Simulated Process with Discharge Inks

[philgeiger]

I have been printing a design with a six color simulated process (lots of halftones) with plastisol, and was wondering if you had any experience doing this kind of printing with all discharge water based inks. Haven't seen many examples of this anywhere.

[Chuggins]

Thats a BIG question.... many things will change...

Your dot gain will end up being very very different.

Waterbase inks have around 20% dot gain. Plastisol is between 35%-40%. What this directly means is your image, when using discharge inks, will appear faint or light in comparison.

The other difference is you typically print on top of a base white with plastisol. this also changes ink translucency values as well as the dot gain and blending.

With discharge, you have no ink underneath, so any fades to a lighter color tone cannot be done since there is no white under the design. You end up needing to figure out a way to accomplish that. Sometimes its as simple as creating a tonal discharge white that over prints these areas.

Also, your separations are typically approached differently due to everything above...

So - taking one set of seps and changing to discharge is 100% dependent on the design itself as to whether or not it will work, but the odds are you will need to re-separate.


Here is a shortcut to a softer hand - Use a discharge underbase.

An easy solution is to mix 80% discharge base and 20% discharge white as an underbase white. Activate as normal and give that ink a try as your new base white. Make sure to drive it deep into the fabric leaving very little on top of the fabric.