Where Did January Go?

Hey guys!

Your friendly neighborhood Renegades here, and can you believe that it's already well into February? WTF right?

A lot of things happened this last month and downtown LA has been buzzin with activity. Lot's of people expressing themselves with printed materials (if you catch our drift). We're always happy to lend a hand to those who feel the need to wear their opinion on their shirt.

We have a feeling we'll be printing more stuff like this in the coming months. Stay tuned.

We also had a chance to get to ISS last month and check all the latest and greatest in garment decoration as well as taking in some seminars and classes to bone up on our skills. It was cool to see screen printers and other garment decorators from all over the country there in different capacities as well as some familiar faces. It was a very wet weekend but we managed to get a picture while it was nice and sunny out.

Hopefully we'll see some you at the next one. In the mean time, we have orders coming in what seems to be non-stop so if you need us, we'll be manning the presses making sure we crank out these jobs to make way for the new ones!!

The End of Another Year...

Hey Guys!

We know we know, it’s been a WHOLE YEAR, literally, since we’ve gotten a new post up on our blog but we’re looking to change that for 2017. Print Renegades has been growing and growing and we are SO busy (especially for the holidays) that posting on the blog has not been the priority that it should be. Now that we have a full time marketing and social media guy to assist in this, we will definitely be more up and out of our shells to bring you guys the new and improved Renegades!!

Since last December, we have expanded our team to include some new faces to keep production in our shop running like a well-oiled machine and to make sure we stay active on social media and the web. We’ve got a new kick-ass DTG printer, the Epson F2000, that we’ve definitely been putting through its paces these last 12 months and have got it running almost non-stop with our ever-growing job board for Direct-To-Garment print jobs.

Along with DTG business, screen print jobs have not slowed down a tick and we’re constantly pushing ourselves to work outside of our comfort zone from printing oversized flatstock to printing on materials we’ve never printed on before. Our aim is to always say YES! And as you might hear from our customers, we usually do!

Keep your eyes on this blog for a deeper dive into what we’ve been up to and what’s going on at Print Renegades in the future. We have a lot of new equipment were purchasing at the end of this year (tax breaks!!!) and another 1-2 employees we are currently trying to hire to be able to stay ahead of our job schedules, and were super excited to bring all of these new occurences to light coming in 2017. (its weird to write...wow!). Also, keep checking us out on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for more behind the scenes stuff! (we post on those more than once a year, we promise!) :)

Nama Rococo Large Format Wallpaper Printing

Very recently we were able to work with Nama Rococo, a luxurious hand painted and hand printed large format wallpaper company that personally designs their own custom wall paper sets. These sets then get printed, in a limited number edition, and then sold by the individual sheet to whomever can handle this amazing look inside their abode.

Working with the owner, Karen, was amazing; to be able to see her unique style of pop art and Art Nouveau come right out of her designs. When they came to our studio, they brought the pre-cut paper sheets for us, and also their own ink that they wanted to use as well (since she hand makes it herself)...something that not many clients do.

We were able to print these sheets, although they ended up to be much bigger than we originally anticipated, and the final result turned out amazingly. The paper was very textured thick recycled paper, then turned black with a Gesso-type covering to seal the paper, which we printed their single color designs with white ink on the black paper.

These types of projects are exactly what Print Renegades exists for: custom made pieces, limited edition artwork, and a project that not only pushes the boundaries of standard screen printing but also gives us, as printers, a run for our money. Jobs like this make us much better at what we do and who we are, as professionals as much as artists.

Large Format Fabric Printing for Superbowl 2014

Superbowl time has come: and so has the time for the amazing commercials that are made just for that one single game. We had the chance to print some fabric for the Pistachio Wonderful Superbowl commercial (as seen HERE). Our main man Stephen Colbert is staring in the commercial, with his eagle costar, wearing a custom made suit that we printed.

We were given the feat to print multicolored prints on a large roll of fabric. Although this was superbly impossible for most printers to take on, we feel differently about custom jobs as this one, and we took this job on, ready to rock it!

STEP 1: Prepping - Doing this wasn't easy, as we weren't set up for it and really had to improvise with our materials and process of getting this done. First step: Getting a pallet (table) to attach to the press in order to print on, and fit the screens on. This was done by us cutting down some piece of wall in our shop in order to get a smooth surface to attach to a piece of wood.

STEP 2: Setting up the screens - This was a tedious step, as the screens are VERY large custom made screens and having them fit onto the press was difficult enough, let alone registering them together AND making sure nothing moves during production.

STEP 3: Printing - Whenever anything this large is being printed, there are always difficulties with the print either looking too LIGHT, or there being lines in it from where the squeege passed thru the image (depending on the size of squegee there is). Luckily with this print, we were able to use a small squeegee and go over each individual word to make it look thick but without lines. After this, flash drying it in between colors took a while with our small little flash, then printing the 2nd color was stressful, but overall we really got a handle on the printing of this and really busted it out.

STEP 4: Finishing - properly curing the fabric AND finishing it up with the presentation was key for us. It doesn't come everyday where you get to print for a multi-million dollar Superbowl commerical, and we wanted to really impress the clients here.

Its jobs like this that we REALLY love to take on, say YES to when most shops say NO (since they dont want to waste their time doing anything outside of the norm), but we LOVE doing custom jobs like this, cause not only are we able to venture outside our "screen printer" selves and really touch the inner "Artist" that we are to help create something like this, but we also learn SO much and thus, become much better printers because of it! (Next time someone asks us to print multi-color large format printing on fabric, we can say YES with confidence! :)