Printing T-Shirts with Discharge & WaterBase Inks

Discharge and Waterbase Ink Qualities

Discharge inks are used for DARK colored 100% COTTON garments. Polyester garments don’t work very well with Discharge inks. Waterbased inks are used for LIGHT colored garments. Waterbased inks can work quite well with polyester garments. It is strongly recommended that you test each garment style and brand before “diving headfirst” into the production run.

The method of printing t-shirts, sweatshirts, tanktops, etc. with Discharge and WaterBased inks is often called “soft hand” printing. Once printed, the garment has virtually no feeling of the ink. The Discharge itself has a bleaching agent which changes the fabric color of the design area.

Discharge printing is much like painting your room

Think of Discharge Printing this way: If the walls in your room are white, than you will use very little blue paint to paint your room blue. However, if your walls are painted blue you will have to use white primer as an underbase. Once the primer has done its work you can than paint a finish coat of white in order to have white walls. Discharge and WaterBased inks allow for much less ink to be used on the shirt which prevents cracking, fading and the sticky heavy feeling of having a logo on the shirt. Discharge does not have to be used on colored shirts to get the finished result you are looking for, however, discharge ink printing does produce the nicest finished garment by a long shot!

How Does Discharge Ink Printing and Waterbased Ink Printing Work

Discharge and WaterBased inks are a specialty ink used in screen printing. It shows the garments natural fiber instead of laying a thick layer of ink on top of the shirt. By itself, discharge ink removes the dye of the cotton fiber when it hits a certain temperature. Discharge T-shirt printing does require a much longer curing time in the dryer as opposed to traditional plastisol inks. Waterbased and Discharge printing work with a variety of different brands and styles of garments, with some styles and colors having stronger results than others.

Feel Free to contact us if you have any questions.