‘Not only are standard polyurethane/polyester boards made from petrochemicals, but the production of them releases incredibly harmful chemicals into the environment. Put this with their typical lifespan and it is clear that there is definite room for improvement on how boards are made.‘

It looks like the James Otter approach to this problem has been without compromise in all repects, the finished boards look amazing and have now been thoroughly tested on our Cornish coastline. In addition to producing an incredible product there is (at the time of writing) an invitation to the customer to be a part of the creation process. In my opinion it would be well worth making the most of this opportunity.

I would like to think that one day I might get to own one myself, although this would require finding the time to use it, getting back in the water again is high on the agenda but screen printing, right now, seems to be taking up every waking moment. Speaking of which the T shirts….

An obvious choice, Earth positive Organic T shirts screen printed using water based inks. Only the best for Otter Surfboards.

Screen printing full colour half toned images is not easy, and printing them with water based inks is harder still. One of the easiest ways to overcome some of the difficulties involved is to select a lighter coloured T shirt to print on (an environmentally friendly decision too) this enables the use of  true process printing, which is ideally suited to the transparent nature of water based inks. Using only cyan, magenta, yellow and black a full spectrum of colours can be achieved.

Mr Chuffiewuffie and friends have been printed on organic natural coloured T shirts, a perfect canvas for the full colour illustrations. It allows us to use the most environmentally sound inks with no bleaching additives. Also no extra heat sources  are required between printed colours (as needed when using opaque water based inks) thus a very energy efficient choice too. This means Mr Chuffiewuffie, Dozer, Flipper, Hop Hop and Hazel have succeeded in achieving minimum environmental impact.

All things Chuffiewuffie can be found at http://www.mrchuffiewuffie.com

So we are now offering foils using a phthalate free adhesive, when used in combination with waterbased inks no foil resist additives are required, the additional heat pressing also adding some colour intensity to discharge prints. It has taken some time to get the correct screen mesh, pre curing, heat press pressures, temperatures and pressing times correct, but we now seem to have relatively quick production time and a consistent final result.

T shirt printing by advertees

Yet good promotional T shirts do not require the whole colour spectrum to make an impression, a good bold single colour graphic in one place on the shirt is often more memorable, and more eye catching than multiple multi coloured graphics in every position imaginable. So perhaps less is more? and a lot cheaper too.

On this basis Advertees are now promoting cheap single colour printing T-shirt Deals on short print runs of 50 and 100 shirts. The emphasis is on quality of print and T shirt as we think promotional should not mean disposable, Advertees think cotton is to precious a resource to be used in such a wasteful way, this is also a reason to avoid building diposability into a promotional design, people will wear a T shirt they grow fond of  until they are thread bare, this is obviously very good long term promotion. So rather than supplying a cheap disposable product, Advertees have been able to bring the cost down through the quick set up times they are now able to achieve.

Prior to this design we had never attempted a 6 colour simulated process using water based discharge printing, a job like this can present so many problems (colour is especially difficult to control), but when it works the final result cannot be compared to any other method of getting designs on to a Tshirt. The result is a fully ironable, breathable print. The earthy tones which are an inherent part of discharge prints, match this particular design perfectly.

The newly installed TAS dealt with this job brilliantly. We are already starting to wonder how we managed pre TAS. This job was run without flash cures, so an incredibly quick print run and a good energy saving. Newman screens also played a very important part of getting this job done without any hiccups.

Enochian Theory are now on their way to the Prog Power festival in Holland, with some UK shows on their return. Be sure to check out the bands web site, and myspace pages. There is also some great you tube footage. We like them a lot, a full 10 out of 10 from us. If you want to support this hard working band, buy their album, and if you like what you hear why not get the T shirt too.

After several hours trawling the net it became clear the answer was accurips all black system. It was not the quickest decision to ditch all our coloured ink capabilities, as the colour print outs from this printer are amazing, but we were left with very little choice as creating good films is essential to creating good screens, is essential to creating good screen prints etc.

Finding a supplier of the all black system was not so easy, as it seems there is no UK supplier. Eventually we managed to find Serigraf a screen printing supplies firm in Ireland who were very helpful in sorting us out with everything we needed for the conversion. We spent an entire weekend colour printing to make good use of the no longer needed colour cartridges then set about purging the machine, and refilling with the black chromablast dye ink.

The resulting films are very, very good. The dye ink is as black as it gets, and combined with accurips software (I think this is the only RIP at present which offers an all black system) it is capable of producing extremely accurate half tone images.

The loss of our colour cartridges has been forgotten already as full colour T shirt screen prints become easier to produce, and this, ultimately, is our only requirement from this epson.

Index separations have been covered previously in these posts:

5-colour-index-separation-and-waterbased-ink

index-method-for-screen-printing

and can be created in photo shop, screenprint separator is a useful additional plugin which has the ability to create separations, and export them for adding vector graphics and text to the design.

This 4 colour separation was printed wet on wet, the blending/blurring that occurs when printing waterbased inks wet on wet can help in producing more subtle gradations. Many screen printers will also agree the opportunity to print T shirts without the use of a flash curing unit (or 2) is both a time and energy saver.

Fonts convey a lot of information, designers go to great lengths to get this right, a good collection of typefaces is a must. Your choice of font will help you convey the other important element. Your T shirts slogan, catchphrase, saying.

Colour combinations will also play an important part of your design, this seasons colours, or classic black T shirt, large bold brightly coloured type, or modest colours and designer fonts.

Here are some of our favourite designer slogan T shirts

katharine Hamnett

Henry Holland

And a site which has a bewildering selection of type only T shirts

TypeTees

Enjoy!

Butt or trap registration? What are they?

• Trap Registration. This is essentially an overlap. When screen printing on dark garments all colours require a white underbase to improve there opacity. Without the overlap there is a danger the white will still be visible at the edges of the colour printed on top. Screen printing on textiles is a tricky business and very slight movement can occur in the fabrics and the screens, especially when heat is applied (the white underbase needs to be flash dried before applying the colours,  trap registration creates a margin for movement. If applied correctly the overlap will be barely visible on close inspection. In a programme such as illustrator you can take the underbase back using a stroke of 0.5 .
• Butt Registration. separations set up to register perfectly without overlaps. This type of registration is hard to achieve, but well worth the extra set up time on longer print runs on light Tshirts, especially when using water based inks. It helps to prevent bleeding of colours and the need to flash cure between colours. This type of separation can also be used when discharge printing. Butt registration requires a perfectly aligned printing press, if you have uneven palettes and worn registration pins you may want to stick with the afformentioned Trap registration.

The above information although relevant to all screen printing does mention movement and press inaccuracies, this is with the assumption that 99% of people reading this type of article probably don’t have access to modern precision machinery. Most professional screen printers should not experience any of the movement mentioned,  and use of trap will be limited to white underbases only.

Every now and then we come across T-shirt prints which have all the qualities we like, water-based printing is a must, good design for screen print is another plus.

T shirts which are organic, or at least sweat shop free are always good. The T shirts featured tick all these boxes, a promotion for a UK tour of, The Present, a new Thomas Campbell film. The follow up to surf films Sprout, and The Seedling  covers West Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Sumatra, Java, Hawaii and California. For more information about the film and the venues visit thesurfscreen.com.

Looking at the featured surfers and locations this is probably going to be another classic, we can’t wait to see it.

The tour dates and venues are:

* Wednesday 22nd April  The Royal Cinema, St Ives
* Saturday 25th April The Sallis Beeney Theatre, Brighton
* Friday 1st May  The Carnmarth Hotel, Newquay
* Saturday 2nd May Woodlane Theatre, Falmouth
* Saturday 9th May The Lighthouse Centre, Poole
* Sunday 10th May The Cube Cinema, Bristol
* Saturday 16th May Braunton Village Hall, Braunton
* Sunday 17th May  The Reel Cinema, Kingsbridge
* Saturday 23rd May St Merryn Village Hall, St Merryn

Simulated process separations were our choice for this T-shirt design, the subtle tones required for the egg were not suited to the index process. We find simulated process separations are a little more time consuming to create but they really can produce the highest quality prints.

We used 61T and 77T meshes for this print, 77T is not an ideal mesh for waterbased ink it held the half tone with no problem at all, but they required flood bar and squeegee tweaks on the machine to print well.

On the other hand 61T mesh printed with no problems at all, but the halftone on the blue screen suffered from moire patterning. This is possibly due to the mesh on the Newman frame being slightly off true square, as the yellow, also on a 61T mesh, was fine. Or was the yellow screen stretched off square? It is difficult to know for sure so a lot more care will be taken when stretching our Newman Frames in the future. With only slight moire on one screen we decided to go with it, there is no pattern visible on the final print, see rear side of duck above. The ideal screen angle for the 61T is what we are concentrating on now.

But none of these calculations really allow for a mesh below 196/77T, when screening water based inks by hand these fine meshes can make life very difficult. So can you put a 55lpi half tone on say a 34T and get a satisfactory result?

We think yes, in some cases it is ok. if you need to apply a large area of ink with a fade we think a coarse screen can do the job very well, the problem of moire is in fact reduced. However there is the problem of  losing the finer dots on a coarse mesh, and this will reduce the tonal range.

This coarse mesh is not able to hold the very small pieces of remaining screen coat causing holes in some places,

at the other end there are less problems in the quality of the half tone, some very fine pin holes may sit on top of the wide mesh fibre and will not wash out, but the finished printed gradient does not suffer. The reason for this being it is a gradual change in colour over a large area, using only 2 colours. Advertees would not like to attempt a full process colour job using such coarse mesh, but then we would probaly not print a full colour process screen print hand.

Other related posts

coarse-screens-and-half-tones

halftone-dots-and-screenprinting

simulated-process-separation-printed-with-waterbased-ink

epson-4880-as-imagesetter

Advertees tshirt printing Cornwall

This T shirt design by Murkin uses 6 colours and is printed at our maximum proportions of 14×16. We prefer to print slightly under these dimensions especially when using half tones, but will make exceptions when customers are not in a hurry. This print was post old dryer and pre gas dryer, as a result it had to be printed using pthalate free plastisols rather than water based inks. This is our first multicolour job on Newman frames, a rather long set up time made clear the need to organise a pin reg system as soon as posible.

Update 2011: Advertees now print 16″x20″ or 40×50 cm prints, print quality and set up times have been improved no end with the introduction of newman screens.

Delivery of a new gas dryer has held things up a little this week, but all being well we should be up and running again by the weekend. Once this oven is fired up we will be able to process water-based orders far more efficiently. T shirt prints such as theweboflife.org.uk will be done in half the time, this design was printed on Okarma organic cotton T-shirts using Grafco clear water base.

A nice colourful design came through this week for Celefest. Initially this job was more than 6 colours, a little reworking made the design more affordable but had little effect on the impact of the design. Printed entirely in opaque water based inks, the colours were all underbased with yellow, as there is no white in the design. Curing a waterbase print like this is no easy matter, especially when printing hoodies as more ink is put down, so we gave the finished design a little heat pressing to make sure.

And remember, always check the owners terms and conditions before using freebies.

GoMediaZine

Go Media seem to be split between two grungy style sites, a graphic design blog and a product site. The blog is home to loads of original  Illustrator tutorials, which cover quite a range of topics. The Go Media Arsenal product site is home to a variety of prepacked vector sets. They are generally $34.99 each from what I can see. Although you may just be looking for free stuff, these should not be dismissed, as they contain a considerable amount of artwork. They do also have a few Vector Sample Packs on offer for free.

Illustrator Tutorials
Free Vector Stuff
Themed Vector Packs (these require purchase – see site for prices)
Vector Samples

Bittbox

Bittbox is run by Jay Hilgert who describes himself as a ‘Freebie Maker’ and that is why he is featured here. He provides some excellent stuff, a mixture of Photoshop and Illustrator supplies. Only problem I found was that it could be difficult searching through the archive, because there is so much. Once I started using his tag cloud as navigation, it was much easier to find what I needed. This is a great site to keep an eye on.

Freebie Thread
Illustrator Tutorials

SpoonGraphics

Chris Spooner gets a mention again, as he previously appeared in my logo designer post. Chris has some great tutorials and freebies on his blog; one of my favourites being for the My Nite Life Logo. There are plenty of useful freebies here too, as well as an article on 50 illustrator tutorials that every designer should see.

Spoon Freebies
Spoon Tutorials

Vecteezy

Like it says  – stupid name, cool vectors. This is pure resource, rather than tutorials. It is user submitted vectors and people have the ability to rate them. There is some really good contemporary artwork in here. It also has category filters and such in place, if you are looking for something specific.

Vecteezy Resources

Noupe

Although Noupe does not create tutorials, it compiles great lists of tutorials covering all sorts of creative areas. The post I have isolated has 60 tutorials to work through, covering a wide range of vector subjects.

Vector Illustration – 60 Illustrator Tutorials, Tips and Best Practices

Tutorial Blog

Like Noupe, Tutorial Blog compiles lists full of content ready for you to read through. The tutorials are aimed at beginners to intermediate, so have a look through to see what you might pick up from them. There are free vectors available too, mostly in the form of buttons.

Illustrator Tutorials
Free Vector Downloads

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If you have any favourite vector resources or vector tutorial sites, please feel free to add them in the comments below.

For any design up to 14×16 inches most screen printers will have no problems or restrictions, however, all over T shirt designs and large T shirt designs can be problematic. Oversize T shirt prints are now becoming more popular than ever, but they do require the correct machinery such as belt printers or even customised hand printing and automatic carousels. They also require a large dryer. Large format autos and belt printers have high set up costs as they require larger screens, bigger film etc, and high minimum orders are required to absorb these costs. So how does a small label get their designs printed the full length of the shirt? Advertees is presently looking at solutions for smaller labels, and the above design is one of  our larger prints produced on a standard size screen, Advertees can supply prints of 40cm x 50cm (avoiding seams if possible), it uses a discharge water based ink for a soft hand, as plastisol ink over such a large area of the shirt would have unsatisfactory and uncomfortable results. We would advise that given the added expense of film print outs that a minimum of 50 shirts would apply to oversize prints. And although we are unlikely to offer all over T shirt prints, we are able to print top to bottom on most T shirt sizes.

Advertees regularly screen print neck labels, and sleeves for small independent labels and bands. the above image shows a sleeve print being applied to an oversize T shirt print.

In the space of a couple of months we have printed two cheerleading T shirt designs, this is up on the previous 30 years, in which time we printed absolutely zero. We are interested to know if this is a sudden surge in cheerleadings popularity in the UK, or this type of work has just been passing us by? Both designs made use of metallic inks, Razzle dazzle made use of the excellent waterbased binder and gold metal flakes from Grafco. The designs are often American old school in style, and lend themselves perfectly to screen print, nice solid areas of colour which do not require super tight registration.

Sounds interesting, but just how are you going to do it?

OK, come on, back into the studio.

Butterflies, they’re beautiful. On anything.
T shirts included, so here’s my subject for the present little demonstration.

Actually, this is a really good image to use because it will reduce to monochrome exceptionally well. It’s practically black and white already and this is the first thing to consider – how your original image will convert to print.
A photo with little contrast, especially one that’s a little murky, may prove unsuccessful. You don’t want an indistinct blob, do you?
You won’t get the right kind of looks. Believe me, I used to wear one and I became shunned socially.

Anyway, the first step is to cut out the butterfly from the background.
You got photoshop? OK, open the photo, zoom in and grab the lasso tool. I’m setting the feather to 1 px (top, left of screen) – this gives a small fade to the edge of the lasso selection which reduces the sharp angularity of the cut out and I’m using the polygonal lasso tool. With this, you click anywhere on the edge of the butterfly and simply move along that edge, clicking as you go. The selection line will pay out behind your cursor in straight lines between each click. When you get to curly bits of the butterfly, space your clicks closer together to go accurately around the bends.

You can see here the lasso line being taken around the edge of the butterfly. Note that I’ve come away from the wee beast a little in the region of its antennae. With something as fine as these, it’s often better to go in later with the eraser tool and clean up.

When you arrive at your starting point, your selection will be complete and will be shown with a moving dotted line.

Copy the selection – Ctrl+C, or Edit/Copy.

Hit Ctrl+N to open a new document, A3 should be big enough, and paste the selection into it. It should  now be on its own layer, above the background layer.

The first thing to do with it is to clean up the edges where necessary. I’m using the eraser.

Choose a brush size for the eraser which is appropriate to the area that you’re working on.
If you click and hold, then hold down shift, then move along the edge of the antenna then click again, you will see that area is erased in a straight line between the click points. Moving on and clicking with the shift still held down like this will result in nice, clean- edged erasure instead of the wobbly line you get when you’ve drunk a whole bottle of Wild Turkey the night before and you’ve got the shakes bad.

Your butterfly is clean.

Now it must have all the colour sucked away from it like jelly tots up a Dyson.

Various ways, various ways; but what works well here is to first go image/adjustments/shadow & highlight and take the shadows amount down and the mid tone contrast up. This effectively makes the image starker. Follow this by going image/adjustments/brightness & contrast and slide the contrast up to max.
That’ll do – it’s almost completely B&W.

Now, just because we can, let’s sit this stunner on a red background and make it a jaw dropper.

Ow!

Here’s how it’s done:

Create a new layer – Ctrl+Shift+N.
Open up the layers palette and look for the new layer. This should be called Layer 2. Grab it anywhere in the grey area and drag it downwards so that it lies between Layer 1 and the Background layer. When we fill it with red, it will now be behind the butterfly.
Go to the colour selection box at the bottom of the toolbar and double click inside of it. A large colour picker will appear. Pick out your red colour and click OK. The selection box will now show red. Ensuring that your new layer is still selected, go Edit/Fill/Foreground colour and your new layer will be filled with vibrancy.

Here are  shown the layers palette and the colour selection box (circled in green).

The design is good as it is. Alternatively, in order to give it perfectly sharp edges and to clean it up still further,  it could be be given the vector treatment.  I would take it into Illustrator and trace it.

Settings for a good, clear trace.

There you go.

Now classed as a retro look, fluorescent T Shirt Printing is synonymous with the 80′s. It is not a regular customer request, but now and again it crops up. The key to a good quality fluoro prints is underbasing, the pigments are not very opaque and a good white background is essential. For the T shirt print in the above image we put down 2 whites before printing the fluorescent green and magenta, the colours consist of an opaque water based binder with 10% pigment. Good quality pigments are always advisable.

Cromatex 2000 is made by Grafco and supplied by Screening West

This job was printed on organic T shirts from Okarma, and printed using water based products. Geeks in the basement was produced for a competition winner and will be flown out to Oz! So although these T shirts are printed using environmentally sound methods, the air miles clocked up by them will make a nonsense of it. First and last time we ship this far I am sure.