How We Print On Balloons
STEP 1
All our printed balloons start off with your artwork on a computer screen, this Mambo artwork is big and bold, perfect for printing on balloons! As you see it consists of two colours, black and a creamy light chocolate colour. Sometimes the second colour can be made of of the colour of the balloon so in this case for example you might have black balloons with a light brown print and therefore it would be a one colour print. Our client wants lots of lovely bright colour balloons though so a two colour print it is!
STEP 2
Printing on balloons involves a process called Screen Printing. In Screen Printing the colours of a print are printed separately, one at a time on the balloon to create the final image. So for a two colour image like this we have to break the colours down into two separate images, one for each colour. In this case brown (top right) and black (bottom left). We print these out onto a transparency each, ready for ‘burning’.
STEP 3
We create a screen for each colour using the transparencies as a template. You can see one of our staff members inspecting a finished screen here. It’s very important that each screen is perfectly developed so we take a lot of care to make sure the image has come out correctly.
STEP 4
For this job, one of the ink colours is a non standard colour, we can print in any custom colour and we use the Pantone matching system to mix our inks to the requested shade and tone. The ink colour will be affected slightly by the colour of the balloon but the end result is usually very close to the required shade. Some inks work better than others on certain colour balloons, our customer service team will be able to help you with your colour choices.
STEP 5
Once the inks are mixed and the screens are created they are installed on one of our balloon printing machines ready for printing. You can see one of the print heads here ready to print. As you might imagine, our inks have to be quite stretchy why dry considering the substrate is a balloon.
STEP 6
Balloons waiting patiently in line to be custom printed. In this case the customer has requested a mixture of our metallic / pearlescent colours. You can see our colour charts here: . It’s worth noting that balloons are often slightly darker when un-inflated than when they are blown up.
STEP 7
Colours are printed one at a time on an inflated balloon. Inflating the balloons makes for a tricky surface to print on but results in a much higher resolution and better quality print Here we’ve printed the lighter colour first.
STEP 8
The second colour goes down - black in this case - and you can see the difference, the black providing depth and contrast to the print.
STEP 9
One of our balloons seconds after receiving it’s second ink layer.All our balloons are stress tested as part of the printing process so you can be assured of non exploding custom printed balloons!
STEP 10
After printing our balloons air dry on the press before being deflated and prepared for dispatch. For this job we have used a nice range of colours. You can have as many different colours of balloons for no extra cost.
The end result. Spectacular!
