How long has it been since we rolled out the Lon & Don Show with horsepower and rock and roll? Well okay, probably last month or the month before at least one of the subjects came up. But not hotrods and rock in the same month! Not for a while anyway. But we digress, because that is what we do, and by now you know that.

Classic rockabilly

It was time for the New Year and no time like the present for our good friends’ rock band to put together some special-edition gifts for their fans. Brethren Fast Racing Team is a killer rockabilly band formed right here in the Mile High City some years ago. We are pretty sure we’ve been makin’ shirts for these guys for over 20 years now. The music and lyrics are all about cars, music and women. Always have been. The Brethren wrote a song many years ago about the beat-up old work truck they used to move their gear around called “Big Black.” The recently updated version, now called “Bigger Black,” is a song about the band’s brand new one-ton crew cab dually pick-up, sponsored by Budweiser Racing. The lyrics happen to mention “Big Don ridin’ shotgun, he gets all the chicks.” Let’s just say the boys have made some progress but have not forgotten their roots. Now that is classic rockabilly!

Since many if not all Brethren members and fans have custom rods or tricked out bikes, it made perfect sense to put together a dash plaque that could mount to these machines, and a good lookin’ full-zip hoodie for cruising in the cool Colorado evening breeze.

You know we would need an old-school look ‘cause you know that’s how we roll. We began the project with a little research into our personal photo vault to find just the right hot-rod pic.

Artistic considerations

We imported the chosen photo into Photoshop and removed the background, played around with the curves to move the rod into a more graphic look, then opened the file into Illustrator. We used the “relatively new and very cool” live trace tool to give us some great effects. We wanted to go with black, grey and white on a red background, as no other colors say old-school raw horsepower like these three.

After we had our image rendered into those three colors we would add some type. We chose a busted-up font for the type solution, then used the warp filter to arch the verbiage around our car, top and bottom. We added some outlines and carefully positioned the type to give the look of a seal or stamp. Then we threw in a couple of checkered flags and stripes for good measure and added a couple of taglines to give credit where credit is due.

When the art was good to go, we e-mailed it to our subcontractor to use for the dye-sublimation dash plaques. Now for the wearables. We sized the art to about 3.5˝ for a left-chest placement and 13˝ for the backs of our hoodies. Such resizing is a classic reason for using a vector based design program such as Adobe Illustrator.

We removed the bottom type from the left chest but left it on the back. We usually build a base-plate in Illustrator by using a composite of all the colors except for black. In this case, we will not use an underbase for the grey either as we don’t necessarily need the opacity or brightness here. We, of course, never use a white printer under our black. So we ended up with two whites, a grey and a black for both the front and the back print.

And into production

We took the film to screens and used a very straightforward set-up on press. Because there is some polyester and possibly unstable dyes in the red fleeceⁱ we were printing, we began with a low-bleed white, then flashed it only to a gel, followed by a nice neutral grey.

We didn’t mix any special colors for this job. As you know, grey is sometimes a tough color to mix anyway. We rarely mix gray and try to buy RFU versions to keep them as neutral as possible. Thus, we stock a light, medium and dark grey on the shelf most all the time.

Next we print the highlight white and, again, a flash to gel and hold all our white areas very white, followed finally by our black to visually trap it all. The back print was pretty simple and ran with no hiccups.

The left chest would have a couple of issues, including the zipper, which called for our special “platen adapters.” We cutⁱ 1/8th inch Masonite to fit the platen exactly at 16˝ X 22˝, then routed out a gutter for the zipper to fall into, right down the center, parallel and perpendicular. The central off-contact had to be increased to compensate for that 1/8th inch thickness. The positioning of the film on the screen had to be raised a bit to make sure the zipper tab was off the platen during printing, and loading was just a bit slower than typical to make sure this happened, and that the rest of the zipper dropped into the channel we had made. Years ago, we figured that out the hard way by blowing all the screens on our test print of the first zipper hoodie job we ever ran. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. In this case, our necessity was to avoid blowing our screens.

Big-boy toys

The dash plaques made their way back to us after a digital proofing process and turned out killer. We were able to match the full zip hoods to the plaques exactly, and enclosed with the job a disk including the art, to be used on the website or for other promotional materials.

We’ve begun providing this service to our customers recently and it seems to be a real hit. It takes us just a few minutes to convert the files and Brethren Fast absolutely loved everything we did. Of course, we can’t remember when the Brethren had a problem with any of our work. Gotta love customers like that.

Then all the boys went out to play with their big-boy toys.