When charged with combining history, gambling, gold fever and cars in a single T-shirt design, the authors turned to their successful combination of old-school thinking and new-school technique. The result was a win-win for them and their client.

It’s been a wet summer this year in our so-called semi-arid climate. Seems like thunderstorms nearly every afternoon . . . complete with noise, light shows, torrential showers and hail. It has taken a little more planning than usual this summer as far as putting the top down and going out to do a little hot roddin’ with the boys. Ever seen what golf-ball size hail does to a custom paint job?

One of the more beautiful afternoons, the fellas and us decided on a road trip up to Black Hawk. Black Hawk is one of three low-stakes gambling communities in Colorado about an hour and a half from the city. (In fact, they just raised the stakes recently, which is not necessarily a good thing for us.) Well before the community was turned into a gaming town it was a cool little mountain town known for mining, at around 10,000 feet elevation. Some of the old mines still exist on the sides of the hills. Pretty cool road trip.

We’ve worked with less

While we were cruisin’ from casino to casino and losing at arm wrestling with the one-armed bandits we ran into one of our old friends who used to be the Mayor of Black Hawk. It has been a long time since he was the top dog but he is still much involved in the community’s politics and civic activities.

You might be interested to know that he is in charge of an annual hot-rod car show coming up in the fall. And, wouldn’t ya know it, we happen to have a little experience in this subject matter.

In terms of promotional shirts, turns out he needs something “cool.” Don’t they all? Cool we can do. But he also wants different and he wants to bring in a little of the history of the old mining town. After a little research—well, it was actually a couple more cold ones in the lounge—we learned that the very first gold in Colorado was discovered in one of the mines of this town.

So, “Maybe an old miner guy riding an old gold mining car that that has been turned into a hot rod!” What? Now that is different. But cool? Sounds like a little of the suds talking. But, we guess we have worked with less.

After another frosty-cold libation we set to work. We would need to get out the latest digital-graphic technology to start this project. Okay, seriously: We would go old-school, again. Got the pencil and paper out, ‘cause that is still the best way to freehand illustrate images such as these.

We sketched out several pencil drawings until we landed in a general area we liked. Kinda had that old thirties-something tub-hot-rod look with the big-block blown motor with headers stickin’ out the side. (Makes us want to grunt, but we will not digress.) We pulled the pen and ink out and dialed in our good black-line illustration and scanned it. Then we opened up our scanned image in Photoshop and cleaned it up a bit to prepare it to be opened in Illustrator.

Once open in Illustrator we traced it into vector art and began the type solution part of the project. We laid in a bold type and added several outlines by duplicating the type and adding strokes to each layer. Then we started messin’ with colors. We stretched and twisted our type around our “rod” until we got the layout clean. Our customer liked the color proof so well that he doubled the order. The “rod” really took on the old-school Rat Fink look—just in case there are any Ed “Big Daddy” Roth fans in the crowd—which was really cool.

For butt-to-butt registration the type would need to be knocked out of the background and vise-versa. Illustrator does this for us automatically in the layers created when we output.

We ended up with a fairly simple vector image of four colors. Classic candy-apple red for the rod, along with teal, black and, of course, gold. We would go ahead and jazz the final print up and add a little sparkle to the gold by adding metallic gold to that plate. No additional charge for that, it just seemed appropriate. Because our garments are white we would not need to use a white printer or base plate. We cleaned it all up then outputted through Illustrator onto inkjet film using our RIP.

All that glitters

While the color department was mixing and matching the called colors, we had the screen department prepare our screens. Since we were going on the white substrate and we wanted a soft, breathable hand, our screens would be work-hardened N-272-tpi, stretched to 50N/cm2, perpendicular and parallel on retensionable frames. All, that is, but the metallic gold. The flakes that give us the sparkle are too large to go through a mesh type with threads so close together so we opt for a mesh with a much larger open area. In this case an N-102.

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. The print order was somewhat typical in that we started with the teal followed by our red color, then the black outline. The metallic gold prints last in most cases because those same flakes and lower mesh allow for a substantial ink deposit that can get picked up or smeared when stepped on wet-on-wet.

The run was fairly uneventful and, after boxed, it was time for another road trip for delivery. They were a huge hit at the event and we picked up a few other accounts from the show. Unfortunately, we’re pretty sure the Black Hawk tables took most of the profit out of the job.