Screen Printing - Inks and Methods

At Convicted Printing, we offer a range of inks and printing methods that can bring your design to life. If you are interested in learning more about the different products we can print on, please visit our Products page.

Printing Methods:

Inks:

Specialty:

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Screen Printing Menu:
The Process - ​Products - Inks and Methods - ​Basic Pricing Guide - Artwork requirements - ​Consider This!
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Embroidery Menu:
The Process - Products - Colors and styles - Basic Pricing Guide - Artwork requirements

Plastisol:
These inks are general purpose and have been used in screen printing for many years. They can be used for spot printing and simulated process printing.

Plastisol typically adds more hand-feel to the design on the shirt.

​Plastisol is the most cost effective ink to use.

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Discharge:
Discharge ink uses a heat activated, two-part ink/chemical to bleach the design portion of a garment to its original color and then re-dye the shirt with a new color.  This process creates vivid color with an almost no hand-feel. The design won't crack or fade since the image you see is practically the shirt itself.

An additional charge per piece and per color is included when using discharge inks. We use a water-based discharge ink that requires a chemical to be mixed with it immediately before use and must be discarded that day. 

Spot Printing:
The most popular of the three printing processes utilized in our operation, this is the more typical method used in screen printing one or more colors. Either solid or half tone and can be used on light or dark garments.

The reason it is called "spot" printing is because each color of ink has its own "spot" on the substrate, meaning there is no special blending of ink required to produce the image(s) on the substrate.

This is the most cost effective printing process.

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4-Color Processing:
This process uses only four colors to duplicate any image, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (similar to an inkjet printer using CMYK on white paper). These special inks are transparent and allow overlapping dots of the colors to blend and make another color. Because of their transparency, this process can only be used on white or extremely light color garments.

This is a very precise printing process and requires special separations, screens, and inks as well as knowledgeable printers. 
An additional charge is included in order to process the image separations through the proper software needed.

Simulated Process:
One of the three printing processes utilized in our operation. The simulated process uses special separations to print full graphic images, including gradients and color blending, on dark garments.

​If your image has a lot of colors and is going on a dark garment, you will probably need the simulated process.

This process typically takes 4 to 8 screens to make the image come out with the highest quality.
An additional Simulated Process charge will be added to use the Color Separations Studio software needed.

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Custom Ink Mixing with Wilflex™ Color System MX:
At Convicted Printing, we offer in-house, Pantone match ink mixing. We use the Wilflex™ Color System MX, which is a simple finished ink system that allows access to simulations of the entire Pantone® spectrum with just 15 inter-mixable colors.
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MX Mixing colors are single pigments offering balance of color, accuracy, and printability and features base chemistry that provides a matte surface finish and is optimized for wet-on-wet printing.

If a custom ink mix is needed for your order, there is a small additional charge per color, per piece. This covers the cost of the software needed, as well as the additional time it takes to mix your custom color(s).