Matthew Tomlet turned out to have considerably more artistic skill than expected, so the authors didn’t have to teach him how to create images, just how to separate them.

As you know, we do get around . . . so to speak. What with all the trade shows and international consulting we do, it is our pleasure to meet a lot of really great people from really great places. At a recent Printwear Show, we met a nice fellow who is starting up an apparel-printing operation in Panama.

Matthew Tomlet has a couple of retail outlets there but, being tired of leaving profit on the table, has decided to go vertical. While his existing T-shirt shops do a nice little business in tourist areas where the cruise ships come in to port, he now wants to produce their merchandise himself. And, having received glowing reports of our capabilities from several industry friends, he availed himself of our services.

Schedules and budget constraints did not permit us travel to Panama for a more traditional consultation to get him up and running so, instead, we invited him up to our studio here in the Mile High City. It was decided that, to get him to the top of his game sooner rather than later, we’d put him personally through screen-printing boot camp right here in our back yard—that is, a week of intense, hands-on training with yours truly. Aside from the Thursday-night barbecue, it was all business. Matt spent over 12 hours a day with us, learning the T-shirt-printing ropes and more besides. Yikes!

Nothing is ever typical

He came in on Saturday—a day early to avoid any delays, as it was hurricane season in the Caribbean—we decided to throw in a bonus day of art and separation training the following Sunday. That’s right, we do work Sundays when we must. We do what we gotta do. Matt brought his hard drive with him which contained several of his typical designs.

We thought we knew that nothing is ever “typical,” but were somewhat surprised at Matt’s design and illustration skills. He had told us he was an infant in the business, but we found his art skills to be way more mature than that, as the images with this installment attest. So we didn’t have to teach him how to create images, just how to separate them.

We dove right in and tested his existing knowledge so we would know where to start with him. His proficiency with design and illustration made our job much easier, so we began with some of his vector images in Illustrator. Much to Matt’s surprise, we taught him that, as long as he creates his original art using spot colors in layers with this software, the separations are all but finished. WYSIWYG, remember? What You See Is What You Get. Vector separations are cake in Illustrator. We just click on all the layers and print out the separations using the RIP to inkjet, and bada-bing! seps and film are done.

We showed Matt a few tricks on how to build a white baseplate by turning several of the layers the same color, excluding the black and select darker colors.

We also worked on how to choke the white printer by putting a half stroke around the whole thing. The concept of gutters was then covered as we added a stroke around each converted layer within the white printer. These tricks allow for traditional gain, minimize smearing and flashing, and make registration a bit easier than without them.

Art preparation, color separating, ink mixing, screen making and more went into Matt’s week-long “screen-printing boot camp.” That basic know-how, combined with the creative and artistic flare represented here should stand him in excellent stead back in Panama.

From simple to complex

Then it was time to look at his more complicated raster images. Oh, and there was one little limitation here. (Isn’t there always?) He’s establishing his shop with a six-color press, so we’d need to keep all his completed separations to six colors or fewer. As you know, that’s not really our style. We usually like to exploit the luxury of ample color capacity, filling all the heads even on 18-color and larger machines. But we would figure out how to make this work, too (that being what we do).

We showed Matt a couple of separation software packages from within our industry, to get him to the next level quickly and avoid farming out sep work. We chose a couple of packages we use regularly and recommend to customers around the world depending on needs. Wilflex Easy Art is a plug-in that works with Photoshop. There are any number of additional Photoshop plug-ins available as well. Spot Process is a stand-alone separation and proofing package. Both show solid results. The Easy Art seems to always see and lay in a lot of black throughout the image. We know this from experience, and show Matt how to back off on black using the curves in Photoshop.

We also start him on the road down the index-separation trail. The problem with the index method is that we typically want more than six colors. So we took several nine- and ten-color designs and jammed them into six for this exercise. Based on what we saw on the monitor and ease of use, we decided that the Spot Process was the best fit for his needs, as the images seemed to hold together best using it rather than the other methods. Holding screens down to six colors and having a somewhat fixed ink set seemed to make the most sense for his production needs. We worked several more designs with him that all turned out satisfactory on the monitor, considering we had to pull out a lot of colors to work on his presses.

Going fishing

We spent the balance of the week working with Matt on the rest of the screen-printing process. We thought about having him reclaim all week but, well, that ain’t right, is it?  Actually, we output film, made screens and printed all week. Among countless other lessons, we helped him determine that his vector work should work best on 166- to 205-tpi mesh and his raster on 272- to 300-, all in the 45N/cm2 range on retensionable frames. All the images we separated turned out very well on press for Matt’s first time out of the box. He returned to Panama and, after all was said and done, was very grateful and learned a ton. We like to say he left our place “GraphicElephants.com certified!” . . . whatever that means.

Good luck Matt. We look forward to a visit and a little fishing.