You may have read an article or two over the years about the relationship between screen print business and supply companies. We are certainly no different and believe in a solid two-way partnership with the manufacturers and distributors. Our relationships are a bit different though, in that we frequently work for supply companies worldwide at trade shows for demos, seminars and workshops. One such company, Dallas-based GSG employed our services for some workshops and seminars. They also asked us to design and print at their grand reopening at a beautiful new facility they had just moved into. We have engineered a number of prints for them at trade shows and events over the last few years and usually stay with the western theme for obvious reasons. We would need to do something a bit different this time around, however.

 

Boots, guns, buckles and cowboy hats have been a little played out for these Texas events. Hmmm… what could we create that says Texas but isn’t cowboy? Easier than we thought—music! In Texas there are two kinds of music: country and western. 

 

New country

We started with our clipart archives and found a template we have used on a number of occasions. We found a guitar image with some music score ribboned around it. What says country music more than a guitar, right? 

 

First step was to ungroup and remove or delete the parts we were not going to use. To add a little edge, we laid in some wing shapes to wrap around the guitar and some scrolls and filigree to fill up some space and add a bit of interest. After some resizing, stretching and warping, we had our symmetry and overall layout dialed in. Then it was time to color—and you know how much we like colorin’. 

 

The highlight white printed last to make the white areas nice and bright. The metallic silver was printed through a lower-count mesh for a heavy deposit.

Since Texas is its own nation after all and the state flag is the good ol’ red, white and blue, that seemed to be the way to go. We had to print on black because black always looks best with the contrast it offers. For a solid steel feel we thought we better add in some silver too. We used spot colors in Illustrator to put it all together. 

 

Next up: the type solution part of the project. For the verbiage in the banner and guitar elements of the graphic, we appropriately located a line using the line segment tool and put a stroke in a contrasting color that we could easily see. Using the warp tool, we bent the line to match the curves in the shapes and clicked on the type using the path tool. We didn’t want to print another color, so we let the shirt  show through by adjusting the spacing and coverting the fonts to outlines which would be taken out of the image. 

 

For the large GSG logo, we laid in a bold type and added some outlines by duplicating the type and adding strokes to each layer. In the warp options, we used the rise tool at about 20 percent to wrap the type around the guitar. The bend tool would help to shape it just right.  

 

Colorful lyrics

Our customer liked the color proof so we were ready for separations. The shapes and elements would need to be knocked out of each other for butt-to-butt registration. Illustrator does this automatically in the layers created in spot colors. We ended up with a fairly simple vector image with four colors—red, white, blue and silver. Maybe too simple. Boring, in fact. Because the garments were black, we would need to use a white base plate to get the colors to pop but would not need to use black. We were going to setup in a six-color automatic with a flash, so one more color would fit in perfectly. 

 

We decided to use white to jazz up the textures and get some more colors working for us. Typically, the underbase is a composite of the colors to be printed, but we decided to not use it under the blue area where the royal would turn to a nice soft navy. We’d only use it as a base for parts of the highlight white, so we added another gray color to the mix. We also added a distressed pattern in Photoshop under the small portions of the wings to give us several levels in the silver. We cleaned it all up, gave the white printer some creative chokes using strokes, and then output our five plates through illustrator.

 

Encore

Because this was a demo as well as for convenience, we used inks right out of the bucket, ready for use (RFUs). We prepared three sets of screens to be shipped to the open house. Since we were printing on the black substrate, but still wanted a soft breathable hand, our colored plates—including the highlight white—would go on 230 tpi brand new aluminum static frames except for the metallic silver. The flakes are too large to go through a mesh with threads so close together, so we opt for a mesh with a much larger open area at 110 for this kind of ink. Our first white went on a 156 tpi screen that would give us fair detail yet still block color and fiber. All tensions were in the 25 N/cm range. You know we are retensionable guys, but this was an entry-level demo and we were instructed to use statics. At least when they are new the tensions aren’t too bad.

 

We started the setup with the under print white and then a flash followed by our royal, red and then silver. We finished with our final highlight white which lifted some of the silver off and created the variable colors created by the texture of the distressed pattern. The metallic silver usually prints last because lower-count mesh allows for a substantial ink deposit that can get picked up when stepped wet-on-wet but, in this case, that is exactly what we wanted. That, and we needed the white areas to be really nice and white so the highlight white had to print last. 

 

Our customer liked the image so much they used it on several huge banners including the one behind the live music stage. The workshops and seminars along with the prints we setup were a big hit and all were thrilled with the grand reopening event. It was great to be a part of it.