The original numbered print on the right was compared with digitally-printed color bars, the original scan file and separated file that was also digitally printed on good matte finished paper. Inks would be matched to the color bars. (All images courtesy the author)

The test print went on cobblestone and chocolate garments, which really captured the “spirit” of the original bronze sculpture.

Printed on an automatic using 10 colors, the final image ran smoothly from platen to platen.

We just returned from a consulting gig down in Monkey Island, Okla., a cute little resort town on a huge lake. We helped get an old friend of ours, Mark Athey up and running in his new screen-printing shop called Athey Graphics. Mark’s market happens to be the local establishments on the island—printing for everything from marinas and restaurants to golf courses and gift shops. What a great place to do business. 

Another great thing about the area, Oklahoma is rich in Native-American tradition, history and culture. As a testament and tribute, one famous western and Indian artist and sculptor, Harold T. Holden, was commissioned by the Athey family to create a bronze statue known as “Keeper of the Plains.” A lone Indian standing proudly, peaceful, thoughtful and serene, this life-size monument was unveiled at the county courthouse years ago. The Athey family additionally owns a number of limited-edition prints by Holden including a painting of the bronze. Now that the Atheys are in the print business, what better way to get started than a reproduction of “Keeper of the Plains?” And what better training piece for us to get this place up and rolling….

This design would be printed on thousands of shirts, so the Atheys wanted the garments to look very close to the limited-edition prints. As always, it would be critical for the last print to look like the first from setup to setup. Oh, and one more thing—we needed the separations to work on multiple shades of brown.

 

Recapturing the spirit 

We took one of the prints to our local service bureau to have it scanned to size at high resolution and returned to our studio with the file on a disk. After importing it into Photoshop, we manipulated the art by the individual curves to our liking—smoothing out some fades, making all the blacks truly black, increasing the contrast, cleaning up all the edges and making any necessary image changes. Basically we worked over the original file and developed the art into a good, optimized working file. We always make a copy of the original before manipulation so we can go back to the original if, for some reason, we make an error in judgment. We opted for the index separation method on this image because we had a 10-color press and wanted to use every head to make sure the machine was completely operational. Index separations can achieve great results but usually, more heads are a good thing. 

At this point we did a preliminary separation and looked at the composite on screen in order to critique it. We usually find several issues and need to make some changes. In this case, we are trying to jam 300-plus colors into 10 and it takes a couple of whacks at it to get it right. We would refer to the working file while looking at the composite and brought up some highlight colors with the selection tool. That helped us grab what was needed by slightly bringing the colors back up.

 We were trying to achieve several tones by using about three levels of each—dark, mid and highlight. The second separated file started to look pretty good on screen. Doesn’t everything though? After exporting the separated file into Illustrator for output, we set up the print order through the layers. Print order on an image like this is critical. Generally, it’s best to set darker colors down first, followed by mid tones and then lighter colors. Here, we compensate for the ink build up on the back of subsequent screens before output. Since this run would break in the brand-new setup, everything was calibrated to our place for the best starting point.

 

Keeper of registration

Inks and color matching using the index method is very important to reproduce artwork such as with this project. Careful attention was given to matching colors exactly based on a color proof output of the image and color bars on a good matte-finished paper. This was a great exercise to train the ink department as well, as several of the colors were very close and splitting hairs became necessary on a couple of the browns. The transitions from light to mid-tone to shadow were the most important. To get the inks to dither together in transition, not only was color important, but also consistency in viscosity and other parameters. Ten percent soft hand clear was added to all the inks. Like the original artist, no white was used and the canvas would be tan.

Because of the considerable detail and consistent size of the pixels (not halftones), 230 tpi (threads per inch) mesh was used for the screens. All were tensioned to our standard 30 N/cm2 on retensionable frames to ensure next-to-perfect registration using the pre-registration system we installed. Again, as a starting point for this new operation, the stencil thickness is the standard 10 to 12 percent emulsion over mesh (EOM) using a good dual-cure emulsion coated two-by-two. This provides ideal ink deposit for opacity, yet keeps the print smooth.

We usually spend quite some time on press in setup on paintings compared to easier prints, but get great results once we get them dialed. The off-contact is the minimal 30/1,000 used on all high-detail T-shirt printing. Also, the press must be in complete plane from platen-to-platen to head-to-head for quality, consistent results. 

This was a great training ground once everything was dialed in. The image run setup took about half an hour and, believe it or not, no micro adjustments were needed. The screens lined up perfectly the first time using our registration system. This was easily the best demo we ever ran with just a few minor ink-deposit adjustments with squeegee angle and speeds. The final print was beautiful and really captured the spirit of the artist’s work.