Screen printing artwork?

Screen Printing - Multicolor Printing?

• Hi there, I am planning on running a small scale silk screen printing business mainly printing T-Shirts. Currently I have been restricting my designs to only four colors which is the maximum number of frames on my screen printer and then just use spot colors to print. But now some of my cool designs have more than one color and has several color gradients. What I would want to know is whether I can use a regular Screen Printer to print CMYK and produce at least all the colors on my designs i.e. prepare a screen for C and another for M and another Y and K. Will the subsequent colors not override the preceding colors without actually blending to form a desired color. I use mostly Illustrator for my designs but I also have Corel Draw and Photoshop as well. Any information will be much appreciated. Thank you

• Answer:

  if you have good registration and your screen angles are correct you should be able to do it. Keep in mind adobe cmyk settings are based on SWOP which is set for offset printing, so you will likely have to adjust your color %'s to get your screen builds to match your intended color. for example - if you have a green that is 75% cyan and 25% yellow on screen, it may actually be 60% and 40% to account for the dot gain you get from your mesh.