If you’re looking for a print that’s a little out of the ordinary, some specialty ink may be right up your alley. They can make parts of your artwork glow or puff up off the shirt. You can even draw attention to certain parts of your art by adding glitter or shimmer.
Aside from just adding pizzazz to your prints, sometimes certain kinds of specialty ink are just flat out required on certain garments. For instance, 100% polyester garments require polyester inks so that the dye in the fabric doesn’t bleed into the print. If we printed regular white ink on a red, 100% polyester shirt, the white print would turn pink in a matter of hours.
To avoid issues like that (and a slew of others) we’ll help you pick the right inks for your project. We do charge extra for these specialty inks, but it’s to ensure you get the best possible end product available.
Our specialty inks include glitter, shimmer, glow-in-the-dark, puff, suede, poly, stretch, and nylobond. Each of these has different pros and cons. Read on for more specifics about these various inks.
• Guess what this ink does? Glows in the dark!
• The standard, raw ink color is a very pale green, but more colors are available for additional fees. Please keep in mind that this will increase production time.
• This ink works well with many designs, but we suggest staying away from anything with halftones or fine details.
• A little less shiny than glitter inks. The flakes in this ink are smaller than glitter inks, so they don’t reflect as much light.
• Available colors: gold, silver, blue, & red. Additional colors are available for additional fees. Please keep in mind that this will increase production time.
• High details are still not encouraged, but some smaller details can be printed with shimmer vs glitter.
• The print is still pretty thick, but not much thicker than a standard plastisol. Still, if you’re looking for a soft print, we would recommend you stick with water-based inks. Click here for more information on water-based inks.
As stated in the short description above, this ink keeps the dyes used in polyester fabrics from bleeding into the print.
Nylon fabrics don’t necessarily like being printed on. Standard plastisol inks don’t fuse well with these kinds of garments, so nylobond is used as a bonding agent to guarantee that the ink properly holds to the fabric.
This is used when printing garments that are more prone to stretching than your average t-shirt. It allows the ink to pull and stretch with the garment.
