Free Sample
The Purple Guide to Learning Screen Printing in 10 Days
A 10-day starter plan to print your first shirt, poster, or tote bag and decide if screen printing is for you
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: First Day
Welcome to day one. You have not bought anything yet, you have not watched forty contradictory videos, and you have not cleaned a screen that you do not yet own. That is exactly where you should be.
Today is about one thing: feeling what screen printing actually is. Not reading about it, not watching it, but getting your hands on the basic bits and making a lumpy, imperfect, strangely satisfying first mark. You are going to end today with a printed shape on a piece of paper that you made with your own two hands. It will not be a masterpiece. It might look like a potato stamped a piece of paper. That is fine. That is the point.
Let us start with what a screen printing rig looks like when it is stripped down to the absolute basics. You have a screen - this is a wooden or aluminum frame with a fine mesh stretched tightly across it like a tiny trampoline. On a real professional setup, that mesh is coated with a light-sensitive liquid called emulsion, which hardens in certain places to create a stencil. You place the screen over a shirt or poster, put ink on top of the mesh, and pull a rubber blade called a squeegee across it. The ink gets pushed through the open parts of the mesh and lands on the surface underneath. That is the whole craft. Everything else - the lights, the chemicals, the multi-color registration, the