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.

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.

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.

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.

We get artwork in a whole variety of forms from finalised vector graphics to a quick sketch on a shopping list.
For this demonstration, I will use a sketch of Woody Allen put together in photoshop.

To start with, this has a wide variety of textures and is fairly colourful. The idea here, is to produce a stark, single colour print. Woody’s going to need simplifying and that means combining all the tonal areas into black.

One way is to adjust the levels (image/adjustments/levels), another way – and the one I have used here – is simply to pull the contrast up and the brightness down. When you’re happy, save the file.
For screening simple graphics like this, as with so many other things, vector is best. Vectorising a piece of bitmap artwork will give it ultra crisp lines instead of the blocky edges we associate with bitmaps.
Open up illustrator or another vector program, and take the image into it.
You can draw over the sketch using the pencil tool. This way, you can do some cleaning up of the lines as you go.
However, if it’s speed you’re after, you should always try vector tracing first. As well as, usually, making a very good job of it, tracing often introduces interesting and useful effects of it’s own.

Here we have the bitmap sketch (on the left) and a quick trace using the default live trace setting in illustrator.
Even at this size, you can see how a lot of the messiness has been cleaned up by the simplifying action of a vector trace.

If we go in closer, the difference in line edge clarity is obvious. This will print nice and cleanly.

It could well be argued though, that some of Woody’s character is lost – look particularly around the mouth where the shadow has become decidedly angular.
Here’s where the tracing variables can help.

This time, I’ve gone into the options and taken the path fitting down to 1 pixel. This gives a trace with a much higher fidelity to the original image. Too far in this direction, however, can result in the actual bitmap pixels being traced! If the original is of a low resolution this can happen, and will result in something which is still rough looking. You should make sure that your original image is of a good resolution to start with if possible.

Another setting which can make all the difference is blur. Using this tool can turn ragged lines into smooth, flowing ones which tend to look quite organic. For simple shapes particularly of an abstract nature, curlicues and the sort of floral patterns commonly seen in artwork today, this might be just the job. Also the blurring of a trace can impart a ‘glossiness’, or sort of plastic sheen etc. Depends what you have in mind.

Here’s Woody again with the blur turned up to 4 px. It’s often a trade-off, trial and error, but again, the higher quality the original artwork the better.

However, we have to try and work with what we receive and often all we have is a low quality piece of artwork. Tracing does not always work. Under these circumstances, we have to re-draw, and a drawing tablet, such as a Wacom can work wonders – so much easier than using the old mouse.

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.

Take a look at this poster, Normandie (1935) by Adolphe Mouron Cassandre.
Monumental and minimal, you’ll never forget it. Cassandre was expert at conveying a message immediately. His posters for Dubonnet wine were amongst the first intended to be read by drivers passing by in fast moving cars. This kind of approach can look as good on a T shirt as on a poster.

Here’s another, similar example by Georges Dorival designed in 1928.

Here is a skyscraper drawing by Violette Engelberg. Hit them with that and they’ll feel it!

Very often, lettering is all you need. Typography is a powerful means of conveying mood as well as precise meaning.

El Lissitzky’s cover for the book The isms of Art (1925)

This is probably the most famous image created by the great Russian Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko.
It’s a lesson in the use of simple, striking type and dynamic blocks of flat colour which extend the calling motif in the photograph. It’s so good that it has been re-used in various forms umpteen times since.

Going back a little further, this is a billboard image advertising forthcoming productions in 1876 at a Glasgow theatre.
Such images were common in Victorian city streets. Note the use of various fonts to attract the eye to the details as well as the headlines. When treated with care, type-only designs can be rich in variety and strong in impact.

T shirt printers cornwall

Although indexing is not recommended for a subtle gradient, it does eliminate the problem of moire or screen clash, and when we are using coarse screens for a waterbased print this is very useful, we processed this design at 160 ppi and placed it on a medium mesh so we do not put too much ink down, but if your screens are coated well you could put the same half tone on a 34 mesh count if required.

The random dot will go on any mesh count with no moire, but how smooth is the gradient when printed.

Well take a look, obviously where the colours are similar in tone the transition is barely perceptible, you can see the dot on the dark blue to light blue gradient but we think it is still a very good result, it would have benefited only very slightly with the addition of another blue, we do not think it is worth the extra screen on a shorter run of shirts.We are certain the crew at global surf adventures will be more than happy with their T-shirt print.

index separations for waterbased T-shirt printing

‘We often get called upon to produce colour prints from photographs or complex illustrations involving gradations of tone. There are several ways of achieving this, including transfer printing and direct to garment (DTG) printing. The most commonly used techniques for screen printing however, are index and simulated process. The following is an insight into index separations.

We have taken this photo of a handsome rooster and opened it in Adobe Photoshop.

The first thing to do is to decide on the print size and to make sure that the image is at a suitable resolution for screen printing.

This one is going to be a proud 11 inches and 160 ppi is good for retaining subtlety and detail without being too fine for the screens.Next we convert the image to index mode (image/mode/indexed colour).

With the preview box un-ticked, We open a colour table (palette/custom) and progressively pick out colours from the photo that we intend to be the final ink colours used in printing this minor miracle of the avian world. Here`s how it`s done.The first little colour table box we leave white. As we are going to be printing with 6 colours on white shirts, we now have 6 boxes to fill. The first box (after white) will give us the green which is mostly apparent in the fuzzy background foliage. Click in the box, then go up to an area of pale green on the photo. Click here and the box in the palette turns this colour. Click OK on the select colour box (which has suddenly appeared) and the first colour is done. For the next box in the colour table, choose the bright magenta from somewhere in our boy`s comb. The rest of the colours are a rich ruddy brown from his neck feathers, bright red from his wattle, pale yellow from his beak and that inscrutable black from his little alert eye (actually any black will do).

Click OK on the colour table.Click OK on the indexed colour box. Hit Alt+Ctrl+0 to get a view at actual pixels, et voila! Your indexed rooster. You can see the difference between the original and the indexed versions if we get a close up look at that eye.

What`s clear here is that by indexing an image, we turn it into wee contiguous blocks of discrete colour all of which we will separate and then magically re-combine to form a multi-colour print to thrill the onlooker.First we have to separate those colours. How can this possibly be done? Here`s where you need some extra software, specifically an index separation plugin such as Screenprint Separator. We simply export the index image through SS (as an illustrator file). After a cup of tea and a one of Lucy`s delicious pancakes we go to Adobe Illustrator and open up the file just exported from Photoshop.

What we have now is our incomparable bird on screen with all the index colours fully separated on their own layers. At this stage other material such as vector graphics or lettering can be added to the design. The separations can now be printed out individually as pure black, onto film, with printer`s registration marks. To cut it short, each sep gets transferred onto a screen to be printed through onto the shirts with the appropriate colour ink and Bob`s your Uncle. Needless to say, the client is overcome with emotion.’

If you found our design department enlightened you in any way with this article please leave a comment

Zest series of St Ives Cornwall introduce new designs to the range, these brightly coloured T shirts and bold designs from young designer Kieran Whitefield are already in demand, visit Zestseries and buy the T shirts on line, you can also take a look at some of Cornwalls homegrown freestyle BMX video.

Waterbased T-shirt printing was used for all designs.

We are so used to designing for screen print now, solid images two and three colour, it seems so ingrained in our way of approaching T shirt graphics, a very effective visual language has been developed by designers which is partly built on a practical basis, more colour, complex separations=longer set up times=more expense etc. But within these basic designs the language is clear, quick to understand esthetically pleasing. So what changes will direct to garment printing have on design, how much will it change what we wear? Will the flat colour graphics on Royzys bling trainers be replaced with photographic or half toned digitally printed images? Or a combination of both, maybe a little screened gold ink for good measure, or will DTG printers have special effect inks capabilities too?

Good stencils are key to screen printing, getting all the variables correct for each T shirt printing job is essential. With plastisol inks it has always been about finer mesh counts, T shirt printing using waterbased  inks requires a different approach entirely, and the use of both opaque and clear bases gives us a seemingly endless list of possible scenarios. Good stencils on coarse meshes can produce fantastic detail, but every part of the screen preparation process and exposure needs to be spot on, maintaining detail and making the screens resistent to wear and tear is a very fine line.