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.

 

 

 

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).

Making Band Shirts

Not long ago we received t-shirt artwork from the band Illegal Substance.  The file was a mock-up done by a third-party artist who had either never printed shirts before, or was quite advanced in silkscreening.  It’s a simple design, but printing it onto t-shirts would require slightly advanced techniques.

Here’s the mock-up we received.

Our trusty consultant, Nate Montijo, was kind enough to break down the process for us into two detailed options.  The first choice was to print the background layers with halftones and create a separate screen for the foreground color.  This would allow us to print the design with only two screens.  The drawback to this option is that we are currently without AccuRIP software – a Raster Image Processing program which translates linear printing to dots using a PostScript interpreter.  This is a necessary component in printing halftones. 

The second option involved dividing the background into three separate screens and using the same ink, divided into three equal amounts and mixed with differing levels of International Coating’s Curable Reducer.  As you can see in the mock-up above, there is a subtle increase in the opacity of each background layer.  Reducer is perfect for use in this type of situation because, in addition to thinning inks, it also reduces the opacity.

Given our lack of AccuRIP and a quality exposure unit like the X-Vactor Digital Vacuum Exposure Unit, we decided that we would be unable to produce the fine detail required to pull off the first option.  Although the second choice involved more work and more supplies, it was in fact our only option.

Being positive people, we decided that our first test run was not a “failure” – we simply learned through experience how not to print this design.  As with most first drafts, it was an important step in “identifying opportunities.”  That’s corporate-speak for “seeing where we messed up.”

This was our first attempt.

 

As you can see, the color of the background is too light.  It was also apparent that we needed to further reduce the ink for the second run.  We adjusted these two factors and came up with this:

 

A much better result!  As you can see, the use of a 50% reducer/plastisol mix caused a “sparkly” result in the background layer that actually looks pretty cool.

Now to send the sample back to the band for approval.

As always, thanks for clicking the link!

Leave a comment here.

Ethan

MOYA Tees

Water-Based Inks

Today we had the opportunity to try out some of the new inks we picked up from Ryonet when we were in LA last month.  The new Los Angeles location is not only a distribution warehouse and training center, but also a retail location.  After our class concluded, we stuck around to talk shop with some of the staff.  It was a little bit overwhelming walking around in a warehouse when you want every single thing they have in stock, but we finally narrowed it down to foil transfers and environmentally friendly water-based inks.  Nate (our trainer) and Enrique (the branch manager) were both incredibly helpful in directing us towards what we needed…not what we wanted.

We will be covering foil transfers in a later blog, after we’ve come up with a cool design to show off the product and technique.

For the water-based inks, we picked up a few colors – white, black, red, yellow, and blue.  Our thinking was that, if needed, these basic colors could be used in conjunction with one another to mix other colors.  Since we’ve never used water-based inks, we wanted to get just enough to experiment with so we could decide if we liked it.  As the water content of these inks can break down the standard DXP emulsion we used for plastisol prints, we also needed a water-resistant emulsion – CCI’s SWR-3.

We’ve been planning to print a small run of women’s boy shorts with a MOYA logo for a few months now.  This seemed like the perfect opportunity to test the water-based inks because we can print the boy shorts easily and, after giving them away to fans, we can collect educated opinions about the product.  It’s beta product testing, essentially.

With my logo design already printed, I set to opening the new SWR-3 emulsion.  After reading the directions, I discovered that I was correct in assuming that it was used in the same way as the DXP emulsion – add water to diazo, shake, add to emulsion, stir, etc.  I took everything into the darkroom (which means I left everything where it was and turned off the lights) and opened the emulsion.  Purple!  A really cool purple color!  Unfortunately I was using a 305 screen with a dark mesh, so most of the color was lost as I applied the emulsion to the screen. 

After setting the screen up to dry, I realized that I wasn’t sure about exposure times for this particular emulsion.  No problem!  www.silkscreeningsupplies.com has an online support feature.  Within literally 45 seconds, I had my answer (from a very helpful representative named TJ) – exposure time should be the same as it was with the DXP emulsion.  And he was right.  The exposure turned out great and the screen printed wonderfully! 

How did the ink work?  Well, great so far!  It leaves a very soft hand (or “smooth print” in layman’s terms), and it has good coverage and opacity.  It was a little touch-and-go trying to find a good flashing time as water-based ink needs a longer cure time and the boy shorts burned easily (only lost one pair, though!).  We’re counting on our beta testers to let us know how well the ink holds up after a few washes.  We might need to find a way to adjust the curing parameters to allow for a longer dry time without burning the fabric.

The only thing I didn’t like about the ink was the fact that it dries in the screen quickly.  Of course, in Arizona that’s to be expected.  No parts of my screen became clogged but, if they had, we also picked up some Fast Open 32 which is used for opening the screen.  I know we’ll get a chance to try that out when we do a longer run of shirts.

Here’s the final product.  What do you think?

 

Leave a comment here.

Thanks for clicking the link!

Ethan

Team MOYA