In order to produce the sharpest of detail, artwork often needs to be rebuilt. The author utilized Genuine Fractals software to speed up the process for this project. (All photos courtesy the author)

It’s hard to believe it’s the New Year already. It seems like summer just ended and here in Colorado, we were just weathering our fall snow storms. The hot rods, boats and two-wheelers are packed away for the winter, though we don’t bury ‘em too deep in the garage, just in case. We do get a few Indian summers here in the Rocky Mountain City long enough to break out the bikes. And what goes better with horse power than a little bit of rock and roll? Now that’s a year-round sport in any part of the country. 

A couple of our roddin’ buddies also have a band (of course) and as the snow flies so does the local live-band bar scene. We went and saw our buddies from Buford T. Justus play at one of our hangouts and enjoyed a couple diet cokes as we are known to do. You know, in case there happens to be any business to be made. And that, there was—one of the roadies from the band approached us and yelled above the tunes, “Hey, you’re the T-shirt guys!” That we are. Turns out the fellas would need a new set of touring shirts for the band. They wanted something really original; skulls, wings and guns they told us. Real original, huh? Oh well—that look just keeps on going and who are we to argue?

On a napkin’s wings

We got a disk from the guys and inserted it back at the studio to take a look. Here we go again with the digital bar napkin… a .jpg image at about 4" X 4" at 72 dpi that they wanted at 13" X 13" for a full-front imprint on a black T-shirt. If we had a nickel for every time we tried to explain GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). But we stopped explaining it a while ago, because we found a little trick piece of software: Genuine Fractals. 

When we open any file with this software and enlarge it, the image is rebuilt using individual pixels. In this case, the transitions remained smooth and the resized design was really quite good, which saved us a ton of time rebuilding a bad file. Still, we would need to do a little work on this piece of art back in Photoshop. We cleaned up the edges and tried our best to smooth out some of the color in the design; we would need to stick to about four to five colors. With a little work we had the image in a lot better shape than what we started with. Without all of this time and effort spent on the front-end before separation—the time customers generally have no clue about—the final print suffers dramatically. 

Later, we opened our adjusted skull and wings art file in Illustrator, auto traced it to get some working vector paths for good manipulation, and then filled the shapes with color. After making a new layer for our text, we found a good font and laid the lettering on a banner and dropped it into the design. We added an additional layer for the distressed filter that we dropped over our type solution to add a little texture. The distressing would be a nice contrast to the crisp, clean imagery and high density outlines. It was important to build all these separate pieces of the design on individual layers to make for faster and easier manipulation. Once our film was output and checked for quality and registration on a light table, it was off to the screen and ink departments. 

Red discharge is sometimes difficult and requires testing for good permanent color.  We ended up combining a couple systems to get a good blood red.  We printed the red and white discharges wet-on-wet with fairly heavy pressure to drive the ink into the garment; a brief flash after the discharge screens would freeze the top layer.

Putting ink to mesh

The screens for the job were all work-hardened and tensioned at 35 N/cm2, plus or minus two or three newtons to be true to our pre-registration system. The gray of the wings would be done with a standard neutral RFU (ready for use) non-phthalate plastisol ink through a 230 tpi (threads per inch) mesh using standard coating procedures. This ink will be stepped on by subsequent screens to keep the print areas soft and subtle in the wings. 

The distressed vintage text and skull portion would be printed using a white discharge ink for the softest hand we could achieve on dark. The white ink was mixed using a pigment concentrate system with a standard discharge base, 10 percent white pigment and six percent NF, a non formaldehyde activator. The red in the design was also printed with a discharge ink. Red discharge is sometimes difficult and requires testing for good permanent color, so the formulation on this was more complicated. We ended up combining a couple systems to get a good blood red. 

The meshes we used for the discharge were of the 156 tpi variety while the high-density white outline portion of the wings was done on our favorite specialty mesh—83 tpi with 70 micron thread. The 156 was coated with a water-resistant discharge emulsion to about 10 percent emulsion over mesh and then hardened post-exposure with a reclaimable hardener. A 400 micron capillary film was attached to the 83 mesh using a direct method and a like-pure photo polymer emulsion.

The trick to getting all those fine points on the outline to wash out properly is to equip the dip tank with agitation. We soaked the screen after exposure for 10 to 15 minutes and cleaned it up with warm water at medium pressure.

We set up the standard gray first in the print order with a minimum off-contact distance and printed it using a rapid flood and squeegee stroke with medium pressure. We printed the red and white discharges wet-on-wet with fairly heavy pressure to drive the ink into the garment; a brief flash after the discharge screens would freeze the top layer. The HD white (a standard HD plastisol straight out of the bucket) was printed next with increased off-contact distance after a cool station. The HD flood stroke had good pressure and ran at about half speed to really fill that thick stencil. The 70/90/70 triple-ply dual durometer squeegee was quick at about 15 degrees and of just enough pressure to transfer the ink and leave it on top with the edges in tact. 

The print ran very well and the contrasting textures of the super soft discharge ink and the really clean, sharp high-density white on the black shirt came out really nice. Our friends down the road were in charge of the banners and were given the same low res file to work with. Needless to say, the banners didn’t look nearly as tight as the T-shirts. That little extra time and effort in the clean up on the art makes all the difference.