About ScreenPress

A lot of screen printing comes down to numbers nobody hands you up front. How much ink does a run of 50 actually take? What mesh count fits this design? How hard should the squeegee blade be, and at what angle? How fast does the belt need to move through the dryer to actually cure the ink instead of just warming it? How much longer should the screen sit under the exposure lamp now that it’s farther away than last time? And once ink, blanks, and shop time are all added up, what should a print actually cost? None of these are hard questions individually, but working them out by hand, print after print, is where a hobby or a small shop loses an evening.

ScreenPress exists to take that arithmetic off your plate. Instead of one long guide to wade through, the site is built around a set of small, single-purpose calculators, each aimed at one part of the job. The Ink Coverage Calculator estimates grams of plastisol, water-based, or discharge ink for a run from the print size and quantity. The Mesh Count Selector recommends a screen mesh count from your ink type and how much detail the art needs. The Squeegee Guide matches a blade durometer, edge profile, and attack angle to your ink and mesh. The Cure Temp/Time Calculator works out the conveyor belt speed for a target dwell time and gives a typical ink-surface temperature by ink type. The Emulsion Exposure Calculator carries a known-good exposure time to a new lamp distance or wattage using the inverse-square law. And the Cost-Per-Print Calculatoradds up setup, ink, labor, blanks, and overhead per piece and suggests a sale price for the margin you’re after.

Beyond the calculators, the blog and learn section cover the craft side of printing — ink, mesh, squeegee technique, curing, and screen prep — and the Printmaking Museum is a browsable collection spanning screen printing, block and lino printing, risograph and stencil work, and the broader history of printmaking and its presses, with every entry, image, and fact drawn from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

A few things worth stating plainly. ScreenPress is an independent site, not affiliated with any ink, mesh, or equipment manufacturer. It is supported by advertising, which is how the tools stay free with no account required. Every result the tools produce is an estimate built on standard formulas and commonly cited screen-printing figures, not a guarantee — actual ink use, cure behavior, and exposure times vary with your specific ink, mesh, dryer, and light source, so treat a result as a starting point and confirm it with a test print before committing a full run. If a tool looks off, or there’s a calculator you wish existed, the contact page is the place to say so.