Jewelled Gecko: lifelike graphics make a vivid impression

Surface Active | Making waves in a sea of sameness.

Hyper-real graphics like the Jewel Gecko make a vivid impression. Why? Because people relate to them! Dramatic lifelike renderings of wildlife produce a prompt and typically positive response in a person’s mind. People relate to real things and enjoy them most. It is the route to why people relate to many of our eye-catching and impactful “SurfaceActive” wildlife-art-to-wear designs.

How did we do it? The technique of colour separating this design by hand involved breaking it down into eight separate designs, from which the screens are made. The separations are printed over each other, in layers to create the original hand screenprinted design. This crafty route is the only way to achieve the unparalleled vivid impression of the design.

It helps that beauty is permanent

Fashions come and go, then come around again, but the fundamentals stay. The inspiration for the designs came from getting to know superlative alpine/wildlife photographer Colin Monteith, and renowned wildlife photographer Rod Morris. We visited their image libraries to cherrypick the most beautiful jewels in their amazing archives that we could see had the potential to be developed into hand-separated wildlife art screen gems.

Our bespoke production methodology

With the eight layers of Jewelled gecko art-for-reproduction drawn in-register and “camera-ready” my next ports of call were Multigraphics for camera and photolitho film work, and Seritech for photo stencil making. (As a footnote I owe these guys a vote of thanks[1].)

With the set of intermediate artwork negatives cleaned up and properly composited, the final set of “emulsion-up, right-reading” litho film-positives could be contact exposed directly from the negatives.

Next step was to affix the emulsion-up, right-reading film separations, to the set of 8 prepped,  photo stencil “frames”. The photo-litho punch register system was carried over into our innovative stencil making process.[2]

Regarding the custom inline 10-station screenprinting workshop…

…you can see in the photos that skilled humans are the moving parts in this machine.

‘Jewelled Gecko – New Zealand’ eight colour T-shirt print on dark green fabric. Placement; Eight colour front print, one colour kowhaiwhai print front and back around hem.

Tracing method. This process is performed using a lightbox where light shines through the reference highlighting the areas to be drawn in a careful pointillist method with a Rotring pen onto Mylar film or charcoal pencil onto coquille board.

How it’s done. The Photolitho craft technique of punched registration of the eight hand separated designs is vital to create all eight of the layers “in register” at the drawing & painting stage.

Painting the Maori kowhaiwhai design printed around the garment’s hem onto a sheet of translucent Mylar using a No.3 sable brush, ‘Plum tree’ photo opaque fluid and a drawing bridge.

Shaun applies spray adhesive to the printing pallets, Deborah McDonald places the T-shirts. If designs like the base light green are touch dry between each screen pass then wet ink areas “offset” onto the underside of the next screen, which in turn causes the cotton fabric to adhere to the screen and then lift… aaargh! Chrissie Terpstra in the background is loading the 8 screenprinting stencil frames with their respective inks.

Eight colour designs were printed in editions of 80—100 garments per day. Starting at print station one, Deborah hand screenprints the first colour, light green onto the front of the locally made pure cotton teeshirt.

Chrissie Terpstra follows Deborah McDonald printing the first colour down the row of 10 aluminium & rubber composite printing stations with ‘Flash Gordon’, our customised water-based ink ‘flash-cure’ unit and high-efficiency nasty volatiles extractor unit on wheels.

Synchronised with Deborah printing the second colour, dark green, Chrissie prints the third colour orange. Because the area of the dark green colour is small it does not present the problem of sticking to bottom of the following orange stencil.

Chrissie prints the third colour, orange, then as Deborah moves Flash Gordon from station to station in-sync with a 30-second timer, Chrissie uses a paint-stripping gun to dry off print’s most saturated areas.

Deborah follows the orange screen with the next in the sequence, super-opaque bright red. The jig on the black steel bar running the length of the ten print stations uses clamped butt stops to register one design over the other in perfect register.

Chrissie follows Deborah printing red with super opaque metallic golden eyes and scale detail. After “flashing off” the wet inks, next minute Chrissie prints the black to finish the design.

A stickler for detail Chrissie proofs each black design while the ink is still wet and manually touches up the black to ensure it is solidly covering where it is supposed to cover. Deborah follows with Flash Gordon, strips the printed shirts off and reloads with the next set of set of blank tees.

Final heat cure of the print on the pallet, stripping the finished Tees off and reloading the next run of 10. This process start to finish took two people labouring hard-out for 45 minutes. A lunch break from this hard labour on your feet the whole time was essential, sit-down lunches at the table which amazing Chrissie Terpstra cooked for our crew of Screen Gems every single day! Morning and afternoon coffee/tea and snacks were delivered and consumed on the fly.

Footnotes

[1] A vote of recognition and thanks is due to the guys and gals of Multigraphics and Seritech.

The large size of the art and number of colours meant there was a fair amount of expense in large-format photolitho materials and expert time.

Each design was shot first as an intermediate-negative in Multigraphics’ large format offset-litho platemaking process camera, then, once the negatives were touched up, the final set of film positives were made in the same precision vacuum-down U.V. exposure units that were used to expose offset litho printing plates.

Thanks are due to the decency of the managers and staff at Multigraphics where I was made welcome to work on one of their large lightboxes in order to carefully; “spot out” the dust and scratches on each of the negatives using a brush and “plum tree” photo opaque fluid, and “open up” detail in the shadow areas using a scalpel tip as drawing tool. The layers of artwork were mechanically registered throughout using the Kodak photolitho “high-pin” punched film register bar system.

A hat-tip is due at this point to the goodwill of the then endangered species of photolitho men, the colour strippers at Multigraphics. It was they who made this crucial step of the artwork production process not just affordable but practically do-able. Thanks to Gerry, Paul and Bruce. For over a decade your perennial support, mentoring and encouragement was unwavering and amazing!

[2] Sceenprinting consultant Dave Cox, of Seritech developed this workaround with us. Getting the set of eight light-sensitive frames the 10 km home from Seritech to our crafty “sheltered workshop” during daylight hours meant a Heath Robinson workaround where I bagged the prepped screens in black rubbish bags and transported them in our little Ford Escort van all covered in blankets. The task of affixing the stencil sets to the frames, all “in register” could only be done at in the workshop at home after dark.

The next day the photostencil frames were returned to Seritich using the same method as above, and exposed 8 at a time, in a vertical vacuum-down frame illuminated by a large UV light source.

Dave Cox was the consultant for the design of our crafty one-off custom built, 10 station, inline screenprinting workshop facility.

The Heath Robinson method we used for multicolour stencil-making meant that our stencil sets were made “in register”, mechanically by default. Because the “x” and “y” were set—up the right-hand side, and along the foot of each stencil set—we never had to spend any time registering our multicolour designs in the set-up for each print run. This meant our methodology is optimal for small batch multicolour printing.