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Artist => General Art Discussions => Topic started by: Dottonedan on March 25, 2020, 11:31:40 AM
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TIP FOR TODAY:
For your APPAREL DESIGNERS OF ANY LEVEL, STOP! Stop NOW. When designing for apparel, there is no need (none at all) to only use process colors when “designing”. EVEN IF, you are designing for apparel planning to print in cmyk, you can get into the habit of picking pantone color book colors to use for that and then convert them (double click on color, and switch from spot to process) and they will print in cmyk. Getting into the habit of only using Pantone Color Book colors or even custom SPOT colors (They both are spot colors) helps artist use your files down the road. We can all agree that most jobs (probably 99% of them) we screen print is going to be in spot color. So WHY, does your art department create art in CMYK colors causing additional time to change them later in the production process? Carry on.
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We have maybe a half dozen inks with subjective names that are used over and over for longtime customers, which we know the Pantone numbers for so we can mix more later, but we always work in spot colors. I'm always having to tell contacts to go back to the designers and get PMS numbers, Solid Coated please.
Steve
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Yep, I got this years ago. Spot colors always here in my one man operation, but way too often, outside art, from both "real" designers, or from the new wave of "digital Da Vincis" use the seemingly default CYMK colors that display fine and print so effortlessly on their desktop printers.
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Press trick using spot color. Spot color inks use opaque bases primarily. A trick we used on press was to keep halftone clear base nearby. By adding a tiny bit of this to the ink in the screens you can manipulate how secondary and tertiary colors form. It literally expands the colors in the print to get those halftone overlay areas to make great secondary color. The transitions from say red to yellow bring out shades of orange that wouldn't appear otherwise. This can also help balance color in the design. If it is too red, keep adding halftone base to the red until the color cast of red is reduced. We came upon this for the first Lord of the Rings movie where the poster we had to match had tons of different colors. We spent a half a day tweaking the inks in the screens with halftone base. Time consuming, but faster than redoing seps, new screens, and starting again with the halftone base to balance the print to match the poster. Halftone base only, it's perfectly clear, and prints a better dot which helps spot color that can be thick and build up on subsequent screens in the print cycle. Also helps to use mesh counts in the 300-350 range that put down less ink so the translucency of semi opaque inks can accomplish this technique easier. You can keep a digital scale by the press to note additions of halftone base. We put in X grams of spot color, then a teaspoon at a time weighed onto an ink card (on the scale tared out to 0) then kept a running total of gram additions, then scrap it off with a spatula onto the set up screen. This helps to be able to start mixing gallons that have the same ratio of clear base to spot color as the job progressed