Screen Printing at Home

My first attempt at screen printing went pretty well.  From what I gathered off the internet I was a little concerned that it wasn’t going to turn out very well so when I saw my finished product I was pretty excited.  If you are interested in screen printing I would do some searches for DIY Screen Printing on sites like youtube where some have put up nice video tutorials on how to do it.

My down and dirty quick explanation.

1. Get a screen
2. Make a black and white image and then have that made into a transparency at Kinkos (have them make two so you can double it up to get the blacks even darker).
3. Coat your screen (in a somewhat dark room) with screen printing photo emulsion (available at most good art stores).
4. Allow emulsion to dry for an hour
5. Place transparency on screen (have image backwards so that if you were to flip the screen you would see the image properly).
6. Set screen under a 150 watt light bulb for an hour.
7. Take screen into the shower with you and hold screen up to the showerhead.  This will wash out all the parts of your image that were hidden under the black parts of the transparency.
8. Once again let screen dry.
9. Put t-shirt over piece of plywood to stretch out the shirt.
10. Clamp screen to shirt/board.
11. Run a line of ink across top of screen
12. Use squeegee to pull ink across screen.  I did this three times.
13. Let shirts dry overnight.
14. Use iron or bake in the oven for a minute to set the ink.
15. Wear shirt.
16. Join Morbid.