NC Class 7 - 3-Day Professional Screen Printing Class - Dec. 13-15, 2024
THIS CLASS HAS BEEN FILLED - Dec. 13-15, 2024
Invest in Your Success with Texsource’s Three Day Professional Screen Printing Class
Go hands on for three printing packed days at Texsource’s North Carolina-based training center. Our Three Day Professional Class builds on our one day fundamental and advanced courses and pairs it with fresh training in art design in Adobe Illustrator.
We'll demonstrate hacks to better organize your art design workflow and create easily scalable vector graphics. You'll learn to color separate designs, learn tips and tricks to make sure it all aligns on the press and transform those images into photo positives.
Multiple Texsource instructors guide students through every step of the manual screen printing process, from art design, to screen exposure and development, through press set-up, printing, shirt curing, clean up and screen reclaiming. You’ll also apply those lessons in different ways by printing a six color spot design, eight color simulated process designs and a four color process design.
The idea? No short cuts or easy buttons with this one. This is an intensive, hands-on deep dive into the art and science of production printing. You’ll be on your feet for three days. You’ll end up getting a little dirty. You might be exhausted by the end. It’s the best way we know to impart hard won knowledge our instructors have picked up over decades.
If you’ve never touched a squeegee: you’ll learn screen printing best practices, how to understand the mechanics of production screen printing and learn to avoid critical errors early in your career.
If you’re already a screen printer: learn to refine your skills and gain the confidence to tackle tougher, more complex printing jobs that can expand your service offerings.
If you’re a pro: you’ll get help with specific struggles, find answers to your questions, refine your methods and maybe discover new techniques.
Throughout each lesson, the goal is to help students understand the importance that planning and consistency play in finished prints. By learning skills and systems, screen printers can adapt those techniques and principles and apply them to their own equipment in their own print shops and course correct when necessary.
Price: $445
Time: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day
Breakfast and lunch provided each day, along with snacks
Day One - The Fundamentals
You’ll understand the critical importance of mastering the fundamental mechanics of screen printing. You’ll learn why dialing in your screen coating, exposing and developing process is crucial to production printing and how botching the process will end up costing you time and money. You’ll put those skills to use, registering and printing a multiple color design on screens you shot and developed yourself.
You’ll learn:
- How to coat a screen: by hand with a scoop coater and a wall mount screen holder to improve speed and consistency in the coating process
- Understanding emulsions - photopolymer, film, diazo and capillary - and when and why you’d want to use each.
- How to easily tape film positives and expose screens.
- The proper procedure to wash out and develop screens.
- How to properly - and quickly - register a multi-color spot printing job on a manual press.
- How to control squeegee angle, pressure and speed to get the results you need.
- Print, Print, Print!
- How to properly cure shirts and test the finished product.
- The chemicals and techniques to make screen cleaning, emulsion removal and degreasing simple to understand.
Day Two - Let’s Talk About Art
The second day will serve to reinforce the fundamentals learned on the first day, while introducing new screen coating methods, an introduction to Adobe Illustrator and a nifty six color shirt design.
You’ll learn:
- The features and tools of Adobe Illustrator and how to use and modify art from subscription services that will streamline your workflow.
- How to manually separate colors and why you may want to use a dedicated color separation program instead.
- Coat, expose and develop a detailed 60 Lines Per Inch screen
- How to confidently register screens ahead of complex jobs.
- How to understand flash units - including manual, automatic, infrared and quartz designs - and how to set height, level and time parameters.
- Print, Print, Print!
- Clean up, break down the press and reclaim screens for use the following day.
Day Three - Don’t Be Intimidated by the Process
You’ll learn how to meet real world customer demands, like printing softer hand prints with plastisol and how to identify and prevent problems like dye migration and ghosting.
You’ll learn:
- The differences between various inks - including cotton, polyester and 50/50 blends - and the proper applications of each.
- The issues that can arise during printing, how to spot them early and how to adapt your process to fix them. This includes dye migration, cracking, ghosting and undercuring that leads to wash outs. You’ll see actual examples of each.
- The proper print order when tackling CMYK printing jobs.
- To coat, expose, develop and register screens for use in detailed process printing, along with specific considerations to guide that process.
- How to print four color process designs on pellons and multiple t-shirts. By viewing the shirts of other students, you’ll be able to compare exactly how differences in squeegee angle, speed and pressure impacts those finished prints.
Class spots are limited and scheduled in advance with instructors. Any cancellation by student can be accepted but not refunded, only class spot moved to a different class date
Location: Texsource Screen Printing Supply, 714 Cleveland Ave, Kings Mountain, NC 28086
From Charlotte: Located 35 minutes west of Charlotte, and Charlotte Douglas International Airport, via I-85 S.
From Asheville: Located 97 minutes southeast of Asheville, via I-26 E and US-74 E.
From Spartanburg: Located 54 minutes northeast of Spartanburg via I-85 N.
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Morgan and Wells Bed & Breakfast
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*note - Texsource reserves the right to use video and photos from our classes for promotional purposes.