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AMANDA CLAIRE: So in standard screen printing, like the screen printing where professional
print shops that make a lot of t-shirts, or you know a lot of art prints, posters, the
way that works is though they take a fabric, again, you know, silk or polyester or it's
gotta be something that doesn't stretch, that has a uniform hole size to it, uniform pore
size. We'll talk about that later. And in standard screen printing, they prepare them
on these screens and they actually just kinda looks--kinda like a picture frame with the
fabric stretched across it and then what they do is they coat it with a chemical called
the photo emulsion, which is basically kinda like what the emulsion that's on film but
it's a light sensitive emulsion. And so think of it as like a glue or a paint that kinda
goes over the entire screen, so they coat it with that, and then they let that dry,
kind of in the dark and then what you do is then you would take your image, you know,
whatever it is, something in black and white and you put it on a transparency, you put
that on the emulsion, okay? You expose it to light, right, so light's going to you know
hit, it's going to go through what's transparent and not go through where you've got black
on the transparency. And then when you wash the image out with a hose, it will wash away
where it wasn't exposed, that'll wash away where it was black and it will stay where
it was white. And so then when you apply the ink on it or the paint, it will be forced
through the areas of that emulsion that were washed away. Okay? So again, think of it kind
of as a stencil. The problem with that method is its quite labor intensive and it can be
quite expensive. I mean, the fabric you use for regular screen printing is, you know,
sort of expensive. You have to either know how to prep those large screens or buy them.
The photo emulsion you have to pay for, that's also quite messy. You have to kind of build
your light box, you can expose it to light and you know, hose it out; there's a lot of
steps. And that's really not the way we're going to be doing it in this kind of simpler
DIY method which takes a little bit different approach, but the DIY--the do-it-yourself
method is a little bit cheaper. The materials are cheaper and the methods are a little bit
different, but you know, I think you'll like it.