We’re gettin’ a little wind in the hair, rollin’ out on the two-wheelers in the beautiful Colorado springtime, when we run into one of our old friends and clients, from the hood. Owning several storefronts there, this guy does a ton of retail in Sturgis, S.D. Now, if you know anything about Sturgis, you know that this lovely mountain town shuts down—for the most part—two weeks every year for the famous—or infamous as the case is—Sturgis Bike Rally. This event takes place late summer every year, and our buddy works his butt off for about a month before and during the rally. Read between the lines, and you’ll realize what we’re saying is that this old friend of ours pretty much has an 11-month vacation every year. Don’t ya just hate this old friend of ours? Us too.

Anyhow. We were discussing some new art for this year’s event over a couple of caramel Frappuccinos when he pulled out an old shirt from a couple of years back that he just loves. He wants to do it again, but has nothing but the shirt. Perfect. Just the thing for this month’s Lon & Don Show.

Recyclable designing

The design part of this image was fairly simple and straightforward, but the final print turned out really, really cool. We began by hand drawing a very basic skull in a simple pen-and-ink format. We scanned it into Photoshop and adjusted it a bit to really get the blacks nice and dark. Then we opened our adjusted skull into Illustrator and auto traced it to get some working vector paths for good manipulation, and filled it.

After making a new layer for our type we found just the right font and laid “Sturgis Rally” into the design. The typestyle looked killer for this application, especially after we pulled the points out a bit for an even more aggressive look. Then we created another layer we would use for the high-density outline we’d be printing. We created yet another layer for the distressed filter that we dropped over our skull to add a little texture. The distressing would be a nice contrast to the crisp clean HD outline.

We added the oval with our new date and we were done with the design. Incidentally, we will change this same oval to new dates going forward, and be ready to go. Luckily we built everything on layers. It was important to build all the separate pieces of a design on individual layers to make for faster and easier manipulation, especially with two distinct styles side by side. Distressed vintage next to crisp high density, as well as the date changes.

The dip is the pip

Once our film was output and checked for quality and registration it was off to the screen and ink departments. Again, we are running these two contrasting styles next to each other, so the screens will be very different, one to the next, though all at work-hardened and tensioned to 35N/cm2, plus or minus two, to be true to our pre-registration system. The distressed vintage skull portion and the orange inline of the type would be printed using a discharge ink for the softest hand on dark we could achieve. The ink was mixed using a pigment-concentrate system with a standard discharge base and six percent NF, a non-formaldehyde activator. This mesh would be of the 196-tpi variety while the HD white-outline portion would be on our favorite specialty mesh, 83-tpi with the 70-micron thread diameter. The 196 would be coated with a water-resistant emulsion to about 10 percent emulsion-over-mesh (eom) ratio, then hardened with a reclaimable hardener, post exposure. The 83 would have a 400-micron capillary film—a one-part photopolymer—attached using a direct method.

The trick to getting all those fine points on the outline to wash out properly was the dip tank we use. We soak a screen after exposure for 10 to 15 minutes and clean it up with warm water at medium pressure. The high-density white would be an RFU plastisol, straight out of the bucket.

Our friend whom we hate

We set the discharge orange up first in the print order with minimal off-contact distance, and printed it with a fairly rapid flood and squeegee stroke with pretty good pressure to drive the ink into the garment. We did not flash after the discharge screen but, instead, printed the HD white next wet-on-wet with increased off-contact distance. The flood stroke had good pressure and ran at about half speed to really fill that thick stencil with ink. The print stroke was quick and of just enough pressure to transfer the ink and leave it on top with the edges intact.

We were still having some difficulty getting the real tight corners to print using the high-density screen alone. The image was in our stencil but we just couldn’t get the deposit perfect. So we added an additional white flat screen where we chose a more traditional all-purpose white ink and a 156-tpi mesh with standard duel-cure emulsion and about 14 percent eom. We printed this just before the HD to reintroduce those points we were missing. Called it a “reintroduction printer.”

The print ran very well and the contrast of the super soft discharge ink and the really clean sharp high-density white, all on black, came out fantastic. You can probably imagine why our good friend (whom we all still hate) wants to use the same design again.