printing method Tony's always talking about (and doing).  Maybe could get that 9 color down to a six?  I'm banking on using the living hell out of this method once initial r&d gets done.  I think I'm actually going to build a set of stock discharge color mixes, test on all the shirts 'till I find a couple of sweetheart brands/colors and only (mostly?) offer or do that style of printing on those brands/colors with those stock inks in various overprint configurations.  It'll probably be a six color set plus white and black... but I'm not exactly sure on that part yet, need to get my feet wet and do some studyin up on color theory as well.

Actually no I don't think so, the only color that could easily be made by blending IMO would have been the orange.  Maybe, in a stretch, the maroon or the dark purple could be made by shading the red or light purple with black, but honestly that wouldn't look as good or pure.  It also probably would have taken at least 2 tries per color to get the black percentages right on press.  The orange by blending yes, but we have a nice pure orange discharge and I'd only get one head back anyway.

Beyond that the artwork was generated months before press time so had I set up the customer with an expectation of subjectivity in the art, I would have been more comfortable trying that.  It just wasn't practical enough to go to the trouble in this case and we have enough heads anyway.

[tonypep]

The reflex blue and the scarlet would make a pretty dull purple. The process has its limits. But kudos to putting your own formulas together and creating stock colors. Thats how to get started. Next try over printing 2" circles (no halftones) and crushing them together with a third screen and see what you get.

[squeegee]

Opps, forgot about mixing for purple, but the blue was more of a royal, I agree it wouldn't have made either of the purples I was looking for.

Tony, when you say crush, you mean like a blank screen right, with a little base for lube?

That would give a different color result than color over a color less the crush? 

[ZooCity]

Gotcha on the "keep it simple" approach squeegee.  That's one of the benefits of having all those heads right, you can do whatever you want to make it easier on-press. 

I think Tony is referring to making test prints of small circles and "stepping" on them with a screen to see how that will affect the finished print.  You mentioned this before I think Tony?  A setup with a tester screen and a big ass hair dyer or something like that?  It sounds like a great place to start.  From there I'd like to basically print a set of color wheels posing as some art on some discharge-friendly Ts, check for repeatability and then use them as samples and client displays.   Next I'd calibrate a workspace and build a swatch kit around the colors so my art was geared to the whole process from the onset.  The idea with the standard set of colors is I'll hopefully know more or less exactly what those mixes are going to do and can use that to my advantage despite the inherent limitations of having a smaller color set.  I'm sure I'll extend the set overtime with experimentation but would like to stick to that basic group as much as possible. 

On thing that's maybe not being considered here is using fill percentages of higher-lpi dots combined with the overprinting as well as running an additional wet white (not necessarily discharge).

[squeegee]

That sounds like a solid plan Zoo.  I am working constantly on enlarging our discharge color palette.  When the right piece of art comes along, I'll take a stab or three at blending colors, it sounds like fun.

I'd really like to find the time to try a sim process job using discharge.  Sometimes I wish I had a press out in my garage just to monkey with stuff for fun.

I have taken to the heat gun method of testing colors, what a time saver that is.  I gotta say thanks to Tony for all the tips, lots of invaluable information that has helped me a lot.

[screenxpress]

I have taken to the heat gun method of testing colors, what a time saver that is.  I gotta say thanks to Tony for all the tips, lots of invaluable information that has helped me a lot.

Can you explain that?  Is that related to discharge?

[tonypep]

It's just a simple, inexpensive way to cure ink swatches of any type without using a flash cure or dryer. A lot of ink rooms use these and often I've seen manual printers use them to selectively flash images on heat sensitive fabrics.. A crush screen can be an un-imaged, exposed screen with base as a lube for testing swatches. For production purposes it can be any non-blending color. On the New Balance shirt the crush screen was the white type.
I have a swatch of an Indian Motorcycle pinup girl, sim process ten color discharge no base. I'll try to get a good j-peg of it and post later.