Our services include screen printing, embroidery, and logo reproduction. We also provide additional related services to meet your specific needs.

An underbase is essentially a layer of white ink covering the full area of a design, which is printed before any of the other colors. Printing this white layer ensures that colors stay true and maintain opacity when printing colors on dark garments.

Screen printing inks aren’t very opaque in the sense that they are quite thin. This is so colors can blend & mix when printed and so it can be printed through finer mesh screens for better detail hand softer ‘hand’ or ‘feel.’ In most cases, when printing on dark-colored fabric with plastisol inks, a white underbase layer first needs to be printed as an “undercoat” before printing the colored inks. This ensures the print is vibrant on dark garments. It is somewhat like a primer when painting a wall in your house; the primer seals and smooths the surface and presents a good surface to paint on. Click here to download a visual example.

If your design is white ink only, we will only need to make one screen, meaning you will not have to pay extra screen setup fees. That being said, white ink on its own still needs two coats to achieve full brightness and opacity. We can achieve this by printing one layer of white, partially ‘flash curing’ it using a quartz dryer, and then printing the second coat with the same screen. There is a slight cost difference compared to printing, say, black ink on a white shirt due to the need for a second coat, but it’s minimal since we’d still only need one screen.

The short answer is yes. The visible white areas of your design still need two coats. Some print shops might cut corners by printing the whole area of the image white twice and then stacking the colors on top. The issue with this is that while the white portions of the image are nice and bright with two coats, the rest of the image will have a third coat of ink on top, meaning the print is unnecessarily thick and more likely to crack and wear out in the wash. Thick ink deposits can also end up looking super tacky and shiny as well, especially if using plastisol inks.

For example, say you have a design that contains red, blue, green, and white, and you want it printed on a black t-shirt.  The correct way to print this design would be to print the whole image in white ink once, flash dry it (this is the underbase), then print the remaining visible colors (red, blue, green, and white) on top. This makes for a nice even, super high-quality print that will not only look great out of the box, but it’ll stay looking that way too.

If you are still unsure if your design will need an underbase, click here to download our flow chart!