It has been almost 11 months to the day, that I started this site. My main goal then, was to share information and techniques relating to screen printing that was not widely available on the internet. While I feel that I have been successful on some level of acheiving that, there is so much more I think we can do with this place.

I am currently in the process of overhauling the design, to be much cleaner, easier to navigate, more inclusive and less ads. The redesign will feature a much more robust storefront, for all of our screenprinting products, as well as more tutorials, downloads and the relaunch of the Screensilk.com forums.

Another feature, which has already been implimented, but will be better integrated into the new design, will be the Screensilk.com Online Printshop . ThisOnline Printshop allows for custom printing of promotional items, stickers, postcards, business collateral, and much more. The beauty of this sytem is that not only can you upload your artwork to be printed, but you can also use our online design interface to custom design your own artwork to be printed on our products. All products are competitively priced, and are guaranteed to be of the best print quality, or we will reprint your order for free. Feel free to browse the Product List and price out your next order.

So if you haven’t already, subscribe to the feed, and keep watching Screensilk.com, as we prepare to take it to a whole new level.

Have a happy holidays, and a safe New Year!

Joshua Van Horsen

Screensilk.com

Check it out

Just recently, a friend asked that I create shirts for his business ( Rebath - Bathroom Remodeling ). He only had a low resolution .jpg, but needed vectors that could be used for his t-shirt design, as well as camera-ready art for an assortment of vendors (everything from business cards and letterhead, to vinyl graphics on his companies trucks, and signage for his storefront.

Of course, I could have sent him to one of those site on the web that offer to vectorize your artwork for $100, and then provide you with some half-assed file that has been traced with Illustrator. Instead, I offered to the vectorize the logo for him. Now he has an assortment of files, in vector format, that can be used for anything from his website, to billboard advertisements.

So, now I am wondering, do others really require this service, and if so, what are you willing to pay for this? I would to hear your thoughts! Post links to other sites that offer this service, and I will try to match the lowest price that can be found.

Also, feel free to contact me if you are in need of logo vectorizing.

The tutorial covers, printing the design to butcher paper, cutting out the design, ironing on the stencil, and inking the design with screen printing ink.

Worth a look, and save it to your bookmarks.

Check it out at here

Well, as a professional designer, and admitted font whore, I am generally fairly skeptical about free fonts. I have played the free font game for years, seldomly finding ones that I like, let alone use. So when I heard about these fonts, I wasn’t really chompin’ at the bit to look them over. But being recommended by a friend and colleague, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to take a few minutes and look through the collection, and who knows.. maybe I would find one I like, or at the least can manipulate into something suitable.

Well, not only did I find one I liked, I found 20…..

I was so impressed with these, that I decided to share them with you guys. Now, while the majority of these fonts would be classified as grunge. I felt that there was a solid level of quality to each font. Take some time and check these out and use them in your next t-shirt design.

Misprinted Type - Check it out!

Well, to mark our 5000th download of the free pattern pack, and as a THANK YOU to all the people who have visited Screensilk.com and have used the patterns in their own work, I am releasing the full Hi-Res Pattern pack for absolutely FREE.

So tell your friends, and link to this post on your own sites and let people know they can get some great, very large patterns with just a single click, no strings attached.

Elegant Star Pattern Pack - High Res

Also, subscribe to our feed and keep an eye out for a new pack of patterns in the coming weeks.

Thanks!

Screensilk.com

1. No Media Kings

This is a great walk through on silkscreen preparation and printing for t-shirts and posters. If there is resource you want to save (besides Screensilk.com), it is this one.

2. Stencil Revolution

This tutorial deals with printing up low cost t-shirts with stencils using paint. There are many ways to print stencils up on shirts, silk screens etc, but this is the cheapest and easiest.

3. Fecal Face

Another great tutorial for creating your own t-shirts.

4. CraftGrrl

This tutorial looks at a cheap alternative to traditional screen printing. A great tutorial for learning the basics of screen printing

5. Instructables

How to reuse old picture frames and curtains to make screens, burn them in the sun, and clean them with a garden hose.

6. T-shirt Forums

Online discussion forum for the t-shirt industry. You can learn more about starting a t-shirt business, share tips and experiences,, get help from your peers, as well as network with others.

7. Dakini

This online demonstration will show you one method of silk screening onto silk. This method is used to screen print gutta resist onto the silk to prepare it for painting. This way it is faster and easier to reproduce multiple original wall hangings or scarves.

8. Reuels

Geared towards screen printing with the Speedball products, this set of instructions is very thorough in covering all aspects of screen printing techniques and troubleshooting.

9. EHow

How to Make Hand-Drawn Positives for Multiple-Color Silk Screen Printing

10. SilkscreenBiz

A quick explanation of color separations.

1. Open the cell phone image you want to beautify.
I choose this photo I took inside the Mission in Santa Barbara, CA.


2. Convert Image to high resolution

• Image> Image Size
• Change Resolution to 600
• Constrain Proportions
• Resample Image : Bicubic Sharper

3. Make a copy of the background layer.
This will allow us to always start over if something goes horribly wrong.

4. On the history palette

• Open the flyout menu
• Select New Snapshot
• Click the box next to the snapshot

This allows us to paint back the original image no matter how much we change it.

6. Select the Art History Brush


7. Select the Chalk 60 brush


8. On the Brush Settings Bar

• Brush: 1600
• Mode: Normal
• Opacity: 100%
• Style: Tight Long
• Area: 10px
• Tolerance: 0%

9. Using the art history brush

• Begin painting the picture.

Starting with the large 1600 brush, fill the canvas with color. Once it full, take the brush size down to half (@800), and begin roughing in your shapes. Continue to decrease the brush size, and focus on the details in the shapes, leaving large areas of color in your white spaces.


I used the following sizes:

• 1600
• 800
• 400
• 200
• 100




• 50
• 25

10. Touch up the edges
This will harden the edges of our paint strokes to help add definition to our painting.

• Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp mask
• Amount: 200
• Radius: 2.0
• Threshold: 10

11. That’s it, you’re done! Print and frame.

Ok, I will admit, the only problem with this is the lack of texture to the paint strokes. In order to truly add some depth to our “painting”, lets apply some texture to it.

You may download the paint stroke texture I am using here.

12. Go to Filters > Texture> Texturizer

• Flyout Menu - Load Texture
• Scaling: 174%
• Relief: 8
• Light: Top-Left
• Invert

13. You’re Done
Your final print should now have more depth and a more convincing appearance as a painted piece.


Close-up of detail


Print this out as high quality on a nice glossy paper, and mount in a fancy frame. Better yet, using my Full Color Screen Printing in Photoshop Tutorial and can print t-shirts or posters of your painting, that friends and family will cherish for years to come.

Please feel free to post your comments about the tutorial, or images of painting you have created using this tutorial, on the Screensilk Forums.

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In this tutorial, we are going to quickly discuss the benefits of using the appearance palette, and some basic techniques you can use to create very sophisticated designs, that would generally require multiple layers.

Let’s open a new file in Illustrator, and quickly add some text to our page.

If it isn’t already visible, let’s go to Window>Appearance and open our Appearance palette. After selecting our text, this is what we should see.

Doesn’t look like much, I know, but let’s double click on the character layer.

Ok, now this is starting to make sense. This is showing that we have a no stroke color, a fill of black and default transparency applied. Great, but I think we all could have figured that out with out having to open a palette to tell us.

So, let’s apply a warp to the text to add some interest to this design.

Our appearance palette is now listing the warp we applied, as well as the type of warp (i.e. Flag). Double clicking this entry will bring up our warp menu and allow us to quickly adjust, or completely change the effect. That’s kind of cool, but there’s more.

Ok, since I am happy with the wave I have applied, and I want to start adding color and effects to this design, I am going to right click and select Create Outlines. This is going to turn my text into an object, and allow me to start applying some cool effects to my text.

Firstly, I want to add some color to this design. I am going to add a Red Fill and Gold Stroke of 3pt.

Oh man, that looks awful. Thankfully, the appearance palette has me covered. Double click the contents entry, and you will be presented with their attributes. Clicking on the stroke attribute and dragging it blow the fill attribute, will clean up our text, and provide the look we originally expected.

Cool, that was easy enough. So, I am thinking I want to add a subtle bevel to this text. In order to produce that effect, I am just going to create a new stroke, and place it on top of my text. So, with the text selected, click the stroke attribute on the appearance palette, and click the “Duplicate Selected Item” button, along the bottom of the palette window (It looks the same as the new layer button on the layers palette). This adds an additional stroke to our object. Let’s click and drag that stroke above our fill attribute.

Hmm, not exactly the effect I was hoping for. I really need to offset this stroke inward a couple of points. Luckily, there is a way to do that. On the Illustrator menu bar, select Effect > Path > Offset Path. This will bring up the offset path effect menu. For my text, I just want to reduce the stroke slightly, to create a bevel, so I set it to -1px and click ok. That’s better.

Now, I want to add a slight 3d effect, to add some depth to the design. To do that, I am going to add another stroke in my appearance palette. Just as before, with the text selected, click the stroke attribute on the appearance palette, and click the “Duplicate Selected Item” button, along the bottom of the palette window. I want this to be a 1pt grey stroke, behind the gold stroke. So, I click on the new grey stroke and drag it below the gold stroke on the appearance menu.

In order to get the 3d effect, I need to move this grey stroke down and to the right. To do so, with my text selected, and the grey stroke highlighted in the appearance palette, select Effect >Distort & Transform > Transform. I want to move my stroke 4 pts on the horizontal and -4 pts on the vertical. Click Ok, when you have it how you want it.
10

I am liking how it looks, but I think to help add some depth to the design, I will add a slight drop shadow. With the text selected, choose Effect >Stylize > Drop Shadow. I am going to offset it slightly by 3pts, and just keep it subtle with a 20% opacity. Click OK.

Looking at it, I really would rather the area between my text and the grey offset stroke we created be a solid color, so that the drop shadow is actually behind my design. With our appearance palette, this should be a simple change. With our text selected, select the fill attribute and create a duplicate. Drag that duplicate below the original fill and change it to white. Then, just like we did with the grey stroke, we select the white fill attribute, select Effect >Distort & Transform > Transform and move our fill 4 pts on the horizontal and -4 pts on the vertical, click Ok.

Much closer, let’s just drag our white fill attribute to the bottom of the appearance palette, below our grey stroke. There we go, almost perfect.

To finalize my design, I adjusted the inner red stroke to be .5 pt, and I added a gradient to the fill. As a side note, when adding a gradient, either do it as the last step in your design, or create it on a new layer. The reason being is that once you have a gradient applied, each letter in your text will have different attributes, preventing you from editing the object as a whole. Below is the final design, after my minor changes.

So, as you can see, the appearance palette is a powerful, versatile tool, for any designers collection. With the ability to quickly and efficiently create complex images, your design workflow will never be the same.

Want to check out the file I made? No problem, download it here: Illustrator Appearance Palette Tutorial File

If you enjoyed this tutorial, or found it helpful, let me know! Did you create something great with the appearance palette? Post it in the comments, or on the forums.

Thanks!

Screensilk

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