Creating an Underbase in Adobe Illustrator – Screen Printing 101

creating an underbase tutorial illustrator screen printing cover

When printing light coloured inks directly onto dark coloured garments with opaque color inks, like plastisol inks, the colors lose their intensity. To get around this, it’s best practice to first print a layer of white ink, known as an underbase. The underbase is printed first then dried to the touch with a heat gun or flash-curing machine before the rest of the color screens are printed. By using this method the colours will hold their vibrancy.

When screen printing multiple colors it can be very hard to align the print areas of each screen perfectly, even if the screens are aligned perfectly the white ink underbase can bleed a little, you would then see hints of white where there shouldn’t be. For this reason the underbase artwork is reduced in size slightly, this is called “choking” the artwork.
Choking the underbase gives the screen-printer a little bit of room to completely hide the underbase so it’s invisible to the naked eye.

Continue reading Creating an Underbase in Adobe Illustrator – Screen Printing 101

Free Download – I Heart NY template

i heart ny tshirt design template

Free Download – I Heart editable artwork (screen print ready)

This is our take on the ‘I Heart’ t-shirt design made so famous by new york. We’ve made it free to download and ready for screen printing.

This artwork is designed to be screen printed onto any garment but could be used for many other design projects.

Which state do you ‘I Heart’? 

I heart NY clipart free download- screen print t-shirt art

This free resource contains:

  • 100% editable EPS file (Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw compatible)

Free Download – College Font T-Shirt Art

free download college style t-shirt artwork

We hope you enjoy using this free college style sports t-shirt art, all we ask is that you let us know how you went using the artwork in the comments field below.

This artwork is designed to be screen printed onto any garment but could be used for other design projects. The design would be great for any type of sporting club. All artwork is colour separated, and only needs to be scaled to fit the size of your garments.

Enjoy!

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free download college font style  t-shirt graphic

This free resource contains:

  • 100% editable EPS file (please use Adobe illustrator CS or newer)
  • Free font file.

[button color=”green” icon=”” link=”https://www.prepresstoolkit.com/downloads/PPTK-Free_College_Style_Garment_artwork.zip”] Download – College Font Style t-shirt art (2.3Mb) [/button][/box]

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