Reliance Umbrellas

Reliance Steel & Aluminum Co. is a metal distributor in Los Angeles. The company started in the late 1930's in the postwar metal industry boom.  It was listed in Fortune's List of "Most Admired Companies". 

 Print Renegades was thrilled to work with a Los Angeles icon. The job: To screen print on patio umbrellas! This wasn't just a T-shirt one could thread and easily work on, this took time and thought. We had to be precise, working with that large of fabric. It took multiple people to make sure each umbrella was flawless. After the umbrella was printed, we had to fit it into our dryer. Making sure the fabric didn't scorch and the ink dried thoroughly. It was an exhausting job however, it's projects like these that make us love our jobs. We are always ecstatic to have new and interesting projects, where we can showcase our knowledge of the trade. 

The umbrellas turned out great. We hope Reliance can keep their employees and customers cool this summer! 

Hardcore Til I Die Flag Printing

Sometimes working with certain clients is a pleasure, and really makes our job as printers much easier. Working with Raymond and the guys at Raveready are those clients: even though their jobs are technically difficult and sometimes take a LOT of work and man hours, the fact that they are cool people and create a stress-free working relationship really dictates the ease of the job.

Most recently, we worked with their brand Hardcore Till I Die, and were printing a bunch of flags for some of their rave shows that were in town. These flags were 100% polyester, which is still possible to silk screen onto, but was a very large format oversized print. Our set up is slightly different than printing on anything else, but we have the system down to pump them out and make them look great.

The flags were flown around the entire festival and looked amazing!!

 

Seeing Trails Bandana Printing

Hiking Group? Los Angeles? You wouldn't think those 2 things went together, seeing that there isn't many mountains in Los Angeles. Well the hiking group Seeing Trails has found a way to get around that. These guys make bi-weekly trips up to the San Gabriel Mountains to explore, hike, be together with friends and...well, See Trails! :)

They needed some bandanas. We created them. These bandanas not only got a pretty amazing and super unique dye wash (each one was pretty customized in and of itself) but we were also able to print their amazing logo large on the front of these bandanas.

Because these bandanas were going to be touching bare skin, we decided to use a very light waterbased ink made of charcoal. It is actually a very dark grey color and was best so there were no solvents or other harmful chemicals in any of the inks that we used here. 

Great work guys! Keep up the amazing trip!

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.

Wonderful Pistachios Camo Fabric Printing

We were able to do another small print run for a Wonderful Pistachios commercial (starring the one, the only Stephen Colbert) and this was slightly different from the last fabric print that we did for this same company. (Video can be seen HERE)

This print was still as lengthy, full sized printing on fabric, except this time it was a 3 color print. Much more time consuming. The process started out the same (building a pallet that big to print, making films and burning screens to fit that sized screen), but the registration and color matching was slightly different.

Overall, the prints turned out amazingly. As you can see here, and in the final video of our new "The Late Show with David Letterman" host replacement.

 

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! :)