By Jimmy Geurts
TAMPA, Fla. — Whether it starts with a small store-bought kit or a company that prints thousands of shirts like Tampa T-Shirts, every screen-printing endeavor has its own behind-the-scenes story.
Ross Price, the sales office manager of Tampa T-Shirts, said that the company’s printing process starts by proofing picture layouts and separating multiple colors within the graphics department.
“It’s taken into the screening department, where you have different screen meshes ranging basically from about 80 — which is 80 little squares in a mesh per inch — all the way up to 300 and, I don’t know, the sky’s the limit nowadays,” Price said.
After determining the screen mesh, Tampa T-Shirts uses a light source to expose and harden the emulsion — a substance that helps produce the image — washes it off, and dries and registers the image before finally pressing the picture onto clothing.
Home kits with a similar process are available for those who want to produce their own silk screen-printed shirts. For instance, Urban Outfitters sells a $64 Speedball screen-printing kit with its own screen frame, emulsion material and instruction book.
“There’s a kit that I’ve seen that they’ve been selling recently, where it comes with the screens and emulsion, and you put it on, and you burn it with the light and wash it out,” Price said. “It’s basically the same process — it’s just a much smaller scale.”
Price said Tampa T-Shirts, on the other hand, averages around 300 to 500 pieces per hour depending on the size of the imprint.
Fellow screen-printing shop Monster Press is located in Gainesville, but the business ships to cities like Tampa — with a page on its website addressed to potential Tampa Bay area customers.
Joe Bridge, who works at Monster Press, said that its process is somewhere in between home screen-printing kits and companies with automatic presses. Bridge said although he uses more expensive inks than the ones that kits use, and the shop utilizes large, reused equipment, the pressing process is still manual.
“We set the screens up on our press — all of this is done by hand,” Bridge said. “We register the screens — when you do multiple colors, there’s a really fine-tuning, almost artistic skill to registering all your images so that they’re all lined up exactly how you want them.”
Steps within Bridge’s everyday printing process — including coating emulsion and burning images — are similar to those at Tampa T-Shirts. Yet Bridge said employees at Monster Press are all “self-taught,” and the atmosphere is “like a bigger, more pro, more organized kind of homemade shop.”
“It is a hand thing, and it is something that you can go to the art store and get,” Bridge said. “But there is definitely an artistic skill and trade that’s involved with learning all these details, and how all the different colors and fabrics and inks and artwork all work together to make exactly what you want.”
