How to specify your colours for screen printing

For screen printing, we’ve got metallic inks, glow colours (neon) and can use extender to thin the ink out for a slightly transparent look. We can pretty much mix whatever you want and we're always happy to experiment.

It’s worth considering the number of colours in the design for a screen print, since increasing the number of colours costs more.  A screen has to be prepared for every colour in the design, so more colours equals more screen prep and a higher overall cost.  

Will your print colour(s) contrast well enough against the garment colour?  Or do you want it to look more subtle?  Are you looking for more than one colourway?  You can split the print run, changing the ink colour(s) partway through the order, but this does increase the cost.  Or you could split your order between two different garment colours, printing them all with one ink colour, e.g. white ink.  This doesn’t usually affect the price of the overall order and can work well.

So how are you going to tell us what ink colour you’d like? A lot of our customers specify a Pantone Matching System (PMS) reference, which is great for us and we can match the colour very closely. The downside is that you have to have the reference book to look up your colour in, in the first place.

Other people send their artwork over and ask us to match it to the computer screen. We use colour matching software to find the closest PMS reference and match the ink colour to that. It’s pretty accurate but won’t be exact.  We can use this PMS reference for all repeat order print runs, ensuring that the colour is the same for your next batch.

Some people sneak into their local DIY store and find a paint swatch that they like and post it through. This works too!

What colour will you choose?