We are substituting the word "shirts" for all kinds of textiles / wearables. Be sure to keep in mind that these rules hold for towels, shorts, jackets, caps and a host of other textiles.
GARMENTS: In general shirts are classified as white, light & darks. Whites are the least expensive and darks are the most expensive.
PRINTING: On white shirts, printing is fairly straight forward (usually on lights too). A 3 color imprint is just that, 3 colors.
However, darks are a different animal. A simple 1 color imprint on a dark actually requires 3 steps.
Step 1 – An underbase of white. For example, if you were to print yellow on red, the resulting color would be orange/brown. The red from the shirt would bleed right through the ink. To avoid that problem, we “trick” the imprint color by laying down a white underbase first. That way, when the yellow is printed on top of the white, it still appears yellow.
Step 2 – Flashing. Flashing is a method of quick-drying the underlay (or the previous imprint color if more than one is being used) on the garment. After the underlay (or previous color) is printed, the garment is passed under a very hot light which quick-dries the ink. That allows the next color of ink to be applied smoothly without mixing with the previous color.
Step 3 – Applying the imprint color desired. Once the underlay has been applied and flashed, then the final color can be printed. All told, this is a 3 step process which requires three “stations” of the automatic printer to be used.
With each pass of the equipment for either an imprint color, flash or underlay, the price of the finished garment increases. So be sure to keep these printing aspects in mind when choosing your items to be imprinted.
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