Getting Pinehart-Halloween with Our Design
At Pinehart, Halloween is a joyful time of year. It’s always a chance to see the highly inventive and unusual ways our customers use their custom t-shirts to celebrate, among the excitement of arranging costumes for our annual party. We also couldn’t let this year’s All Hallows’ Eve pass without creating a unique t-shirt design to get us in the eerie mood, so we had our designers ready.
On Ruth Drive, a nightmare…
If you aren’t already familiar with our designer Ben, he has a long history of producing eye-catching posters for punk rock bands like Blink-182. Still, you can also credit him for many of the great design templates you can find on our website.
He took time away from creating clip art for our clients to create a Freddy Krueger-inspired t-shirt design for us, which is the ideal fusion of Pinehart and horror. An homage to our Athens, Georgia headquarters, A Nightmare on Ruth Drive wouldn’t be complete without a screen-printing squeegee in his razor-sharp glove.
The printer screen and the computer screen
That would be an excellent chance to demonstrate our screen-printing technique and provide some behind-the-scenes images of how a design like this applies to a t-shirt. We wrote a rather extensive post about the principles of screen printing a couple of months ago, but seeing this t-shirt take shape would help fill in the blanks.
When we get the chance to create our designs in-house, the artwork preparation step of the process is a snap because one-off designs like this start in Adobe Photoshop.
We need to create screens for all four colors in this design to achieve the desired jump-off-the-shirt effect. The vivid ink colors we’re using require a white Underbase to print down first, so the completed product looks as colorful as possible because we’re publishing this design on a black t-shirt.
The image above shows the Underbase screen we used to print a base layer of white ink underneath all of our subsequent colors.
The rest of our colors can now add, starting with the light cream. It’s not just for the Pinehart name; it also serves to highlight the glove just below.
What makes this image stand out is the brilliant red that comes next. The picture above gives a fantastic view of how the shirt’s various color layers blend. On the left, the white Underbase, cream print, and red layer are just about to be applied.
If you haven’t already noticed, this example uses automatic screen printing that is a little bit more sophisticated than the conventional handheld squeegee. The remaining ink colors are applied to each garment as it makes its way around the press before being removed and dried on a belt dryer. This setup enables us to dial in perfectly for those more extensive orders.
You can notice the effect a design like this makes on a t-shirt when all the colors are combined. Additionally, using black in the t-shirt as the fifth hue is a crucial component of this design.
Using the color of the t-shirt in the design not only allows for some cost savings but also frequently results in more attractive designs. In most cases, the final print will look better matched to the color of the cloth and give the impression that the background link into the design. In this instance, Ben employed a standard technique for designing t-shirts by using the shirt’s black to represent the hand and squeegee’s shape and shadow.
The Pinehart team ended up with a brand-new design to celebrate this week despite having a lot of mess to clean up and immaculate, freshly printed t-shirts out of the dryer.
