Printing Screen Printing Graphics Larger Than A Sheet Of Paper

If you are using a computer to produce your screen printing artwork, you may want to print something larger than will fit on a single 8 1/2”x 11” piece of paper. But how do you do it? If you manage to put together the right combination of search terms in Google, you will find there is software out there to do this. The programs will break up your images into page-sized sections, and print them. But I am cheap. I didn't want to pay $20 or more for a program that does nothing more than this. I started playing with some of the programs that I already had.

First I tried my antique version of Adobe Photoshop (version 3.5). I searched for a feature to print my large graphic in sections, but it didn't seem to have one. Maybe a newer version has a feature for it. Or maybe someone sells a plug-in for it. I suppose I could have just manually broken the image up into smaller pieces, and printed them on the transparencies. Next I tried Microsoft Word. I couldn't find a way to get Word to print an image larger than a single page. It seems like they would have some sort of banner mode. But I couldn't find it.

But I did finally find a program that I owned that would do what I wanted. It was an unlikely candidate. Microsoft Excel! Yes, the spreadsheet program!

Simply open Excel. Go to the Insert menu option, and select Picture. It will give you another menu, so select From File. A browse box will pop up, so use this to select the image that you want to print. This will insert your image into a single spreadsheet cell. Right-click on the image, and choose Format Picture. Under the Size tab, you will find the ability to adjust the size of your image. Make sure you have “Lock aspect ratio” checked, or it might distort your image.

Now you can print your image. Excel will automatically print the whole thing, using multiple sheets if needed. You can print whole banners if you want. I have used Excel to print a poster size image that was 5 pages wide, and 6 pages tall. So it was 30 pages in all. I just had to tape them all together.

So for screen printing, you would just print your image onto transparencies, and then tape the transparencies together (using transparent tape) into one contiguous image.

Rob Jacob has years of screen printing experience. For articles and information about screen printing t-shirts, visit: http://www.screen-printing-t-shirts.com