Interesting idea… but there’s a few considerations. I kinda moonlight a little, doing rep stuff for a screen printer up thisaway, and I know a very little about it.
First, it’s not just one screen, it’s one for every color. And that means your original graphic has to be shot, color separated into standard inks, all kinds of fun like that. Figure ( for a large screen ) fifty bucks US per screen times what, four colors? $200 right there.
Art time - what time it takes to do each screen in addition to the basic charge for the screens and photosensitive stuff they use in the process. That’s $50 an hour and up, prolly a 3 hour minimum. We’re up to $350.
The screens themselves, well, we’re talking a one of a kind unit here, so if you have registration marks on both the shaped blank and the screens, so everything lines up. For that, you could use any of several ways to get the screen material temporarily attached, including hot gluing the back of it together.
Then there’s the Tunnel of Love. See, for a lot of screenprinting inks, the type used in the clothing/textile market, they run 'em through a heated box about 20 feet long with a conveyor belt at the bottom, so the inks cure. This might have some unpleasant effects on your shaped blank. I could pretty much guarantee it’d distort. And they are not gonna come up with special inks for foam just for this one item, trust me on this one.
Note, above, I mentioned one of a kind graphics - that’s cos you can’t go and sell a zillion boards with the same graphic unless you’re surf tech ( or a ski/snowboard/skateboard company ) so you wind up with about $500 tied up in your graphics alone.
Oh, and you better make that an epoxy board, 'cos chances are that the styrene in the resin will dissolve at least some of the inks. If you were gonna be really clever about it, you’d do your graphic flat, on, say, some Divinycell foam or something and vaccum bag it to the deck like Bert does it , that would at least be easier.
I think you’ll find that they use a similar process when they print skateboards and such, the graphic is done as a flat item and then stuck on somehow, might even be printed on flat Mylar and rolled on with heat. They do screen-print curvilinear items like, say, promotional beer cups or that sort of thing, but that’s small screens, cheap items and thousands of units.
Doing the photo emulsion right on the board…well, I suppose you could, but again it’d be a number of different shots, one for every color, then wash 'em to get the unhardened emulsion off, then print, then remove all the emulsion from that shot ( and they use pressure washers and nasty chemicals for that ) which might have some interesting effects on the underlying ink and glass - 'cos you couldn’t do it on the foam, guarantee the pressure washer is gonna do a little shaping of its own. And through the Tunnel of Love ( delamination city ) and the whole process again. Then, you’d have to do it again, and again, for every color.
Now, there may be a way around this. What if you printed, very lightly, the fiberglass cloth? While it will distort the image, while your costs are gonna be high unless you run your cloth through with Somebody Else’s screens, maybe their t-shirt du jour, align the graphic on the board, temporarily pin it there with some long common pins and remove 'em as you laminate the board. Assuming no probs with the inks and resin, assuming that the lamination was ok ( not necessarily wetting the cloth out real well what with all the ink on there blocking how the cloth took up resin, that’s why I said lightly printed ) then it might work. Though that is a lot of extra effort when the rice paper or airbrush is so relatively easy to do, y’know?
hope that’s of use, somehow or other
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