Images Digital Edition DEC 2018

KB TIPS & TECHNIQUES www.images-magazine.com 50 images DECEMBER 2018 ink‘. It looks faded and old. Worn. Another popular choice for me is what I call ‘smoke‘ ink. I’ve written about this before [see the February 2016 issue of Images ] Throw some dark coloured old inks in a bucket, then add the same amount of black. Stir it up. Add about double curable reducer to the mix. Stir it up. You should get a translucent dark colour. The more reducer you add, the more transparent the ink will get. Instead of using white ink on that shirt, try using smoke. This will shadow that shirt colour to a darker shade. On a shirt that is red, it will look maroon. For royal blue, it will look navy. Similar to the white ink formula with curable reducer, the more additive you stir in, the more translucent the mixture becomes. Smoke ink is the absolute best drop shadow you will ever use. What’s great is you can use the same screen and ink with multiple shirt colours and not have to change ink colours. This will quickly become your go-to colour for any drop-shadow effect. Plus this has zero hand, as it is basically all reducer. It‘s also a great way to use up those PMS colours that you used for that one job a year and a half ago and haven’t touched since. Reduced ink like this is the perfect solution for printing over a hoodie seam or pocket. Couple that with a distressed texture, and it’s a winner. Overprinting Another popular choice for designers is to overprint one colour on another to produce a third colour. Using thinned inks makes this easy. On press, print the lighter colour first. You can either flash it or leave it wet. Flashing locks in that colour as a base and will prevent the following ink from mixing in that colour. But sometimes that’s what you want. For example, take a peek at this design [Taunton Family Festival, above] I made a few years ago. The smoke plate is used to overprint the red, blue and white plates to produce darker areas in each for the texture I wanted. On red, this shows up as maroon. On blue, it’s navy, and on white, it appears grey. This print only used one white, and the screen with the smoke ink was printed last without flashing. Engineering your art this way produces more colour on the shirt, but takes less time to set up and print. It also reduces your colour count and makes your quote to your customer cheaper – so maybe you will win that order! Another less-ink tip: traditional halftones Halftones have been around for a very long time. While the invention of halftone photomechanical process cannot be attributed to one person, William Henry Fox Talbot patented the first use of halftones for textiles in 1852. In your shop, using halftones can be a great way to add more dimension to your design without adding any extra production cost. Let’s say you are working on a design and want to add another colour to separate the primary element from a secondary one. Sure, you can use another colour for that secondary idea – but what if you used a halftone instead? My question to you is this: “Do you really need that second colour?“ It’s a good question to ask. A lot of shops have their production colour count hijacked by their art department. The creative minds want that extra ink colour because it’s a colour quality thing to them. This usually starts when customer service or sales give up that control with the question: “Hey, how many colours is this?“ Suddenly that image you thought was three or four colours is now six. Or eight. Of course, there are eight colours in that design. But if we use some halftones in a few we can get the colour count down to a manageable (and sometimes ‘affordable to the customer’) level. Printing halftones can be tricky for some shops though. There are entire books and video series dedicated to this subject. If you want to be the best at this, I would recommend Mark Coudray’s Halftone Mastery Course. Colour hierarchy In your design, the colours you choose can have a dramatic impact on the overall design. Bolder colours are naturally going to come forward, S m o k e i n k i s u s e d h e r e t o a d d t e x t u r e b y c r e a ti n g d a r k e r a r e a s A lot of shops have their production colour count hijacked by their art department Add some drama with speciality inks