‘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.

Our first try out was using gold foil as part of a rough raster graphic, to see the effect of cracks, splatters and half tones. The details came up well, and therefore screen printing has obvious benefits over the cad cut foils.  The process was certainly not as time consuming as we had anticipated.

So our first impressions are good. Our next graphic will be a vector graphic. Clean edges and a super smooth finish is no doubt a harder look to master, but we are confident this will be achieved very soon. The only real problem we had was trying to photograph the print for this blog, this design was printed on an ocean blue Gildan Ultra T shirt, but the foil has played havoc with the camera, hence the sky blue and other variants on display here.

We have also made a stretching table for our Newman Frames (it consists partly of old aluminium stretch and glued screens) which now enables us to achieve a consistent 40 newtons without any of the mesh distortions that can so easily occur when stretching by hand. Nearly all of our stretch and glues have been auctioned off on e bay, all of them sold within 2 days (it seems there is an army of eager screen printers out there looking for used kit). We kept some screens back for possible projects similar to the Newman stretching table, as box aluminium seems to have very many uses. But in terms of screen printing it is now Newman roller frames exclusively , we love them.

With equinox and the cold weather now officially behind us we are feeling very optimistic about the weeks to come.

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.

Our new, or not quite so new gas dryer, is finally up and running. It is not pretty, and took far more time than expected to install (Finding a gas fitter for commercial appliances in Cornwall at short notice was not an easy task) but once fired up all was well, a serious amount of work to catch up on now, thanks to all those customers who were willing to wait a while. February and March are the months we usually consider safe to make all the big changes to our print shop, but this year has been our busiest yet. Water based printing on Tshirts will require no catalysts or cross linking, a full 3 minutes of hot air will render all designs wash fast. Thanks also to Acland Plant for putting it through our workshop doors.

Discharge screen print . In 2011 gas dryer still going strong, and perhaps the most important piece of machinery for any screen printing business wanting to move to waterbased screen printing.

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.

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.

This years Screen Actions, is a two day event for young people, combining workshops, screenings and partys, last year saw 300 young people take part from schools all over Cornwall.

Board shorts is the Festival’s board sports film event, held at the Sandsifter Bar in Gwithian on the 8th November. As well as screenings there will be live music from Mark Kermode’s skiffle band The Dodge Brothers and local DJs Sir Vinyl of the Fattest.

This is a great event and although I am unable to make any of the screenings this year, we were fortunate enough to be able to supply some printed organic T shirts, we used water based screen printing inks for all the designs. The designs were created by A-Side a graphic design and illustration studio based in Falmouth Cornwall.

Advertees always try to find the best process for the designs we are given, for one off designs and sampling we are using the direct to garment printing more and more. Screen printing is always our first choice on larger orders, but every now  and then we find cad cut vinyl is the only process we can use. For large areas of bright colour and clean edges it is the only cost effective option on orders of less than 10 items. The thing we do not like about heat pressed vinyl is the amount of plastic involved in the process. Direct to garment printers are excellent in this respect, as there is virtually no waste, and require no screens. We are hopeful the next couple of years will see direct to garment machines produce this kind of design on a sweatshirt at a similar quality, and with the rapid advances to date we are pretty sure this will be the case.

2011 update: one offs are no longer catered for by Advertees, and vinyl is only used in situations where nothing else is viable. Advertees are progressively working towards solutions which do not produce such a large amount of waste.

This T shirt design does not appear to contain a great number of colours, but we found it required six colours to make the job work well. We used index separations at 200dpi and took a very long time playing around with the palette of colours before it came right, we printed the T shirts with a combination of clear waterbased and opaque waterbased inks.
Setting the job up on the hopkins handpress allowed us to change the sequence in which the colours were printed. It is always interesting to try different colour sequences when printing index separations with waterbased inks.

200dpi  is a bit of a challenge printing T shirts manually in six colours using waterbased inks, but it does allow for some experimentation. We are very pleased with the choices water based inks are affording us.

Suftwisted are in the process of a radical change, an interesting site is threatening to emerge from twisted towers in the very near future. The killer site is going to take bevel, emboss and shadow photoshop filters to the next level, no text or photograph will be left untouched.

In depth profiles of team riders can be found at the site already if you are willing to take the time to find them, but no sign of any merchandise for sale so far, the twisted merchandise is becoming very exclusive kit, and as a result the price is being driven sky high.

2011 update: Surtwisted remains in limbo, merch as illusive as ever, Tont Plant currently in Sumatra meditating on what the next incarnation will be. Can’t wait to find out what it is.

“The Number One Cornish clothing label” The Rebus Collective release new Screen printed T shirts and Hoodies. Rebus love their Graffiti, Hip Hop and street clothing. This collective of DJ’s, artists and writers are responsible for some seriously interesting happenings in Cornwall, the likes of which we have rarely seen before. Beat boxes, break dancing and graffiti alive and kicking in Cornwall.

Hoodies printing

Three colour waterbased index print on organic T shirts.

A partnership of the zoological society of London and Global Tiger Patrol is 21st Century Tiger. Raising funds for wild tiger conservation globally and supporting more than 30 projects across six countries, their contribution is now over £1 million. The 21st Century Tiger web site is full of information and a must to read.