The Grade 10 Capstone Project is to design a Merit product collection! Each team came up with a theme for the collection and 5 design concepts. These design concepts will be screen printed onto a sample collection which will be available for presale at the 2018 Student Showcase!
We wanted to give our students a taste of the production process by showing them how to screen print product. One of our awesome community partners, Midwest Graphics and Awards, located in Dexter MI, took the students through a step-by-step screen printing tutorial.
- “Step 1” - It all starts with a digital file of the graphic that will be placed on the product. This graphic is printed out using a laser printer onto transparency paper.
- “Step 2” - Coat the screen with emulsion. The screen has to sit in a pitch black room for a total of 2 hours until it’s dry before it can be used!
- “Step 3” - Expose the image on the screen. This means the transparency paper with the graphic printed on it will be transferred onto the screen itself! At first, you will only see faint blue lines where the image has been burned onto the screen.
- “Step 4” - Clean the screen. The screen needs to be hosed down with cold water until you can see through the graphic clearly.
- “Step 5” - Time to print! Utilizing the screen printer, pour a little bit of ink onto the screen and take the squeegee to make one smooth movement down the screen. Repeat a few times with pressure and lift the screen up to reveal your perfectly printed graphic! To make sure the design stays, it needs to run through a heater and voila! You have a screen printed shirt!
By the end of the workshop, each student was able to screen print their own t-shirt -- either a JRLA Logo or FATE Logo -- to take home!
Special thanks to Jamie, Abbie, Diana & Eric from MidWest Graphics & Awards!
