Needless to say, it’s been sunny and the weather has been exceptional. But that’s how it is in the Mile High City. Time to get out the toys ’cause it’s two-wheel weather! No no, not another motorcycle story. (At least not for this month.) Two wheels as in bicycles. It’s a good time of year to get into shape anyway. Gotta be able to take the shirt off on the boat and flex a bit, ya know. And what better way to get in a little cardio and resistance training all at the same time than on a human-powered two-wheeler?

Researching the archives

One of our long-time customers invited us over for margaritas (virgin of course) on the patio for a little shop talk. This is after a half-day ride on the mountain bikes up at Red Rocks Amphitheater. What a ride! We’re pretty sure we’re still breathing hard, two weeks later. Anyway, Matt’s company—The Bicycle Doctor—is about to hit full stride in the cycling season and needs some new apparel . . . quick. It’s the same story every year, because he also owns a snowboard company—Edge Works—that keeps his focus until about this time, year after year. We’ve come to expect it.

At any rate, he needs some new printed merchandise for his retail store. He’s looking for that classic 1970s look with an old school rock ‘n’ roll music-poster theme. Now he’s speaking our language! We can dig that. We agreed on simple one- to three-color, basic images that would work on both men’s and women’s apparel. That budget thing, ya know.

So we had to bust out the old record-album collection (remember those?) for research and a little classic sound. After listening to the scratches on the ol’ turntable, we decide on a classic, vintage typestyle. We did a little stretching, twisting and warping in Illustrator to get the look we were after and a general composition. We searched online for some classic bicycle images until we found a vintage bike that would work perfect for our design. We created a cool silhouette-looking graphic out of the bike and added its layer to our type solution. To give the image a classic yet up-to-date look, we added in some scrolls from our vector art collections and archives. For butt-to-butt registration, the type would need to be knocked out of the background and vice-versa. Illustrator does this for us automatically in the layers created when we output.

We decided on a couple of green tones to go on a bright yellow T-shirt: an antique dirty green on the foreground and a grayed-out green for the background. Because our colors are a bit darker than our substrate color we would not need to use a white printer or base plate; we wanted the yellow of the shirt to influence our green shades in this case. We cleaned it all up, then output through illustrator onto inkjet film using our RIP.

Strike-off: spot on

While the color department was mixing and matching the called colors of green, we were having the screen department prepare our screens. Since we were going on the bright yellow substrate and we wanted that vintage soft hand, our screens would be 230-tpi, stretched to 30N/cm2, perpendicular and parallel, work-hardened mesh on retensionable frames. The stencil was water resistant and about 10 percent EOM (emulsion-over-mesh ratio). After a quick set-up on press using our pre-registration system and a tweak or two on the micros, we were ready to proof our image to the approved digital proof: It was spot on.

We went with water-based ink in this case, in order that the printed area would feel as much like the shirt itself as possible, as if it were dyed rather than printed. To keep the ink deposits minimal, the squeegees were 70/90/70 triple-ply-duel durometer. Because we were using water-based ink we had to reverse the print cycle so that the flood stroke would follow the print stroke rather than the traditional flood-then-print. This procedure allowed us to flood the ink over the image if we had to stop for any reason, keeping the stencil open and wet. This is especially important in a dry climate such as ours here in Colorado. The dry air here is good for the complexion but bad for water-based printing. We throw a humidifier under the press to increase humidity when we run water-base as well. For the most part, water-based inks are far easier to work with these days and do not have the drying problems they did years ago. In fact, we’re able to print on as high as 305-tpi mesh now, when we used to try and keep our water-based printing way down in the 110 to 156 range.

Can you say, “Far out, man”? The authors were challenged to create just the right retro look for these fun T-shirts for local entrepreneur and friend The Bicycle Doctor, just as they’ll have to do in the fall when he replaces bicycles with snow boards.

It’s what we do

The men’s and women’s yellow Ts were of 4.5-ounce combed-cotton fashion fabric—very soft and smooth. The water-based ink in combination with the soft garments made for a very soft and breathable print. This is what retail is demanding on some of its branded merchandise, and our customer absolutely loved the approach. Good thing too, ’cause the next time we hear from him it’ll be this fall as snowboard season is about to explode, at which time he’ll need product for the board shop . . . quick. That’s okay with us, though. It’s what we do.