It’s common for our company, GraphicElephants.com to be contracted by our industry’s manufacturers to demonstrate products and supplies either in our studio, onsite or even at trade shows. Machine, ink, frame and stencil manufacturers, among others, commonly have us engineer and print live at these shows. One of the major ink manufacturers asked us to provide such a service at a recent show, and we were given no real direction other than we knew the World Cup would be going on.

 

 

The quest begins

First things first: we had to build a good original concept. It is a garbage-in, garbage-out biz, so the design must start out strong. With the obvious World Cup theme, it made good sense to start with the World Cup trophy. We searched the Internet for a fairly high-res photo of the trophy for the background and general shape. We guessed that the award has trademarks, so we wanted to bury it well enough that it wouldn’t infringe but had the feel of what it was supposed to be. 

 

We opened the picture in Photoshop and turned the color photo into a gray scale, placed it on a black background, knocked the contrast way back and saved it. We then opened the black-and-white file into Illustrator where we would finish our design work. Now that we had our trophy we would need a soccer ball. We are big believers in not reinventing the wheel and happened to already have a great old tattered ball from a previous design done years ago. This ball was recycled into the new image where it was sized appropriately for the design.

 

Three different foil colors were used to finish this design.

Using some clip art templates, we added some wings and scroll work for the background in order to get a horizontal feel as well as tie the other design components together in the layout. Plus, wings and scrolls are cool. So that they didn’t take over too much, we added a distressed filter and pulled the opacity back to 50 percent. We then gave them an outline for some additional contrast. 

 

Lacking any real color in the design at this point, we decided to add a little by way of foil. Since the World Cup trophy is gold, what better foil color to add? To get our cup shape, we found a piece of clipart that was actually a genie lamp and cut it in half, duped it, flipped it and built the form. We added a few splatters to take foil and then laid the type in. Our layout was complete.

 

Championship battle

At this stage, we had built a somewhat complicated image by combining vector pieces with several raster parts. Thus, separations would need to be done by hand in Photoshop. Enter our long time friend and freelance artist, Jim Popp. His experiences would be perfect for this project. 

 

As you know, the separation process is, more or less, tearing the colors apart to be rebuilt on press. This print would be on black shirts, so the white print was the most important. We wanted the hand as soft as possible and kept this in mind as we built the white. We selected the lightest colors to be nearly 100 percent under-based and held the full gray scale curved way back to anticipate our gain on press. 

 

The shirts would be printed on an eight-color automatic and we had now used the first two heads (the white and a flash). The foil adhesive would be in the last head, which left five colors to work with. We would use two browns—the dark would be vector shapes imported and applied to a color channel with a distressed filter reversed out, and the lighter brown contained some of the lower-level graphics in the ball as well as some additional vector shapes that were handled the same way. 

 

The ball areas were curved back to choke the highlights since we would reintroduce those areas with our spot white; the highlight areas would only be printed in the ball. We knocked out all of the colors to expose the brightest areas on the ball. The gray plate had a lot of different areas throughout the design, including some scroll and wing shapes, some shadow areas of the ball, as well as on the world map that had a gradient from light to dark. 

 

We threw a little orange in the background areas and added some rips to the ball for a splash of color. That gray scale World Cup trophy we started with would be printed in a charcoal ink to make it very subtle in the background. 

 

The print order started with the charcoal trophy screen on N-300 tpi mesh, followed by the white on an N-205, printed wet-on-wet, followed by a flash. The gray, browns, orange and spot printed next, also wet-on-wet on N-272 and 300. The final screen, a standard N-102 with a 400/200 micron stencil, would be for the HD clear that would create the texture of the ball and supply the base for the foil screen (the fun part of the project). 

 

We chose to apply foil by hand at the end of the dryer. In fact, we did three different colors of foil here—gold, as planned, on the cup and splatters: red/rainbow on our seal and an antique application on the ball itself. The live printing and demonstration garnered a lot of attention and even turned into a bit of a fund-raiser for colleague and good friend Mark Coudray, whose son is battling cancer.