How To Separate Art For 3D Foiling

3D Foiling Trick Within a Discharge Print 

(see PDF for better viewing)

Foiling has regained popularity over the past few years as an accent in water base and discharge ink prints. Generally however the foiling is flat and falls short of the sparkle that foil can have when it is applied over a textured base. Our friends at Forward Screenprinting in Oakland have produced a good video of their print technique using discharge and foiling. Click here to connect. 

The video shows how a discharge and foil print is set up on press as well as the foil application. this newsletter shows how to create a textured 3D foil using a similar set up.

Artwork:

The easiest way to create 3D foil is to substitute a black keyline or outline design element with a puff ink screen, flash it, then print a foil adhesive screen. However adding a textured puff base can increase the quality and ease of 3D foiling.

While the outline method works for line art below 1/8th of an inch line weight, larger areas like the Mucom oval’s large ‘M’ (a symbol for the micron btw!) may be dicult to cover smoothly with foil. The answer is to texture the puff base plate with patterns found in Photoshop. The result will be a textured base plate followed by a separate screen with a solid overprint of foil adhesive. This texturing creates bumps and imparts a ‘gold nugget’ look to the foil process when the shirt is run through the oven after the foil is peeled. First we will explore patterns in Photoshop and how to create textures for the puff base plate. Then we’ll show how to use it in the previous design and how we can combine discharge inks with this design process.

The textures above (see pdf) were all made in minutes using patterns found within Photosop. Some like the cross hatch and the leaves in the upper right corner were created by duplicating the layers, deleting the background to create transparency, then rotated to create the patterns you see.

Notice all patterns have air surrrounding the texture print. This allows for fast flash times, as well as providing ‘bumps’ that cause the foil to have both a bright pin point reflection as well as dark shadows to create the sparkle effect. The size of the textures on the previous page are about right for a good puff foil effect, any closer together and the puff would be solid with no valleys, any larger and the texture would be too big to work for this application.

Printing the foil adhesive

Let’s look at how to apply a texture to a design. Here is the art as it looked for a one color print.

There are 3 different ways to foil this design. 

1. To use just the outline and choke the puff base as shown in the letter N to the right. 

2. Texture the outline as shown on page 6. 

3. Texture the interior ll of the letters also shown on page 6.

First Way: Duplicate art onto a new layer and select outline of letters with magic wand. Then SELECT>MODIFY>CONTRACT. Enter 2 pixels to contact the outline so the puff ink won’t be seen in the final print.