I see lots of web ads for tshirts with great big dog faces printed on the front. Does anyone know what technology the company uses?
The confounding element is that much of the animal’s face seems lighter than the shirt color. That’s a tough trick using traditional printing techniques.
Printing dyes are transparent — you can’t print white on a dark shirt — and it seems the company would have to color the entire shirt but leave the front white, and then print that part with dyes that blend into the rest of the shirt. Possible, but not easy.
Alternatively, silk screen inks are opaque—you can print white on a dark shirt—but photographic silk screened images are usually coarse and grainy, And integrating white ink in with the CMYK inks would be a challenge.
You can certainly print white on a black t-shirt, where did you get that idea? I have several black t-shirts with white images or writing on them.
These look kind of cool, but remember we are just looking at the pictures. But it looks like they match the t-shirt to the dominant color of the breed in question.
In the examples you link to, the darkest part of the shirt is the darkest part of the dog, rather than some darker shirt color. They could have started with a white shirt.
I think that’s the answer: the cloth is printed and then cut/sewn into a tshirt. My mind just instinctively thought of printed tees as being printed after manufacture. I’ve owned a lot of printed (non-tee) shirts, but they’re mostly made from fabric with small repetitive patterns — like an hawaiian shirt. Sewing a tee from a piece of fabric with a large element that requires somewhat careful placement is unusual, which is a big reason the shirts seem so striking.
Me too. Here’s one videoout of many that I found showing the print process for these full coverage shirts. It’s essentially a modern day version of an iron-on transfer.
Yeah, looks like sublimation to me, too. My company sells promotional products (“swag”), and shirts are part of that. Our sublimated shirts look like those dogs; if you need, like, 25 of them with your brand on them, let me know!
Thanks you Messrs Spiderman, Rind &Diddy.
Does the inside of the shirt stay mostly white? And Jackmanni, are there some small unprinted areas around the armpits of your rodent shirt?
