Screen Printing white ink on black shirts for The Bean in Mesilla, NM. How to get a soft hand print

[@RhyBeats]

This is awesome ! Thank you for posting .

[@Bageltron182]

Great channel :) what is the gradient you have on the bottom of the screen?

[@raggedapparel7277]

Hey thank you Sarah. The gradient is a halftone gradient step scale we made and burn on all of our screens. It starts at 5% and increases by 5% on each step until 20% and from there increases by 10% each step. It allows us to see what level of halftone gradient we are holding on each screen when it's exposed. So if we are doing a very detailed simulated process print that has say 10% halftone dots in the image, we can use that scale to make sure we are holding that level dot on that screen during exposure and aren't losing detail. It also helps you dial in your pre-press processes.

[@pane2125]

did you or do you choke the underbase white if yes by how much?

[@raggedapparel7277]

Hi Marco, never choke your base under white. That will make the edges of your print look ghosted or muddy. We do choke the base under colors. We use a really tight choke of .365 of a stroke. You need to be able to hold very good registration and make good screens to have that small of a choke, but it looks amazing.

[@WhiteyGraphics]

What percent of soft hand base are you adding to the white ink?

[@raggedapparel7277]

Thank you for the question. We don't typically use a specific percentage of softhand when adding to our inks, even the white. We usually just add some in incrementally until we get a nice creamy flow of the ink. You don't want to go crazy because adding too much will cause your inks to lose opacity. If we are running a job that for instance we need to give more of a total look where we are reducing the opacity down, then we will calculate and log the percentage so we have that data for reruns. But for our everyday mix we just mix it until It gets a consistency we like.