High Gloss Ink

[knm627]

I have a client requesting a high gloss ink. I am fairly new to the business so I am not sure if there is a specialty ink I should purchase. I have found gel online and use my heat press to create a glossy finish.

Can someone please tell me if there is such a thing as high gloss ink?

Thanks!

[Catspit Productions]

Well yes there are high gloss inks but the desired effect of a very glossy print is actually done by printing a high gloss clear coat over a standard plastisol screen print. Often this will be a high density gloss print which also raised the feel of the print to almost 3 dimensional. Other gloss coats can be thinner.

So you print a print as usual and then print a gloss coat over the top whether it’s high density or not. That is normally how that would be done.

Integrity Print Supply carries Excalibur inks. They have some specialty inks such as you may be interested in. You may want to give them a call.

http://www.catspitproductionsllc.com/in ... plies.html

You could also try Screen Printing Superstore. They would be more than happy to lend a hand:

http://www.catspitproductionsllc.com/sc ... plies.html

And you could ask each in their respective forums if you wanted to:

http://www.catspitproductionsllc.com/fo ... m.php?f=21

I hope that helps out a bit. Don’t hesitate to reach out and ask the vendors for technical help. That’s what they’re here to help do. I’ll make sure questions directed to vendors get answered.

[knm627]

Thank you so much! I will start there!

[knm627]

One more question...when printing my positives will I need to reduce the size of the first or second layer as I would when doing an underbase or should I just print two positives of the same size (one for the gloss and one for the plastisol)?

[Catspit Productions]

Yes, you could probably choke the color and overprint the gloss by a half a line point or less if you want to. Kind of like an under base where we let the color overprint the under base just slightly.

[knm627]

Thanks!