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Screen Printing vs Digital Printing: 6 Key Differences You Need to Know
Ever wondered how your favourite custom T-shirt designs are printed? Knowing the correct printing technique will help you—whether you’re a…
Silk Screen Printing
Printing 20 shirts or 2,000? Here's how silkscreen works, what drives the price and when it's the smart choice.
How Silkscreen Printing Works
Silkscreen printing (also called screen printing) is the workhorse of bulk apparel decoration, and the method behind most of the T-Shirt Printing orders we handle in Singapore.
Ink is pushed through a fine mesh stencil so your artwork lands on the garment, whether it's a tee, a polo or a tote bag.
The ink sits thick and opaque, giving bold, solid colours that last, and the same screen can be reused across hundreds of pieces.
Each colour in your design gets its own screen. Areas that should print are left open in the mesh, the rest is blocked off, and a squeegee drives the ink through the open areas onto the fabric.
Silkscreen print from one of our recent orders
Recent Silkscreen Projects
1. Is Silkscreen Right for Your Order?
Before we get into the nuts and bolts, here's a quick way to tell whether silkscreen suits your project.
It shines when you're ordering in volume, your logo uses a handful of flat colours, and you want a print that keeps looking good wash after wash.
If your artwork is a photo or full of gradients, a digital method such as DTF or DTG will usually give a better result.
Prefer a raised, premium finish? Embroidery is worth a look for polos, caps and jackets.
Planning a Custom Order?
Ordering T-Shirts or Corporate Gifts in quantities of 20 pieces or more? Talk to us and we'll take care of the rest.
Step 1: Preparing the Screens
At heart, screen printing is stencilling through a mesh.
Curious to try it yourself? A small DIY screen printing kit is a fun way to see the basics in action.
Your artwork is split into colour layers, and each layer is transferred onto its own emulsion-coated screen.
The screens are then lined up so every colour lands in the right spot on T-shirts, Polo T-Shirts and other items from our product catalogue.
From artwork to finished print: the main stages of silkscreen
Step 2: Printing and Curing
With the screens ready, production can begin.
Presses come in manual and automatic set-ups. Large runs usually go on an automatic carousel press that prints several garments at once.
What happens when your logo has more than one colour?
Each colour is printed in turn, one screen after another. Some inks are layered while still wet; others are flash-dried between colours so they don't smudge. The finished print then passes through a dryer to cure the ink.
Ink being pulled across the mesh during a print run
Step 3: Making the Stencil
The stencil is the heart of the process, and most print shops make it with the photo emulsion method.
A coated screen is exposed to light through a film of your artwork. The unexposed areas wash out and become the open stencil. The video below shows it step by step.
That covers the technical side. You now know the basics of how a silkscreen job goes from artwork to finished shirt.
Planning a Custom Order?
Ordering T-Shirts or Corporate Gifts in quantities of 20 pieces or more? Talk to us and we'll take care of the rest.
2. Strengths and Limits of Silkscreen
No method is perfect. Here's where silkscreen does well, and where another option may suit you better.
We also silkscreen 1 to 2 colour logos onto gifts such as tote bags when the quantity makes it worthwhile. Browse our corporate gifts singapore wholesale range, with over 1,000 items you can brand.
Advantages
- Lower cost per piece at volume: screen set-up is a fixed cost. As a rough example, a $120 set-up adds $6 to each shirt on an order of 20.
- On 200 shirts, that same set-up adds just $0.60 per shirt. Real quotes vary, and each colour carries its own minimum charge because it needs a separate screen.
That said, silkscreen isn't the answer for every job.
Disadvantages
- Small runs cost more per piece: with only a few shirts, the set-up cost isn't spread very far.
- Extra colours add up: every colour needs another screen, so detailed multi-colour artwork gets pricey.
Need a design that wraps the whole garment? Sublimation printing handles all-over prints far better.
3. How We Price Silkscreen at Ministry of Print
Silkscreen is one of our most-requested methods, so we've built it straight into our Instant Quotation tool.
You don't need to be a print expert to use it: pick a product, choose your quantity and see the price.
Looking at past orders, most of our customers buy 20 pieces or more and want the best value for a simple logo.
Quantities often change while the artwork stays the same, and waiting on quotes slows everyone down. That's why we added 1-colour logo printing to the Instant Quotation in our catalogue, mainly for T-shirts.
Showing prices upfront saves you time and lets you compare options without waiting for a reply.
What Is 1-Colour Logo Printing?
Your artwork is printed in a single ink colour.
A multi-colour logo can often be adapted into a clean one-colour version that stays recognisable and costs less to print.
An automatic press running a multi-station screen print job
Planning a Custom Order?
Ordering T-Shirts or Corporate Gifts in quantities of 20 pieces or more? Talk to us and we'll take care of the rest.
We hope this guide makes silkscreen a little clearer, and shows how to get affordable custom T-shirt printing done with us.
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