Art Wear | A T-shirt and Screen Printing Blog

Recently, when I separated the file for my upcoming Maple Leaves shirt, I recorded my screen as I worked through it, so I could make this here instructional video.

The file is a scan of a black & white negative, but I discovered something with my slide scanner — if I leave it in color negative mode when I load it with black & white film, it imparts some really interesting color casts to the resulting scans that look antique. The original RGB file wasn’t actually tinted by me — it was tinted by my scanner.

So, what I wanted to do in the separation process was to preserve this tinting as much as possible while setting it up to print as a halftone process screen print. It ends up being 5 colors in the end. I will always use at least a black & grey doutone for printing black & white photos, because it gives me so much more on-press control than just a simple greyscale halftone. The theory here is that if there’s less black in the highlights, you won’t kill them with excessive dot gain attempting to get the shadows dense, & by moving some of the midtone & highlight information to a grey screen, you can control perceived dot gain by adjusting the brightness value of the grey ink. So, if the print is looking just a tad too dark in the midtones by the time you’ve got good solid coverage in the shadows, you can just put a lighter grey in the grey screen, and presto! In offset printing, duotones are also used to alter the hue of a greyscale photograph. These will actually have black toning the image across the tonal width, but the black will be underlain with a second halftone screen with a color in it, like yellow or orange, to give a sepiatone effect, for instance.
(General ink mixing hint: Bright orange and black always makes the best deep browns. Wilfex’s fluorescent orange + black is my favorite brown of all.)

With this file, I really need to do both — I need a medium grey to control the highlights & midtones, & I needed an orange & a tan to tint the image. So, anyway, to the video. I used captions instead of a voice-over, because I hate doing voice-overs. Deal.

The video is a bit long at 15 minutes, but it’s an edit/speed-up of what was just over an hour’s worth of work, undo’s notwithstanding. Command-z is my friend, as is Save As…

The steps you see here:
1. Desaturate the file, using the Black & White adjustment dialog, which offers more control than just converting straight to greyscale.
2. Covert to greyscale, which is necessary before you can convert  to duotone.
3. Convert  to duotone, which opens the duotone dialog, where you can pick ink colors, and add up to three additional colors, but choosing the quadtone option.
4. Convert the file to multichannel mode, which allows you to make selections based on individual channels, and make adjustments based on those selections. Key here — Command-clicking on a channel in the channels pane makes a feathered selection based on the density of the contents of that channel. Then, you can switch to other channels and make adjustments based on that selection. (Shift+command-click another channel to add its contents to the selection, or option+command-click another channel to subtract its contents from the selection) Also, the Select by Color Range… tool is very useful. If you use the Sampled Colors option, you can pick a density with the eyedropper, then adjust the sensitivity of the selection with the slider.
5. General dot-gain adjustments. T-shirts are coarse, they wick the ink, & gain is much worse than any of the paper settings in Photoshop’s color settings.
6. Add a white channel for a total of 5 colors.

Coming up “soon” (ha!) I actually print the thing.

Hello, Printshop.
I’m sorry, those vinyl air-dry inks are really expensive and difficult to work with, so we really don’t do bumper-stickers. Okay, thanks for calling.

Hello, Wearables Printing.
Gosh — I’m sorry. Our margins are really slim & it only takes a few rejects on those expensive sweatshirts to gobble up all our profits, plus they’re slow to print, & we’ve got to change all our settings on the press. Okay, thanks anyway.

Hello, T-shirt shop.
Yes sir, just T-shirts. Great! Wait, no — 4 color process doesn’t work well on fabric. We get too much dot gain & the colors always come out muddy. I do appreciate you calling, though.

Hello, Spot Color T-shirt Printing Incorporated, may I help you?
We do — I mean we can, but we’ve got to charge a lot for printing on darks because of all the challenges with opacity. I really can’t come down on that quote. Well, thanks anyway, have a nice day.

Hello, Spot Color on White T-shirt Printing Incorporated, how may I direct your call?
Color matching? Well, our ink manufacturer makes a range of stock colors, but we haven’t had a need to invest in a Pantone matching system until now, so I can’t guarantee we’ll get that color exactly. Okay, thanks for calling.

Hello, Spot Color Black Ink on White T-shirt Printing incorporated.
I’m sorry, when I tried to open your file I got a missing font message, so we just printed it like that. REFUND? GOOD DAY, SIR!

Hello, Spot Color Helvetica Bold Black Ink on White T-shirt Printing.
Youth sizes? No, we can’t fit those on our platens. Okay, then, goodbye.

Hello, Spot Color Helvetica Bold Black Ink on Adult White T-shirt Printi…
Huh… they hung up.

It’s not fine art, it’s a line in the sand.

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At long last, a quiet spell at work has given me the opportunity to turn my attention back to my Wearable Serigraphy line of shirt prints. I’ve got this one all the way through the duotone separation process & onto film, & next week I’ll be prototyping it on 5 different brands of shirts to see which one prints the best. I’m doing white shirts on the next three designs so that I can go 85 line instead of 55. They should be available for sale by early December.

I took this photograph when I was 17 years old, on vacation in Zion National Park, with a borrowed camera. I had a few prints made, but let the roll languish in one box or another through umpteen moves & houses, and finally got the negatives out last year & scanned them all on my good Nikon slide scanner. I found that when I leave the scanner on the color negative setting, it imparts some really nice color tones to the black & white images, so that’s what I’m attempting to reproduce here.

It’s set up as a 5 color print. Black, medium grey, orange, tan & white.

Proof! Here is the black sep on film!

Let me start off by saying how much I love Union Ink. Not the company per se — though I have met some very nice people from Union Ink, but specifically, their fabulous products. In the early 80′s when I first started printing, it was generally accepted that getting plastisol out of those damn metal paint cans was simply a chore. Ink was thick, stringy, stiff and dull, and that was just how it was, then. The only inks I knew about were the few cans of Sanchez that we’d managed to smuggle across the border from Mexico (now owned by Sericol, and still a fabulous ink, if you’re in Latin America, btw) after The Great Fire in mid 1984, and International Coatings, which was generally something everyone avoided if at all possible, or used with a deep sigh of resignation.

Then one day, a fellow printer & friendly competitor named Paula (I forget the name of her one-woman operation now) mentioned Union’s Brite Blue in a conversation, because I just could not get the color a client needed out of the crap I had on the shelf in our garage. I ordered me exactly one quart of ink, god even knows where from, and the sky opened up. It was beautiful, bright, creamy, smooth, and so easy to get out of the can. I became a lifelong customer and ardent adherent that day, and you can ask all the poor ink vendors who have darkened my door since, only grudgingly willing to even look at a competitor’s line.

People used to call Wiflex “Won’tflex” because like IC, their stuff was ungodly thick and impossible to work with, but they came around. Wilflex’s inks are pretty great these days, and I still use their fluorescent pigments willingly, and rely on them for great bright colors because Union’s flourescent colors are tacky and build up wet on wet.

Union upped their game in the late 80′s with the Tru-Tone process colors, and still, no one can touch them. They’re utterly consistent, as close as you can get to SWOP specs in plastisols, and they introduced printers the world over to the meaning of the word thixotropy. Awesome stuff, guys. Your product helped me make a lot of very picky clients happy over the years. In fact, the Union reps used one of my award-winning shirts to show off the Tru-Tone inks in their trade show booths for quite a few years, in the early Aughties — thanks, guys, I was always proud.

But… this.

What the hell is up with this? For nearly as long as I’ve been buying your lovely inks, I’ve also been buying your viscosity reducer, because it makes Rutland worth using — it’s the PLUS 9000 guys, check it out. For nearly 28 years, even single time I order a gallon of this stuff, it has arrived in one of your tin cans, bent, crushed, maimed, dented, often leaking, mangled and otherwise dinged or damaged, and I’ve just about had it. I’m challenging the obviously ample minds at Union to do something about it at long last. The photo above isn’t even really much worse than average — that’s just how it rolls with this stuff. These things tip over, spill, drip and make a general pain in the ass of themselves, and have since day one.

I’m going to guess that you have your reasons for using these containers, but UPS has not been kind to them.  Dear product engineers at Union Ink – it’s simply time to think of something new.

Thanks in advance, your biggest fan.