If you been readin’ “The Lon & Don Show” for long you know we do try to set the pace and that we are just a bit different. As far as we’re concerned that’s what it is all about. Screen printing and garment embellishment in general has run a bunch of different courses and, as you know, many of them come back around again and again over time. What is old is new . . . again. We’ve been saying that for a while.

Opening Night says it all

We were approached by a long-time account to tackle a project the likes of which we had never seen before. And there isn’t a lot we haven’t seen. Hmm. We would see about that.

Once again we were provided with the old digital cocktail napkin: that is, a really low-resolution jpg file. We love those, don’t you? It was a picture of a guy with a lanyard hanging from his neck, a badge dangling from its end, and a spotlight on the badge itself. It kind of had an X-ray feel to it. Our customer wanted this “look” for opening night at the largest hair-products trade show in the U.S. Don’t say a thing. . . .

Yes, hair products. Hey, with rock-n-roll in our blood—even from the eighties—you can bet we had the big-hair thing goin’ on at one point or another. At any rate, this is a huge debut for our customer and his company. Opening Night kinda says it all, doesn’t it?

So he trusts us to make it happen. Only one tiny little problem: Should we accept the mission, we would have just one week to pull it off. From concept to delivery. It was up to us to execute a plan of attack. It would take a little creativity, but we thought we could make it happen.

In the spotlight

To get the desired look, we began by scanning an actual lanyard. We placed a plain white piece of chipboard where the name badge would be so we could add the type and appropriate image later. We manipulated the file by knocking out all of the background information in Photoshop so it was transparent for our separation. To get that X-ray feel we turned our image into grey scale and reversed it. We placed our client’s image into the masked off area in the lanyard for the actual badge. We messed around with the curves to get both images to blend, then cleaned up the whole thing and separated the grey scale, using an index method, into three shades of grey and, of course, black for the deep shadow areas.

We got out the spotlight and were about to break it down and do a little dance, but instead decided to stick with the design we were working on. To get that spotlight look with big time highlights and deep dark shadows, we used the Lens Flare in Photoshop. Pretty cool, eh? There are a number of options to work with. After some tweaking we printed it on paper for the pass around at the studio. “Too computer generated,” was the general verdict. “Needs more variation.” Okay, so strike one. Luckily we get two more.

Time to get creative

We hung a black T-shirt on the wall, placed the spotlight a few feet away and manipulated the light for the right shadowing and highlights. We photographed the image using our digital camera, then imported it into Photoshop for adjustment. The image still did not look right as it was now picking up too much of the T-shirt texture. We needed a clean black surface so we aimed the spot at a black painted wall in our exposure room and tried the digital pic again. Once again we imported the shot into Photoshop and finally had an image we could work with.

We moved our curves around to bring back the contrast just a bit. It was determined that we would need only two screens to accomplish this part of the reproduction. One for all the highlights and one for the lowlights. At this point, we inverted the files and took those and our indexed file to film. The spotlight films were generated using a 65-line halftone at a 22-degree angle. Yep. We’re mixing traditional halftones with indexed FM frequency pixels. We thought that was kinda cool too.

We exposed our index films on our high-tension 272-tpi and put the two spotlight positives on 380s for a very thin ink deposit with killer fine transitions in the five percent and lower areas, and to keep open the 80 percent plus areas. All of our screens were consistently tensioned to 50 N/cm2, plus or minus about three.

No news is good news

We settled on a fine-knit 30-singles combed-cotton 4.5-ounce fashion-cut T-shirt. The very smooth finish of the surface will give us a nice clean and smooth final print. Our inks would be a nice cotton white ink and a standard all-purpose black. We also opted for a very clean couple of RFU grey inks. One light and one dark. We didn’t color match the grey inks, as custom mixing grey ink and keeping it very neutral is difficult. We cut all the inks for this job with 20 percent Finesse or soft-hand additive and added another couple percent curable reducer. Opacity was not our primary concern and we were trying for the smoothest cleanest print we could get.

Press set-up was built from darkest to lightest with no flashing. The lightest colors would be the most opaque and the darkest ones would be stepped on by subsequent screens. Our transitions and overall feel of the print turned out awesome.

The completed shirts were shipped to our customer’s hotel just in time. We didn’t here from him for weeks. We did hear the “Opening Night” was incredible, so are guessing he would have let us know if he wasn’t happy. They always do.