www.images-magazine.com JUNE 2022 images 29 KB TIPS & TECHNIQUES This stunningly detailed World of Warcraft print is a collaboration between separations specialist Flying Colours Textiles and screen printing company Advartex. The director of Flying Colours, Engin Ibrahim, breaks down the separation process used to achieve this photorealistic result Anatomy of a print www.advartex.co.uk www.flyingcolourstextiles.com The design was part of three big-selling merch T-shirt designs for the box-office hit World of Warcraft, all separated by Flying Colours and printed by Advartex. We go through the original image and ‘separate’ each colour to eventually build them up so that the separation looks identical to the original image – generally, what we see on screen is how the final print on the shirt will look. We use manual separations for every job that comes through our studio. This is always going to give you the best result as each image is separated on its own merit, whereas using an automatic plug-in treats every job the exact same, so you will never achieve the perfect result that you and your client expect and deserve. We supply a large range of customers with digital files or we also offer the option of outputting film for those who need the service. The screens were all 90t mesh and the emulsion used was Saati HT Fast Emulsion. The Advartex team used a discharge base with plastisol colours overprinted – all the inks were from Fujifilm Sericol. The base white is always one of the most important elements of a separation. It is the ground work for brighter colours to pop and for the shirt to do the work for the darker areas. This helps with the overall softness of the print. Whether its solid block colours or a complex colour photographic image, we only ever use Adobe Photoshop for colour separation. Every tool we could ever need for a perfect separation is built into Photoshop, which means we can also improve lower resolution images to separate better than you’d expect them to. Lo-res images aren’t ideal, however, as the best results are always going to be from hires artwork that has been created for the purpose of being printed on a larger scale. The design was printed at Advartex on an M&R Gauntlet M3 press, using 60/90/60 durometer squeegees. The screens were created using a direct-to-screen machine, the M&R I-Image STE. Each colour separation was given a Pantone reference for the print shop.
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