The authors were challenged to create the artwork and print the fund-raising shirts for the annual hot-rod show.

After what seemed like a very long rainy season in the Mile High City, we are beginning to be blessed once again with those beautiful Colorado blue skies. And, you guessed it, with the spring and summer come hot-rod and bike shows. While we certainly do enjoy walking the outdoor aisles of awesome rides while sipping on a diet Fresca, we are ourselves members of a couple of clubs—one, by name, The Italians of America. (Sounds a little odd, we know, but one of us turns into “Gino” after too many of those Frescas, if you know what we mean.) At any rate, this car club raises quite a bit of money every year for a wonderful cause—the Tennyson Center for Children. While we are clearly overgrown children ourselves, there is a huge place in our hearts for the kids, and these guys do a great job.

Another club in which we are actively involved is the Goodfellas Car Club. These two groups decided to get together for the annual car show and swap meet, and jointly raise money for the children. We were in before they asked us, ‘cause that’s what kinda guys we are. We are always in to lend a hand to the kids. Accordingly, we were charged to make a cool design so we can print some cool shirts for the event!

Digging the archives

We begin this project, like so many others, by digging into our archives. And, we wondered, what goes better with cars than pinstripes? So we found some good shapes and went to work. We used three colors in our background pinstripes: black, red and silver—great horsepower colors. The provided Goodfellas logo would need to be placed into our design as well. We put the two elements together in Adobe Illustrator to begin the building of our full-back image. We would add all of our type solutions and lay in a couple of sharp-looking rides over the top of our pinstripes. We went ahead and added a fade to the logo and a few outlines and drop shadows to the type solutions to give them a bit more interest. For a little bling to the rigs we threw in some negative space for some highlights on the chrome. It’s always about the chrome.

On to the left-chest image. We would use the lion from our friends at Goodfellas and add some flames to go with our pinstripes. Flames are always cool, too. To keep costs down we kept this one at just a couple of colors. We added our text with an outline to represent the hood of the club.

For good measure we were asked to put together the flyer for the event. Using an 8.5” X 11” template we combined the full-color logos and several type solutions using some outlines, and sent that off to the printer for the paper goods.

To accomplish their task, they had to dig from the tool box a fetching combination of old-school imagery and text, and new-school technology and technique.

Going direct-to-screen

We decided to skip the film on this project and go straight to our direct-to-screen imager. No film, no carrier sheets, no fuss, no muss. The DTS unit is equipped with a matching registration system and takes these steps out of the process. The film savings is great, but the labor, storage space, lost files and other variable savings is tremendous. As the prices of these units have come down to a level where only a couple of automatics worth of production can show a very short return on investment, they’re a must for any sizable operation these days. The quality of reproduction is unparalleled, especially when imaging halftones. We’re able to hold up to two and three percent of 65-line halftone dots and exposure times are down 50 percent with no vacuum frame needed. Gotta love that.

Anyway, we turned the red and black screens around and imaged the left chest design on the other end of the same screens, then headed to the sink for development. After drying we taped up the edges of the screens avoiding heavy blockout application, because we trust our good duel-cure emulsion and typically have very few pinholes to worry about. We used platen-peel to block off the left chest image while we printed the backs.

We can feel just a bit of an edge on the stencil with our fingertips, making it about 12-14 percent EOM on our N272-tpi high-tension mesh on roller frames at 45 Newtons/cm2. We get that EOM by coating using a two-print-side/two-squeegee-side method. One mesh is all we needed on this image because everything was on white shirts. Another budget thing.

Just to help out

The inks were mixed using a standard mixing system and scale. The run was only 144 pieces so we only mixed 1,000 grams of each color. We added 10 percent stretch additive to help in bridging the 2 X 1 rib fabric on the women’s shirts. We also had to add a bit of pressure when printing those, to force the ink down into the lower areas between the whales of the garment.

By the time our readers get a chance to read this the event will be over. Our hope, though, is that the shirts sell out and help our car clubs raise some substantial coin for this fine children’s organization. We knocked off a few bucks ourselves, just to help out.