Tried faking a navy blue with just cyan and black and got a weird purple mess

So I was screen printing a batch of 50 tees last weekend and ran out of my usual blue mix halfway through. I figured hey, I can just blend more cyan with some black and it'll look close enough, right? Wrong. The first 12 shirts came out looking like a bruised plum instead of navy. I had to strip the screens and start over, which cost me an extra 3 hours and like $20 in wasted ink. Learned the hard way that you need at least a tiny bit of magenta to get a true dark blue. Has anyone else found a cheap workaround for mixing dark colors without buying a ton of extra bases?

2 comments

2 Comments

hugo373d ago

How much total ink volume are you working with when you mix?

anthony1652d ago

You're better off ditching the black entirely and using a deep violet or dark purple base with cyan if you want navy. Black kills the saturation and leaves that weird muddy purple every time, I've done it more times than I want to admit. The real trick isn't adding magenta, it's finding a pre-mixed dark blue concentrate that's almost black already and cutting it down with straight cyan until it looks right. You can get those in pint bottles for like 12 bucks and they'll last through a hundred shirts easy, way cheaper than burning through black pigment that never behaves the way you want.