Screen Printing/Planning a Project

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[edit] Overview of the Process

In silk screening, you use a fine mesh material, stretched over a frame, to produce a stencil by blocking up parts of the screen with some sort of filler. One of the most popular and effective methods is by using a photo sensitive material called photo emulsion which hardens when exposed to light. We will describe the proccess of using this substance to make stencils suitable for silk screening in the section "Making the Stencil". Once you have a stencil, you use it as a pattern for tranfering ink onto your printing surface. The screen helps to prevent you from using too much ink and allows a very sharp edged design to be printed, with a little practice. The screen also allows you to spread the ink more evenly, and more easily, over the printing surface to help create even prints.

The process of creating the stencil can take a few days, but once it's created, printing is fast and easy. You can also save stencils indefinitely for reuse, so those few days are a one time deal for each stencil.