Get With The Program

Over the past few weeks we’ve picked up some new programs and art compilations to increase the range and quality of our designs.  Graphic design can unfortunately be limited by the tools on hand so each additional plug in, application, program, extension, tutorial, or clipart pack can make a big impact on the final artwork you’re outputting.

 

Here is a list of the most recent things we’ve picked up:

 

CorelDraw.

When we were first getting into the t-shirt game, we designed exclusively on raster-based programs like Photoshop and Paint.Net.  In all honestly, it can be done that way.  However, vector programs like Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw provide a lot of awesome functionality that you just can’t get with Photoshop or Photo Paint.  Upgrading to vector art is challenging, because the whole language is completely different than PS.  Once you get the hang of it, though, it’s amazing how much more you can do with your designs.

 

Fashion Factory – CorelDraw Plug-in.

Fashion Factory is awesome.  I have to thank our colleague, Jeanette from The Pondering Pooch, for recommending it and my partner Steve for making the decision to get it.  It’s a plug-in that quickly adds textures and effects to artwork.  Like, really quickly.  In just a few easy clicks you can add a distressed, grunge look to any design.  There is also an extensive list of vector-based, scalable, color-changeable t-shirts that allow you to make really slick mock-ups for customers.  Definitely a helpful plug-in, and worth every penny.

 

800 CorelDraw Brushes.

Working with vector programs allows you to use and create custom brushes.  This can be anything from the simple – drawing a line and applying a brush that converts the line into a realistic paint brush stroke – to something far more elaborate – drawing a line and applying a brush that converts the line into a highly detailed, realistic chain.  Or carved stone.  Or lightning, tribal designs, feathers, patterns…anything!  With brushes, if you can draw a line, you can create some visually stunning graphics.

 

T-Shirt Clipart.

This one is very simple.  Have a design in mind that requires a skull?  Oh.  *click click*  Here’s 37 of them.  What’s that?  You need a tribal effect for the background?  Boom – how about one of these 41 tribals?  There’s a lot of amazing, high quality, hand-drawn art in this pack.

 

Now this is a little embarrassing, but I feel like showing this will really drive home the importance of these tools.  I’m going to post two pictures here.  The first is a design that I created four years ago using Paint.NET, when we first started.  The second is a design I worked up yesterday using the tools listed above.  There is, shall we say, a noticeable difference.

 

 

 

Best. Emulsion. Ever.

To coincide with the development of our new logo and the addition of our brand-spankin’-new conveyor dryer, we wanted to pick up some new products with which to experiment.  As I’ve mentioned before, we believe it is important for screen printers to challenge themselves – to learn new techniques and styles.

In the spirit of self-challenging, we ordered some discharge ink earlier this month.  Although we had the opportunity to print with discharge at Ryonet’s Los Angeles location, we have yet to utilize it in our own shop.  The addition of Gilligan (our new Little Buddy conveyor dryer) seemed like a great time to step up to a new and exciting challenge.  We are currently making preparations for our first run of discharge prints next week.

We also picked up some Ryonet WBP Hybrid Emulsion for Water Based & Plastisol.  When we first started printing we used CCI DXP (Pink) Diazo-Photopolymer Dual Cure Direct Emulsion, which works very well.  However, its primary function is for plastisol ink and breaks down too quickly when used with water-based inks.  When we began using the water-based ink we switched to SWR-3 water-resistant emulsion.  This also worked well, but is no longer available through Ryonet.  Good thing, too.  Otherwise we probably wouldn’t have tried the WBP Hybrid emulsion which, as the title of this post suggests, is the best emulsion ever.  At least of the three we’ve used.

WBP has a vibrant red color that is helpful during the washout, printing, and cleanup stages.  It coats the screen beautifully, dries quickly, and washes out like a dream.  The website claims that WBP is easier to use AND reclaim than SWR-3.  That’s an understatement!  This stuff is amazing, and I highly recommend that every printer at least tries a quart.  Also, the cost ($27.99 for a quart) is the same as the cost of standard DXP emulsion.  Can’t beat that.

Here are a few quick shots of an exposed screen, coated with WBP.

Why You Should be a Screen Printer

Are you the type of person that enjoys being creative and making personalized gifts?  Have you considered screen printing as a way of creating fun and useful handmade gifts, on the cheap, for your friends and family?

Think about it.  Who doesn’t like t-shirts?  Furthermore, as screen printing allows you to customize not only t-shirts but towels, hoodies, blankets, totes, onesies – even greeting cards and posters – your creativity is only limited by your…well…creativity.

If you’re considering getting into screen printing at a hobby level, there are some great kits out there that come with not only everything you need to get started, but comprehensive training DVDs that will show you everything you need to know at first.  These kits start as low as $149.

This video might help you decide what level kit would best fit your needs.

As with any hobby, screen printing involves an investment of time and money.  For crafty types, though, the results will not only impress the recipients of the gifts, but open new and exciting options in the way of artistic expression.  Also, for the exceptionally motivated crafty types – even at the hobby level – screen printing can provide extra income.

 

Building Stock

As the end of the month draws near, I am becoming more and more panicky about meeting the self-imposed deadline for launching the MOYA website.  For the most part, everything is falling into place – slowly but surely.

What I’ve been working on the last few days is building up stock so we actually have something to sell on the website.  The plan is to launch with limited (but some) stock, offering only four or five of our 310 designs, and gradually increasing the available designs monthly or even weekly.

The benefits of this plan are numerous.  It’s significantly less expensive than just ordering thousands of shirts at once.  It allows us time to gather useful information such as what designs, sizes, and colors are most popular.  Also, it gives me time to breathe and prepare for the next task.  The thing about tackling all aspects of your business yourself is that you have to tackle all aspects of your business yourself.

At any rate, I’ve been in The Lab for the past three days trying to bust out some small runs for a few of our designs.  All in all, it’s been going very well.

I ran into a problem today, though.  Yesterday, I printed a 10-shirt run of a design with all water-based white ink.  They all came out beautifully.  Today, I tried to duplicate the run with a different colored shirt – same screen, same ink; cleaned up and good as new – but I ended up ruining 6 out of 10 shirts.  For some reason the ink in the screen would just not release the shirt, causing the shirt to lift from the platen and ruining the print.  I tried adjusting the off-contact on the press, cleaning the platen and applying new adhesive, washing out the screen and starting from scratch…basically everything I could think of, I tried.  This just seems to be the latest battle in the epic war I’m having with white and yellow ink.

Anyway, here’s a couple pictures of the successful prints.  Keep an eye out for moyatees.com, coming soon (fingers crossed).

A FREE Vector Program??

There is a saying in screen printing – “Garbage in, Garbage out.”  I assume this could be applied to almost any industry, hobby, or process but, in screen printing, it refers to artwork (the “in”) and how it affects the final print (the “out”).

What this means is that if your artwork is blurry or pixilated, the screen – and consequently the print – will reflect these flaws.  This is the reason that most graphic artists work with vector-based design programs like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw.  Vector programs operate differently than what you might be accustomed to in programs like Photoshop.  They utilize mathematics and paths to render perfect lines, whereas Photoshop uses pixels – or tiny squares – which lose definition when altered or re-sized.

The difference between Vector and Pixel-based graphics

If you’re skilled in a program like Photoshop, don’t necessarily expect that skill to translate to a vector-based program.  They are very different from one another.

I recently came across a free vector-editing utility for Google Chrome.  If you’re not familiar with Chrome, it is Google’s web browser (free download from Google), and it offers a very large selection of free add-ons, apps, and utilities.  One of these utilities is called “Vector Editor by Aviary.”

According to the description, “Aviary’s Vector Editor allows users to create fully scalable vector art appropriate for logos, tee shirt designs, and more. You won’t find a similar tool on the web! Working with paths, lines, curves, and objects, our Vector Editor is a powerful tool for beautiful layer-based vector creations that can be shared with friends and business partners alike!”

I spent a little time playing around with the program just to see what it could do.  It has a few features, and a fairly simple user-interface.  If you have used Illustrator or CorelDraw you’ll recognize some of the tools, but it’s very much its own program with its own unique layout and functionality.

The good news is that it’s absolutely free!  The bad news is that it has limited features.  Hey, what do you expect for free, right?  This utility is great for very light designing needs like text-only, or basic shapes.  However, if you’re looking for a vector-based program with full-functionality, I recommend CorelDraw.  It’s not a cheap program, but it’s well worth the cost as CorelDraw is industry-standard for screen printers.  There is also a training DVD that is specific for screen printing.  The best way to hone your design skills and proficiency is to work with one program exclusively – allowing you to become familiar with every facet and nuance of that particular program, thus getting full use out of every feature.  Because CorelDraw has been around for a long time and is widely accepted (not to mention the existence of a very specific training guide), it is an excellent choice if you’re looking into getting a vector-based design program.  However, the free Aviary Vector Editor program is nice if you’re just looking to learn a little bit about vector art before making a major purchase.

 

Pallet Tape – A Friend to Screen Printers

Anyone who’s done any screen printing knows how messy the platen can get after just a few shirts.  You start with a clean surface, then coat it in spray adhesive, put shirts on top of that, and then ink on the shirts.  After 10 shirts you have a sticky mess of cotton fuzz-balls, ink, and other particles.  This of course needs to be cleaned periodically as it will begin to affect the quality of your prints.

Now, I’m going to show two options for making this problem easier to deal with – saving you time, money, and sanity.

The first option is Newman Pallet Tape – This is essentially a wide roll of heat-resistant masking tape (only much stronger), that covers the platen.  When the shirt fibers and inks have built up enough that the platen needs to be cleaned, simply pull up the tape and put down a fresh strip.  No time-wasting chemical cleanup needed!

Ryan makes it look cool.

The second option is one of my own design – a direct result of my misguided belief that I’m clever, combined with a few extra rolls of blue painter’s tape that I had laying around.  The idea was simply to cover the platen with strips of tape, effectively creating a barrier similar to the Newman Pallet Tape.

Notice the tiny gap on the left side and the slight overlap on the right.

There were two problems with this strategy.  For one, it’s incredibly difficult to get each strip to line up perfectly.  As I learned upon testing this trick, the smallest gap or overlap of the tape strips causes the print to reflect the imperfections onto the shirt.  Another problem is that painter’s tape is relatively expensive, and the cost of this (money-saving, I thought) trick ends up costing more in the long run.

The moral of the story – if you’re into that kind of thing – is that most screen printers should have a roll of this Newman Pallet Tape right next to their press.

Oh, and as long as you’re here…please take a second to vote for our blooper video.

Thanks for clicking the link!

Leave a comment here.

Ethan

Team MOYA

Screen Printing Trick

I’d like to share a quick trick for screen printers.  This is a small tip that you may find useful in a smaller shop.

This will come in handy on those occasions when a build-up of spray adhesive works its way through the shirts and slowly begins to make the print side of the screen tacky.  It also helps when printing with thicker inks (like white plastisol or specialty inks), or when the job is set up with less-than-ideal off contact distance.  All of these circumstances can create the same problem, and that is the shirt and/or ink sticking to the screen.  Now, this is generally only a problem with multi-color designs, as it causes the shirt to lift and shift – thus messing up any registration for secondary screens – but it can still be a hassle with one-color prints.

If you find yourself in the middle of a print with a shirt that is stuck to the screen…grab a can of compressed air.  Aim the stream of air directly into the open areas of the screen (the areas where the ink passes through), and blast some air through the screen.  This should create enough pressure to break the contact between screen and substrate without shifting the shirt and throwing off registration.

One thing to be cautious of, though, is over-using the can.  When compressed air gets too cold, the can will expel some of the propellant which, as it turns out, is similar to Plasti-Solve and will dilute and remove the ink – a result which is less than desirable in this instance.

Like this...

Now, after the air has been used to separate the screen and substrate, you’ll need to troubleshoot what caused the adhesion before moving on.  Failing to fix the cause of the problem will only allow the same result to occur on the next print.

 

Metallic Inks? Rock & Roll!

I took advantage of the Ryonet Cyber Monday sale last month to pick up some new kinds of ink with which to experiment.  In addition to replenishing some supplies, I also ordered three new items:  Metallic Silver ink, Copper Shimmer ink, and Puff Additive.  Today I experimented for the first time with the Metallic Silver.

After removing the lid, I was immediately struck by just how silver the ink actually looks.  Its appearance is identical to mercury.  I was expecting more of a “bright” gray color, but it literally looks like liquid metal.

Metallic Silver ink through an 86 mesh screen with a 2-and-2 coating of emulsion.

I selected an 86 mesh screen for this trial run, because I was sure the ink would be thick.  I was right, too!  I thought white ink was hard to print with, but Metallic is incredibly viscous.  Think Silly Putty, only silver.  As you print, you can actually let go of the squeegee, and it will stand up on its own.  Considering the pressure I needed to apply to get the ink through the screen, I can’t imagine using anything higher than a 110 mesh. 

“Look! No hands!”

The ink retains a great deal of its “metal” appearance on the substrate, even after curing.

The curing stage proved difficult.  I found the ink film was still not completely cured after doubling our standard drying times.  This weekend I will do a wash test – an effective assessment of an inks’ curing parameters, wherein a test print is cut in half and one half is washed and then compared to the original, un-washed half.

My overall rating for this ink is 4 out of 5 stars.  It has an undeniably bold and beautiful result on the shirt, but it’s difficult to work with and temperamental when it comes to curing.  I believe it would work best as a design highlight, and not the main ink color.

Ethan

Team MOYA

The Grand Design

When you think about it, the very center of screen printing – the all-powerful, grand design of screen printing – is the design itself.  It sounds like such a moot point to even bring up, but humor me.

The design is where the appeal lies.  You didn’t start screen printing because you enjoy the smell of the ink.  It would be kind of weird if you did; weird and a bit creepy…awkward pause…aaaand moving on.

 The designs make you relevant in this business.  It’s your bread and butter.  It’s the connection to your customer; platonically speaking of course.  Essentially, it’s the universal appeal of screen printing.

That being said, let’s look at another obvious truth about designs: each design has its process.  This is no different in screen printing as it is the same with any medium involving design.   Exploring the obvious a bit further, learning what that process is now will make all the difference when obtaining the right tools to achieve the right end result later.

Let’s take a look at what style t-shirt you want to design.  Does the design have a lot of detail?  Do you need to use halftones to achieve the maximum effect?  Maybe you want to use glitter ink to print up swag for your Twilight fan club?   The word on the street is that vampires don’t sparkle, but who am I to ruin your delusions?

The glitter effect can be achieved with any setup (granted you have a screen with a low enough mesh count), but those detailed designs require better equipment, supplies, and software.  The real point is if you really want to challenge yourself design-wise, you’re not going to want a hobby kit.  It would be like preparing your Thanksgiving dinner using an easy-bake oven; you’re going to be disappointed with the results.

To better paint a clearer picture here, let me break down some of the equipment involved in screen printing and its relevance to the design itself.

• The better designs need the right design software.  For example Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator (CS3 preferably over the later version) or the latest version of CorelDraw.

 

•  Also programs like Separation Studio and AccuRIP compliment the design software quite nicely, shorten the design process, and can effectively get that design an extra couple of notches towards perfect.

 

• You need a printer that can print dark enough for the exposure, handle halftones, and print to the size you need.  We use the Epson 1400 Blackmax printer and it does a fantastic job.

 

• You need a “good” exposure unit.  The Sun is just not going to shine here.  Investing in an exposure unit will bring out more of the design in your screens than the cheaper alternatives like halogen lamps.  The better the exposing process, the better the fine details will be preserved in the stencil.

 

• A good press that handles four to six screens will start you out nicely; if not flat out continuously meet your needs.  When working with multi-color jobs, you want a sturdy press that doesn’t mess up your registration.  The less you have to adjust your image, the more shirts you can crank out. 

 

• If you’re doing all over designs, you’ll need a press that can accommodate larger screens as well.

 

• A flash dryer is more than a method to cure the ink you print.  Some types of designs require flashing in between prints so that the inks don’t mix when you don’t want them to.  Even if you have a conveyor dryer, which you’ll want if you aspire to crank out larger volumes of products on a deadline, you’ll still want the flash dryer in your shop.  The alternative is a heat gun, which you’re likely not going to be a fan of using for prolonged periods of time.  Heat guns take a long time to cure ink and, because of the concentrated heat, they can easily burn a shirt.

This list gets longer depending on what you’re thinking of doing in the screen printing world.  In a lot of cases, you’ll find a work-around that achieves your goal to an acceptable level.  It’s a tall order to have everything you want in your shop from the get go.  We’re still piecing equipment together ourselves, but the more equipment we invest in….doors open up for us and it’s liberating sometimes. 

My overall point is, before making that first purchase, visualize that design style you know you’re going to bring to the table.  If the common denominator is details, invest a little bit more so you don’t burn yourself out by falling short of the mark.  You’ll save money in the long run by not having to upgrade your equipment as much.  You’ll also save more than one headache having the right tools for the job and you’ll save a ton of time and potentially make more money.  You can’t beat that.

Thanks,

Steve – Team MOYA

Cyber Monday? Oh, Heck Yeah!

Today was Black Friday – the busiest shopping day of the year.  It’s also the day when you’re statistically most likely to be injured/dismembered/killed in a tragic trampling accident.  Ah, the holidays…when people come together to celebrate thankfulness and giving, in the spirit of the season.  Unless there’s a 4am Door-Buster Sale on Digital Photo Frames!  In that case, people will step on their own mothers’ faces to get there first!

Who needs all that mess?  Sure, there are undoubtedly some fantastic deals to be had but, why risk life and limb for it?  This morning I saw a woman stab an orphan in the jaw for the last hand mixer at Target.  Sheesh!  All this craziness is a serious problem.

You know who’s good at solving problems?  The Internet.  A few years ago, the clever people over there at The Internet decided to get together and offer a day of wicked awesome deals, without all of the “likely physical harm” and “stampedes” and “Road Rage with Carts.”  Man, they’re smart.

Today we know it as “Cyber Monday” – a glorious 24-hour period where we can cash-in on amazing deals…without having to give somebody’s grandma the ol’ Dead Leg maneuver the second they open the doors so we can get to the $2 DVDs first.  The sad part is that grandma probably wasn’t even in line for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Aspercreme or whatever.

Anyway, Cyber Monday is three days after Black Friday, which is the day after Thanksgiving.  This, to me, is the really exciting shopping day.  Mainly because, okay, yes, I enjoy shopping in my robe.  Sue me.  Also though, by shopping online you can hit seven stores in 30 minutes.  Try doing that in a robe!  Incidentally, bail is $1,000 for the charge of “public indecency,” and I would suggest that you double-knot your robe if you’re going to try this.  Just trust me.  Double knot!

This year I’m especially excited about Ryonet’s 50% Off Cyber Monday Sale.  The specific sale items won’t be revealed until Monday, but that’s okay because whatever it is, we want it!