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.
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We recently printed for a really dope Los Angeles brand called Plain White Steez.
Most of these prints are printed with soft waterbased ink, which make the prints vibrant yet feel like its still part of the garment. One of them was printed digitally with our Brother GT-361
digital garment printer. With digital printing, we can print up to 256
Million Billion Zillion colors. Pretty unlimited. All tees are printed on
American Apparel goods, Made in LA!
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.
Special Effects printing in Screen Printing is sometimes something of wonder. Its amazing to see the modern advances of science and ink research & development in today's day in age.
With 'Always Out Front', we have been working with these guys for years and years, and their brand has surprisingly evolved from a fixie bike crew to now a car racing crew. They build old cars, put mega-motors inside them and take them to the race track to see what their time will do in terms of speed.
They are always looking for something unique: nothing standard, but they always seem to have an "over the edge" mentality of the design and printing of their merch. I love that about screen printing, because clients like this keep us screen printers on our toes, making sure we are to our best potential and on our best foot always.
These are fashion fit tank tops, Tultex brand, with a single color print on the Front, Back and inside tags. This ink is metallic gold plastisol, printed thru a very low 110 mesh screen (so the metallic pieces can slip thru the small holes of the screen) and dried on our belt dryer with forced air (the only way to truly cure metallic inks) for 3 minutes under 320 degrees.
Shipping mailers are an essential way of making your brand or business look bigger than it actually is, while still staying on top of the branding game. As we have done for others in the past, shipping mailers printed with a personal brand logo on them is always a way to stand apart from the rest. This is something in the past that has been thought of as costing a lot of money to get done, AND with a very high minimum order. The way that we print all panels in a single print, we are able to do lower quantities for people AND keep the cost way down for each order.
Most recently we printed some literature mailers for J. Bones Clothing and they turned out amazingly. These 18x6x4 kraft mailers are printed on every panel of the box, with a single color print using solvent-free waterbased inks.
There are those who are OK with what is traditional. Sometimes a basic wedding is OK for people. Basic dress. Basic ceremony. Basic cake. Basic reception. Basic wedding invitations. For others, basic is far from what they envision for their special day. They go out on a limb, reach for the non-traditional, and sometimes really outshine others.
We had the opportunity to print some amazing wedding invites for the later. They had a great vision, one that went against the grain, was inventive, was forward thinking, yet served multiple purposes at once. Wedding invite, postcard style, scored and perforated, then folded making the final product 6" x 4". But, its like an according, when unfolded reveals 4 sections on each side, each with a different element of the wedding that needs to be communicated to the attendees. Then the last page, perforated and tearable, is the RSVP card to mail back to them. All in one.
When exploring our options for this card, one of the limitations for us was printing super fine text with metallic ink. Most metallic inks have metallic pieces actually inside the ink, requiring them to be burned on lower mesh screens so the metal pieces can pass thru the holes of the screen. Lower mesh screens make it impossible to burn and keep fine detail in artwork. This was a concern, but we solved it.
We printed black French paper, custom cut at 17" x 6". 80 hand printed, limited edition pieces. We custom mixed the Permaset inks to the colors requested (White, Metallic Gold, Mint) and went to town on these. Once printed, we scored and perforated them, then folded for delivery. We were happy with the final product, and so were they! This is what happens when you think outside the box.
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.
