Why Anvil T-Shirts are Great for Screen Printing

What is cooler than a custom t-shirt? What about a custom t-shirt you screen print yourself? Screen printing is a fun, easy and artistic process that t-shirt enthusiasts love using to create unique, handmade designs. Where outsourcing t-shirt printing to a website may run up quite a bill, if you are willing to put in the time, the DIY screen printing process can save you money and give you a much more personal result.

For retailers or large organizations looking for wholesale t-shirts, screen printing can be an ideal method of printing logos or other graphics that require greater vibrancy. Screen printing ink sits on the surface of the fabric for greater clarity and color. Because the printing process requires extra time and labor to start with, as compared to digital printing, it is best to order large quantities when ordering screen printed t-shirts online.

The best types of t-shirts that make screen printing easy are anvil t-shirts.

What is Screen Printing?

Before digital printing, screen printing was a very common way of mass-producing printed images, sometimes referred to as silk screen printing. Screen printing involves transferring a single-color image onto a screen of polyester or another fine mesh, creating a stencil.

Before polyester was available, printers used silk, hence the name silkscreen. A layer of ink is applied over the stencil with a squeegee, and multi-color images are produced by applying multiple layers of ink over different stencils.

To recreate photographs using this printing technique, printers may treat images with a halftone process, creating the illusion of seamless changes in value through the modulation of small dots. The famous artwork of Roy Lichtenstein shows this halftone process up close, as it zooms in on panels from comic strips, revealing the dots comic printers used to create different colors.

Another pop artist that popularized screen printing was Andy Warhol. His multi-color portraits of Marilyn Monroe demonstrate the multilayer screen printing process at its most successful.

What Sets Anvil T-Shirts Apart?

Screen printers will achieve the best results when printing on Anvil t-shirts. Anvil T-shirts’ unique cotton blend comes at a surprisingly low cost, especially when purchased in bulk.

Anvil offers t-shirts in men’s, women’s and children’s silhouettes, so no one is forced to wear a bulky or unflattering cut that was not designed with his or her body in mind. Anvil T-shirts also come in a variety of colors you can pick with your silk screen design in mind.

Best of all, manufacturers and distributors both swear by Anvil T-shirts’ long-term durability, so you can sport your custom design for years to come. Screen prints get better with age, and a cracked silkscreen image on a t-shirt exudes vintage chic.

Buying in Bulk

If you have the occasion to buy bulk blank t-shirts, jump on the chance to get a great deal on this staple clothing item. Most retailers sell both blank and printed t-shirts at a lower price if you make a larger order, even selling individual shirts for as little as one dollar! This buying option can be ideal for company t-shirts, university events or for promoting a new business idea.

Cool Screen Printing Ideas

Use a colorful accent to make text more interesting. If the text you are putting onto a t-shirt is not that exciting, consider adding a colorful logo or accent to liven up the design. If printing on a dark blue, gray or black t-shirt, you could make most of the text white and one important word red or light blue to make it stand out. This is an easy design trick to make the image pop, and luckily also very easy to produce with two silkscreen layers.

Screen print over patterned fabric. This one is a little tricky to pull off, but if you can do it, you will end up with a daring, one-of-a-kind shirt! You will have to think a lot about color here, to make sure your printed text or image is readable over the shirt pattern.

For example, if using a dark army camouflage pattern fabric, do not print in another dark color; use a white or light color to make it stand out. A light ink over a dark tie-dye fabric can create a fun, hippie-inspired t-shirt.

Experiment with halftone. Halftone images use dots of variable size and spacing to create the illusion of a seamless gradient from a distance. You can use black and white halftone or even create color by breaking photographs down into cyan, magenta, yellow and black halftone-dot layers. Although it is a lot of work, you can create cool retro-looking images through this process.

Final Thoughts

With screen printed t-shirts, the creative options are endless. Whether you are getting messy with a silk screen at home or outsourcing the labor to an online service, you will end up with a fun, memorable t-shirt that you will love to wear by using anvil t-shirts for all your screen printing needs.