Printing On Leather

[Ferg]

I have a dye sublimation set-up. I transferred photos etc. onto just about anything you can imagine. Extremely high learning curve, printers get plugged with the subbing ink constantly, many products factory coated for sublimation, very few for leather. As above, the inks are very expensive plus one source company has a monopoly on the inks. It went through a very laborious court battle for a number of years. They can actually sue you if you source from China on your own.

All that said: You need a heat press, mine cost upwards of $2000. It is manually operated but Digital. I coated my own product using Auto Clear Coat. It is very expensive and a little softer than the commercially available pre-coated product. You can use a laser printer. If you have a heat press you can do a little experimenting with a laser printer. Print your subject matter onto a top grade Copy Paper, image reversed. Then you can transfer a decent image onto white leather such as Doe Skin. You would need to bake the leather with the image transfer for about 2 or 3 minutes at 300 degrees F. Leave it in the oven too long, you will get a discolored piece of white leather.

There is no White Sublimation Ink unless someone has developed it since I looked. I have printed Jet Black ink onto Unfinished Veg tanned, it can look real nice. Takes unbelievable amount of patience and many, many, pieces of scrap leather.

Now: Most of the very colorfully printed leather, fabric, etc. is done with "Direct Printing." The printers have a platen inside of the machine where the item to be printed lays.

These printers may have come down in price some since I checked but when I looked into the possibility, a good one with decent size capabilities cost $50,000.

Since we already have a CNC Router that cost $125,000 we didn't feel overly excited about another $50,000 for a printer.

ferg

[Ferg]

Update on my last post:

Epson has a direct print printer for T shirts and other fabrics that uses white ink for a measly $18,000 - $20,000.

There are also Laser printers with white Toner.

ferg

[DavidL]

I did a bit of research on this subject...

Acrylic paints (angelus) can be hand painted on leather cleanly and without any issues. So if you could put it through a screen press it would work in theory. The way acrylics are, they dry out fast and would require you to add screen printing medium so that it could work like a regular screen printing ink.

There are a lot of differences in leather even piece from piece (oils, dark base colour, different tannage) that can affect the print quality. Theres always a bit of testing required and no guarantees in effectively screen printing like the way t shirts can be done.

Edited March 22, 2015 by DavidL