is there a service that will laser print lams and mail them back to me? I’ve got the art and need prints – screen printing is too much $$.
can anyone help me?
kirk
A lot of people print them out on their home ink jet printers.
I have beenthinking about making my own silkscreen for a while. There are plenty of how-tos on the net.
Craft stores sell do it yourself screenprinting for about 40 -50 bux …try
"speedball silk screening "website cheap do it yoursef materials
Check out Marlee on the industry page (looking for shapers)
$$$ but
Hey Kirk,
I too have been trying to reinvent the wheel. Not only do I not like the cost of pro screen print. It has it’s limitations. I want to use silky heavy rice paper because it seems to be the standard and goes completely transparent. I found a sign printer that has a solvent based pigment printer. 2400 dpi, 3 years colorfast outdoors, good stuff. Brought him some digital files and paper. Won’t print on silky heavy. Trial run bled badly. Varied ink loads and color profiles. No good.
Found another system recently designed for short run t-shirt printing. Sent my art and a paper sample to the machine manufacturer. They should have a first try ready by next week. If it looks good I’m going lam it with epoxy and poly over dark painted foam to see how the inks take the resin. I’m optimistic but I was optimistic about the pigment printer.
We’ll see. I’ll let everyone know if it’s any good.
Many guys here seem to have pretty good luck with injets. I talked to a guy that uses the color copier at Kinkos. I think those are color laser.
Some of the best labels I ever made were done this weekend in 45minutes. I bought some Japanese rice paper at the stationary store $6, NOT the “lam” style rice that looks like micro mat glass, but translucent paper. I fired up $10 flea market Adobe Photoshop and a $110 Hp printer from Costco. I put down some print. Morphed it with a font, twisted, stretched and arched it. Added color fade, enhanced the outline and added a drop shadow. Did it in half a dozen colors. Even had time to do various model logos for as many sizes. Looks better than any screened rice …no where near the color separation and special effects. Looks like a detailed air brusher did it with a Pasche 101. However you cant use the guaze style rice paper…ink shoots thru and fails to load on the surface. When I do a new model design I can easily introduce a new graphic as well, without the tradional art work cost. Sure the ink will probably fade in the UV…But there are archival ink printers… Its a gas, takes me back to the '70s when we used to do ganja leaf tracings on onion skin paper for Agua Flo.