How To Prepare Artwork for Screen Printing In 3 Easy Steps

A detailed guide on artwork preparation for Screen Printing

Screen printing is exciting but could be also an overwhelming process to print your own high-quality merchandise, such as t-shirts and tote bags. Since we are not gatekeeping anything on there, today I will be sharing with you how to prepare your artwork for the process. You can use this guide for screen printing at home or in the case where you send your artwork to a company that would do the screen exposure for you.

Good artwork preparation is the first, and very important step to getting your screen to expose properly.

Step 1 - Black and White ONLY

Make sure your artwork is black and white only - no grey tones!

Why is this?

Imagine you are creating a stencil that the ink needs to go through - the black areas are the areas that the ink will pass through, and the white areas would block it. If you are looking to create a faux shading effect you could use the halftone effect.

Is your design idea ready? Time for the next step.

*If you are working digitally, I recommend creating a vector image.

This is what my initial drawing usually looks like. I draw in Procreate, and then I vectorize it in Adobe Illustrator. You can use whatever software you are familiar with to do this!

Things to look out for:

• Keep in mind the size of your screen, its printing area, and make it a few cm smaller so the image is not too close to the frame.

• Make sure your lines are not too thin. Some fonts contain very thin lines, pay attention to that too. If a line is as thin as a hair, it will not go through.

• If you are using a halftone effect for shading, make sure the dots are not too small.

This is what halftone looks like.

Be sure the dots are not too tiny, and preferably work

with vectorized image so the pixels don't mess up your shading.

Step 2 - Size your work

Keep in mind the size of your screen, its printing area, and make it a few cm smaller so the image is not too close to the frame. When you expose your screen your image should not touch the edges.

The reason is that the emulsion coating often is slightly irregular near the edges or doesn't cover them at all - so if your artwork goes all the way to the frame it might not expose properly.

This is what I mean when I say that the are around the frame edges get messy! It is important to properly size your work so you have a few cm on each side.

When you're saving your image as a PDF, the file would retain the size in cm.

Step 3 - Make it transparent!

Now we would need to transfer your artwork on a transparent type of paper. There are many ways to do this, depending on what materials you might or might not have in handy.

• If you are working traditionally I would recommend using a POSCA marker - this is not a sponsored brand drop, but it is the only brand of marker that I have found that does not let the UV light through.

You would want to draw with your POSCA on transparent paper. That could be tracing paper or screen printing transparency sheets. If you can't get your hands on any of these, here's a tip: you can draw on a normal printer paper, and when your ink is dry cover it in olive oil. It will make it transparent, but it will be messy- keep that in mind. We've used this method in the screen printing studio I did my training back in France, and it works! But now I exclusively use tracing paper.

• If you made your artwork digitally, you would need to print it out- again on either tracing paper or screen printing transparency sheets (those only work with inkjet printers, other printers might melt them and make a huge mess, and possibly brake your printer for good!) You can use the following CMYK values to be sure you're using the blackest black: C= 75, M = 67, Y = 68, K = 90. After it is all done, save your vector image as a PDF. In the beginning, I've mentioned that it would be best to create a vector image - that is to be sure that all your lines are nice and crisp. Raster images might be pixelated and create issues when you try to expose your screen later on.

After you print, hold your sheet towards the light to check if the light goes through. If it does, you might need to go over your printed shapes with a POSCA marker. Or if you're using the transparency sheets, print it twice and use them both stacked over each other.

This is what my designs look like printed on tracing paper. I've gone over the artwork with s POSCA marker to make sure that the UV light would not pass through my drawing.

Important note:

If you are working on an image with multiple colors, you would need to do artwork prep for each color separately. Think of each color you are planning on using as a separate layer. Make a separate stencil for each one (in black) and print them out separately. After you've printed them, place them over each other to be sure that they line up properly. After that, you will need a separate screen for each stencil.

Now, all of that might sound a bit overwhelming, but trust me - it is not that complicated! There are a few things you need to keep in mind, but after you've done it once or twice everything would become clear and much easier!

This was Part 1 of my Screen Printing at Home Guide!

I really hope this was helpful! All of the screen print related posts would be in this Category.

My next post of this series would be on Exposing Screens at Home! For me this was the hardest step to get right, so I am really looking forward to writing a helpful and detailed guide on the topic.

If you're ready with your artwork preparation, you can read the next article on How to Expose Your Screen at Home!

Happy crafting!

-Clementine