Hey everyone matt with Mikey Designs & Silk Screen here and i'm gonna give you
a quick tip today and that tip is how to achieve a soft hand fill on light
garments with a color or a dark ink now as some of you screen printers and
people that have ordered t-shirts before might have noticed when when ordering
prints would last us all ink or if your screen printer using plastics all ink
that sometimes they tend to be a little thick and one way to achieve a soft hand
feel like for instance this t-shirt has a nice soft hand feel that almost feels
like a water-based print I can hardly even feel that it's there and one way to
achieve that is to use some curable reducer and what I did was basically I
mixed it down to about 10-15 percent curable reducer to two ink and that
helps kind of thin the ink up to more of the consistency of a water-based ink
which will help it kind of sit into the the garment rather than laying on top of
it and that's that's what basically creates you know that kind of a little
bit of a rough print the ink just sits on top of the the garment rather than
kind of soaking into it okay and here's just a quick little view of what I'm
talking about as far as the consistency of the each so you can see I can hardly
scoop this ink up onto my spatula because it's so so thin so that's just
one way to be able to create the soft hand feels it's just kind of reducing
your your ink down and so so try using a little bit of curable reducer you can
even mix it down to twenty twenty-five percent you just want to get it the
consistency of a water-based ink you know you want it very thin in this case
this is a navy print and Navy that links the plastics all in
so I use is it's fairly thin so I reduce it down even more and I use a fairly
open mesh for this particular job because I was doing the five minute
challenge what you'll see and in another video but that was just so I could print
these quickly not spend too much time trying to clear the ink out of screen so
if you want to if you're trying to achieve a soft hand print or if you're
buying shirts and you want to know what to tell your screen printer to do tell
them to reduce it down reduce the ink down so it'll have a nice soft hand
print and you know it'll feel like a water-based print and also something
else that could be used is a soft hand additive that's something else that you
could use to give it a nice soft hand feel and you could tell your screen
printer that you would like to use soft hand additive in your inks you would
like to use that it's that way your print will be nice and soft
okay so curable reducer that's one way to get it soft and you'll get a soft
hand feel to it and and or soft hand additive okay because and it's hard to
tell but just from a video but you can see that it's really not sitting on top
of the of the garment it's actually kind of soaked into it and so I hope this
helps some of y'all out there I hope it helps them you screen printers as well
as those out there that plan on ordering t-shirts either for me or or another
spring trainer in the future anyways thanks for stopping by and tuning in I
hope everybody has a good day and subscribe to my videos and give them a
thumbs up and look for more videos than their future okay we'll see y'all soon