How to Screen Print - Brought to you by an ACTUAL Expert!

This business has lured you in, like it did me, with dreams of cascading profit margins and high-artistic value locked forever onto a screen-printed tee. Of course by now you may have learned that, while high profit margins are possible it take much more than a price tag to add value to a product.  Furthermore, artistic value occasionally happens, but the truth is you’ll likely be, more often than not, printing t-shirts for plumbers and restaurants more than anything else. And the artsy stuff - fun when it happens! - isn’t the bread and butter of this business. Still, screen printing is a fun and satisfying venture (when everything works the way it’s supposed to), and the market, by most accounts seems to be strong -even in this economy.

But screen printing’s got its downside for new screen printers - and it’s a big one: screen printing is fricken’ hard.

When I first started I was lucky. I had my buddy Randall who is a seasoned screen printer. And even though to some degree we were competitors he didn’t hesitate to help me with the many crisis’ that slowed me to a crawl.

But What about you? Do you have one of those friends?

If you do, great, but what if you don’t? What happens if it’s 3:00am and a job due at 8:00am, but it’s going south fast? What do you do then?? I’ll tell you what I did. I prayed. That doesn’t mean my jobs got done on time, but I felt a lot better. My God gives serenity, even when my customers are pissed at me.

One of the last instances I had like this was a job that I did (luckily) for a friend. There were only 55 sweatshirts, but it took me almost a month to complete them!  The problem was that the ink was getting trapped in the screen and gumming up to mesh.  Furthermore the ink was hardening to a degree making it very difficult to clean once the clogging occurred. I couldn’t even get one clean stroke in before the ink would gum up, and ruin a $15 sweatshirt.  As it turned out, was that I was using a poor quality ink and inaccurate off-contact.

This Blogger is Not A Genius

You’d think that it would be easy to figure all this out, and make the necessary changes during the job.  Except that I was new, and I didn’t have a past experience to draw upon. So I analyzed the situation to death, tested every theory known to screen printing (except the right one) until I finally realized that I didn’t have a clue how to solve this problem.

The final analysis of the whole thing is this: when this happened I would have done anything to have access to a web site like this one.

Mark Coudray has been doing this a long time. But longevity is meaningless if you’re not successful as well. Turns out he’s a pretty successful screen printer. So, he knows the business and is good at it. And to my weensy criteria of exceptionalism that more than qualifies him as a bonifed expert.

I don’t think there is a screen printing site like this one where you have exclusive access to one of the leaders in the industry. Sites like www.T-shirtforums.com are great, but at the same time, it’s hard to find good solid tutorial information locked inside the tag structure of an immensely popular forum like that one.

This might just be the ticket for new screen printers - unprecedented access to the enormous gourd sitting on Mark’s shoulders, at a price of course, but I’m not sure that you put a price tag on having the answers you need before you start this quirky business.

The only complaints I have of his site are that the videos are as dry as burnt toast (but still very informative), and the site itself is a little hard to navigate at times, but all in all, the axiom stands - outstanding content can overcome nearly any web design obstacle.

God bless, and good luck!

Here’s the link:  Click Here!