Hello - Can anyone give me help/pointers on prepping art for screen printing?

Question

I have expereince in Illustrator, but mostly for print. Is there special ways of preparing art work for screen printing? This would be art/logos for hats, tee shirts ansd promotional materials for a screen prininting company - mostly apparel?
Thanks, any info is appreciated - I've got to learn the right way to do this in two weeks time -
Rosie

Answer 1

Best advice I can give you with so broad a questions is: Forget about color; think in terms of inks. Also think in terms of opaque, not translucent, inks. Inks for the kinds of garments you mention are almost always opaque; so you have to forget about on-screen appearances which assume the translucent inks of offset printing.
The way you properly prepare files for screen printing is highly dependent upon the capabilities of the particular screen printing house. Screen printing runs the gamut from crude hand-done process in a local T-Shirt shop to highly automated high-resolution imprints on instrument face plates; and everything in between.
In the most common setups, you should think in terms of line art, not halftone or tint dots. That rules out soft & fuzzy shading, fuzzy drop shadows, and other raster effects.
Some garment screen shops are able to handle toning dots; other's aren't. Some shops can do 4-color process; some can't. Six-color screen printing machines are fairly commonplace these days, even in local shops. The better garment imprinters have equipment capable of CMYK process, but instead build gloriously brilliant images using six or more opaque inks on any color substrate.
So without more specifics about the shop capabilities and the specific artwork, it's not a simple matter to give you a ready-in-two-weeks crash course in preparing artwork for screen printing to cover everything you many encounter.
JET