![]() ![]() I used photographic masking and multiple contacting techniques to reverse and drop colors out, as opposed to just dropping a red on top of a yellow and magenta. “The process-color inks that were available then were horrible. “We’d always been using touch plates and bump plates because you couldn’t get a good red or a deep royal blue,” Coudray says. Pioneers like Coudray and Anderson soon discovered the advantages of supplementing CMYK with additional colors. It was a very involved process, and very technical, and if you didn’t have all of your procedures and elements in place, the outcome was iffy, at best.” “Everything had to be documented and dialed in so the variables were controlled. ![]() “It was a time when we learned that our squeegees had to be sharp, our tensions had to be correct, the coating had to be consistent,” recalls Andy Anderson of Anderson Studio. And there were many, from the quality of the inks, meshes, stencil systems, and printing equipment to the countless variables that had to be controlled in order to get consistent results. The transparency of CMYK inks – the quality that allows them to produce secondary and tertiary shades through the overlapping of halftone dots – exposed every limitation of the garment screen printing technology of the day. He taught himself tricks with a process camera that gave him more suitable line counts for screen printing, but this was just the first of many obstacles. The award-winning Nocona Boot series, produced by Mark Coudray of Serigraphic Designs in 1979, was the first four-color process shirt to feature a highlight white. “I found a guy who could do separations, but the coarsest screen he had was 85 lines,” Coudray remembers, laughing, “so that’s what I had to start with.” He began playing with process-color prints onto shirts while still at the university, quickly realizing that the halftone work of the day was being done for other printing processes at line counts that screen printing was incapable of reproducing. “The consensus was it couldn’t be done,” says Mark Coudray, who by the time of the litho transfer boom had changed his major at Cal Poly from mechanical engineering to graphic communication and devoted his thesis to the limitations of halftone screen printing. Screen printers were poised to fill the void, but none had figured out how to get a process-color image onto a shirt. The problem was that litho-printed transfers were uncomfortable to wear and had terrible durability, causing them to quickly fall out of favor with consumers. Litho transfers such as the iconic Farrah Fawcett swimsuit photograph created a new demand for realistic images on apparel. Here, we take a deep dive into the development of simulated process color.Īround the time that printed T-shirts were becoming the uniform for American teenagers in the mid-1970s, the artwork of the medium began to grow beyond line art and boldly lettered slogans. In our special Innovation Issue, we present a collection of expert essays on an important technology in the industry today.
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