Westwood Music Sign Printing

Westwood Music is the local music store of the West LA area that has all of the small town local guitar shop feel with none of the corporate guitar shop feel. It might be a time warp back to the 1990s when you walk in, but there is no question that you get addressed by a REAL guitar player who knows about every single guitar hanging in that shop and loves what they do and isnt only there to sell sell sell.

WW Music needed some new signs for their store, so they called us to help them with out with getting better signage for their windows. We suggested printing on coroplast signs, since this corrugated plastic material is inexpensive, is durable and lasts thru years of sunlight (which is what their signs will be through sitting in a window for ages). We decided on 4 different signs, each with a different saying on one side and their logo on the other.

Not only is printing on coroplast difficult, as well as printing large format, but doing single sample signs is extremely time consuming and complex: all of which these signs required us to complete. We were able to cut these signs down from a larger plastic, then by using the specialized coroplast ink we could lay down a thick white print, and air dry them until they were ready for delivery. These signs now hang in the windows of Westwood with all their shiny, printed white glory! :)

Hardcore Til I Die Booty Shorts

Our friends over at Rave Ready have some awesome things going: rave clothing for the EDM at heart. They have a great niche market and do really well for what they do. From a printers perspective, they are always trying new and crazy things, really wanting to push the boundaries and putting us printers to the test by pushing the limits of our knowledge at all times.

This last job they wanted to print Booty Shorts...not too crazy of a job but definitely not as simple as a Tshirt print. We helped them layout their artwork so that we split the design they had into 2 separate parts so that none of the artwork went over top of the middle seam (since we all know that would just lead to inconsistencies in the print). We also made sure to get a 100% cotton short so that we could use a Pro Discharge White ink, making it easy to print over such a non-flat surface.

The discharge ink bleaches out the dyes in the existing garment, leaving the natural garment color and making the print very smooth with a little to no hand feel. Because the discharge is a waterbased ink, it also is very smooth with printing over uneven surfaces, over seams/zippers but still keeping the print smooth without ink getting all gunked up.

The shorts turned out pretty rad, and best of all, they were stoked and sold out quickly. (must have been the Coachella crowd who bought them out).

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!!

 

Ray LaMontange Hand Printed Tour Posters

Hand Screen Printed posters are amazing. One of our favorite things in the shop is having the chance to print amazingly well designed tour posters. The difference between cheap full color offset printed posters and hand screen printed posters is obvious: one is cheaply made, bland and something that is machine made; and the other is beautifully crafted, hand made, ink that you can feel, and something that is as beautiful as it is unique. As screen printers, the ability to print flat stock is extremely more difficult than something like apparel...so for an artist-run shop like ours, we prefer printing things like posters because of the high caliber of experience it takes and the artistic value of the final product.

We had the ability to work with artist and illustrator James R. Eads to print some posters for Ray LaMontagne and his live show at the Red Rocks in Denver, Colorado. These posters were 5 colors and printed on French 110# coverstock, sized at 13" x 26". The pantone colors were selected by the artist, and we were able to do a run of about 200 of these. The posters turned out amazingly and we stand behind the idea that the print is ONLY as good as the artist: if you get a great artist and have the ability to print their artwork, the print will always look good due to the great illustration.

Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros Merch

We were recently reunited with our old friends from New Community Management, the managers of many acts like Edward Sharpe, Bad Suns, The Wild Ones, Lia Ices, and many others. ESMZ have recently departed on a short leg tour, and they needed some much needed hoodies printed for that leg of their tour.

The hoodies were Alternative Apparel Eco Fleece hoodie. The hoodie itself is a poly/cotton blend hoody, so its not possible to print discharge inks onto the hoodie (as we would normally do with 100% cotton, for a client who wanted super soft inks on their garments) so we had to just use super soft plastisol inks in order to achieve this look. The coverage still had to be there (so you couldn't see the color of the garment thru they ink itself) but it still needed it to be soft.

Punk Rock Hand Made Patches

For some, what is standard isn't good enough. That's what I realized when talking to the guys with Underground Alliance. Although these guys are a punk rock band, they naturally think outside the box of what is possible, and it really shows with what they are able to call "merch" for their band.

As we were talking about their band shirts for their upcoming show on the Warped Tour in LA, they asked what would happen if I printed as many different prints onto a Tshirt as we could, and then they could cut them out and use as patches. Wonderful idea!!

These turned out really cool, worked great for the style of their brand, and the best part was that it was so cheap because we chose to use a 3XL sized shirt to print these, and we were able to squeeze a lot of patches out of one single shirt, given its massive size.