Pencil Drawings

[buckkillamilla]

Hello, I am new to the site and think it's awesome and very informative! I'm also new to screen printing (couple months) so bare with me.
I have been doing pretty basic prints on shirts but am looking to step up my game and get some more detailed prints.

I have some artwork (pencil drawings) of my own, and I want to print them on a shirt, for now just black on white. How would I go about doing this? Mesh size? ink? halftones? etc. I have look all over the internet but couldn't get much info. ANY help would be appreciated. Thanks!


HERE IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE TYPE OF ART EFFECT I WANT..

[Shamax]

Hey, welcome to the forums, man! For that type of effect, halftones are what you're looking for. Either dot halftones, or possible "line" halftones to give it more of a sketched look. For a 1-color design like that, I've had luck using a 305 mesh screen and doing my halftones at 65 lines per inch at an angle of like 22.5 degrees. I use Gimp's Distort > Newprint filter to do it, then export that image to a TIF and auto-trace it with inkscape to get it into vector form. If you have Illustrator or CorelDRAW, you should be able to do it a lot easier

[buckkillamilla]

Alrighty, I have illustrator and am a rookie at it. Could I scan in the image and open it up in illustrator and convert it it half tones?

[Catspit Productions]

Okay here is my input. If the pencil drawings are able to be considered line drawings with hard black lines that are easily delineated from one another in most cases, then you could scan at high resolution. Maybe 600 dpi with a maximum resolution setting saved as a TIFF. The file should be 1 to 3 megabytes in size. Then you can bring it into Illustrator and do a live trace to convert to vector. Then you can print as black line art with black ink on a 125 to 156 mesh depending on the fineness of the line work.

Now if it has very fine line work and shading then a halftone as Shamax suggested is the way to go. But again depending on the detail in the original artwork you may do a 45 to 65 line halftone. As a 1 color halftone you can use any angle that the dot looks good at when test printing onto paper. Normally more than 5 degrees. Mesh counts can vary but as you go higher in lpi you also need to go higher in mesh count. I might put a 40 lpi halftone on a 200 mesh and a 65 lpi halftone on a 305. Somewhere in the middle may go on a 230 mesh.

I am hoping to do some videos about this sort of stuff in Illustrator over this summer. Please stay tuned and thanks for signing up to the forum.