Screen printing
Ink forced through a mesh stencil, one color at a time. It is the thick, punchy print used on T-shirts, posters, and signs.
See it
What it is
Screen printing pulls a squeegee across a fine mesh stencil, pushing ink through the open areas onto paper, fabric, plastic, or another flat surface. Each ink color normally gets its own stencil and pass. The result can carry a dense, tactile layer of color that ordinary process printing cannot match.
Reach for it on apparel, gig posters, signs, and editions where a small spot-color palette is part of the look. Halftone dots turn one ink into lighter tones, and transparent inks can overlap to make extra colors. Andy Warhol's 1960s portraits made those repeated screens, flat colors, and registration shifts part of pop art's visual language.
Gotcha: every extra color means another screen, alignment, and drying step. Fine lines can close up, tiny gaps can fill, and photographic gradients must become halftones. Separate the artwork into spot-color plates, add modest trapping where colors meet, and agree on ink order before treating an overlap as a predictable third color.
Ask AI for it
Separate this poster for three-color screen printing in Adobe Illustrator. Reduce the art to three named Pantone spot-color plates, convert every tonal area to a 45 lpi halftone, add 0.25mm traps where adjacent colors could open a paper-colored gap, and keep strokes at least 0.5mm. Use Separations Preview to verify there are exactly three ink plates, then export one registration-marked PDF per plate plus a composite proof showing the intended ink order.