Consider this: a customer, let’s call her Jane, wants a specific design – a vibrant orange and red sunset bleeding into the cool indigo of a bustling city skyline. The skyscrapers should glisten with the last rays of the day, while the city begins to twinkle with nightlife. She mentions that she loves the impressionistic…
We love gathering the garment decoration industry’s best and brightest to discuss the future of the industry and we have them here in this Shop Talk. Alex Phelan of Merchadise , Jacob Edwards of Jakprints , Michelle Moxley of M&R and Ed Levy of Hirsch Solutions joined Rick at the Impressions Expo in Long Beach…
MidJourney is so cool. It’s open-ended, gives you a dopamine hit with its speed and randomness. I can force genres out of it, and famous images. I can feed it source images and get pretty cool stylizations. I can even /blend images and /describe images. For the most part, MidJourney is an exploration of the…
Starting a side hustle is one thing, growing that side hustle into a dedicated screen print shop is another. Most vendors and media focus on newcomers or big shops, but in this Shop Talk Rick and YouTuber and business coach StanBanks talk about what you need to do and what you need to consider to grow…
I had the pleasure of visiting Midnight Prints and Bill Heintz in New Orleans and even got to hear his great band The Bills. I have been very lucky in my life to have been able to visit many many shops from some of the biggest with dozens of giant autos, to people printing 12…
If you’re looking for a dose of inspiration, you are in for a treat with this Shop Talk with industry legend Dave Gardner, the inventor of simulated process printing, the “underbase” print, creator of the iconic Harley Davidson t-shirts of the 1980s and now Director of Creative Embellishment at Gildan. When he started there were…
It is always very interesting to see what is offered at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival for merchandise. The music is the best it could be as is the food, and the merch is no exception, also good stuff. Close to 500,000 people attend over two long weekends and besides seeing everything from…
Dye migration is when the color in a fabric (usually polyester or a poly blend) “migrates” into the ink you have printed. Just the other day in an airport I saw a group of people all wearing the same red golf shirts and the prints on them all were pink to varying degrees instead of…
We use Newman Roller Frames and have always had trouble keeping track of what mesh is on them. “Permanent” marker is erased after a few screen washes. You can’t etch the metal as the mesh on any frame might eventually change. A tip of the proverbial cap to Erik at Saati for this trick We…
Ink Kitchen went old school into the future at the Impressions Expo in Atlantic City. We did some great live poster printing, in keeping with analog hand-done artwork being more and more appreciated in a world filling up with digital work. Recent shows indicate how our industry can go into a community and make a…
