Not too long ago we wrote a piece about shirts for one of the oldest bowling alleys in Denver. In fact, our editor has pointed out that this was just last month. At any rate, as we mentioned then, our old buddy is a big-time car guy. That is probably why we get along so well. (That and him serving the coldest beer in town both help the relationship.) So he tries to throw as much work as possible our way when he can.

Well I think we mentioned in that column that Wheat Ridge Lanes holds a bit of an impromptu car rally in the bowling alley parking lot every Thursday night. That’s pretty cool in itself, but once a year WRL puts on a big-time event everybody has come to affectionately refer to as Friday Night Lights. We haven’t missed this event in years, and it was recently time for this year’s hot-rod shirt.

We know what you’re thinking. Another horsepower job? Well, yeah, we just seem to attract ‘em. Read on, though, ‘cause it has some interesting twists. A vector and raster image in the same design. Illustrator and Photoshop playing nice together. Cool.

Checkered flag will work

Friday Night Lights has always attracted the local horsepower and the cool old-school rides we love. Right up our alley. The owner has a sweeeeeeeeet red Chevy Impala. Per his instructions, we would use his car for the centerpiece of the graphic. Always nice to have reference and direction. In this case we have both. He sent us several shots of his ride he took with a good digital camera. We chose the best angle, which is usually a three-quarter type shot. No exception here. We imported the digital pic into Photoshop and cleaned up all the digital noise. We built a mask to cut the car out of the background as well. For a little fun, we managed to put a posterized look into the car’s reflections in the photo, then were able to manually add in some additional crisp clean reflections of our own. We put is some flash reflections to give the car a bit of heavy shine and chrome bling for the print.

We then opened Illustrator to build our type solutions. Because this was a promotional giveaway program, once again, our customer had a budget so it was important to keep the total colors to a minimum. We hate that. Oh well, gotta do what the customer wants.

We kept the verbiage to the reds, oranges and golds from the car. We moved our type around a bit and got to the most practical layout. We would need to add a background solution to bring it all together. We relied on some of our archived textures and images that we down-loaded for free off of the Internet.

Checkered flags are always a good solution on car designs. We found the right pieces and parts and imported them. We then positioned all of our elements leaving a space for the Chevy. This was a front and back project so we would need to put together a simple image for the front to match the back, using type and similar shapes. We built the front image in Illustrator, taking the back graphic into Photoshop to complete the design.

We exported it at 300-dpi for what we think is the ideal garment resolution once sep’d, then laid in the manipulated Impala and adjusted overall colors one more time.

Production was a breeze

Our separations were straightforward. We decided to go with a simulated process that works very well on this type of graphic. (“Simulated process.” Hmm. Now there’s a term we in the industry made up and use pretty loosely. But isn’t it the definition of what our entire process is? But we digress. Y’all know what we mean when we say it, so we guess it is accurate enough.) We tear apart the image using colors within it rather than, say, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. In this case it’s reds, oranges, golds and black. We are able to hit true colors for this type of graphic and, thus, it is the most effective separation technique for our image. We separated into channels for easy editing, discarding the channels we do not need and choosing the Pantone (PMS) colors for each channel to get our print to be as close to the original as possible. Once our separation was complete we took it to inkjet film, which is completely adequate for this design, and output the film at 55-lpi.

With all the work on the front side in the art department—along with proper separations—the inks and screens were easy. Inks right off the shelf, but we added a bit of fashion soft base to soften up the final print. Screens were all 230-tpi, all stretched to 30N/cm2. Set-up was as typical as we can get and especially easy because the final print would be on white. Print order was most coverage to least, and lightest to darkest, with the black printing last to reintroduce detail. Set-up was very short and the production run was a breeze. Gotta love that.

Easy on press

The whole project came together about as perfect as we could have anticipated, with no changes called for. The customer was very pleased and was able to give everything away to the attendees . . . who all wore them at the event (a very good sign). This year’s Friday Night Lights was another huge success, and a great example of how, when you do everything right on the front end, things are easy on press.