>>From Software to Substrate
Giving Back
Catch Lon Winters live when he
presents the following seminars
at The NBM Show…
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Before we start getting into the season of telling stories about the wind in our hair and rivin’ our rigs, we thought we would take a moment to give a little back because we
have been blessed with so much in our lives. Yeah, yeah, we do get a little soft here and there,
and are actually pretty spiritual guys for the most part—we even sell a line of Christian clothing called Christian Edge. And, a number of the examples we’ve shown in this space in the
magazine have been for outreach programs, like the one in this example, for churches and
schools; all part of our Christian Edge brand.
Over the years, Calvary Chapel in Aurora, Colo., an outreach program, has developed into
a great client for us. Calvary is growing its churches all over the country and this one has
become one of the largest in the region. They have book store for obvious products like The
Good Book and, you guessed it, wearables and decorated apparel. Aside from the Christian
Edge branded product that they stock, the pastor and some of the volunteers came to us after
service and asked us to develop a youthful yet tasteful set of images for the book store using
the Calvary message and recognizable dove. No sweat… it’s what we do.
Mix it Up: Multi-Media
Embellishments
3 p.m. to 4: 30 p.m.
May 6; Fort Worth, Texas
June 3; Indianapolis
Aug. 12; Long Beach, Calif.
Nov. 4; Charlotte, N. C.
Specialty applications expert Lon Winters
will walk you through some simple techniques and applications you can offer to customers without a tremendous investment.
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Seal of approval
In one of the designs for our wearable art, we thought we would go for the stamped collegiate
seal look. It was off to Google for a little research on collegiate seals to find a couple images
we liked. We copied one of the more interesting pieces onto our desktop, where we saved and
then imported into Illustrator to begin working. We first selected a box around the image and
resized it up a bit. With the live trace button and with the preview checked, we played around
with different settings under tracing options until we came to a suitable trace. Then we hit
the expand button and ungrouped the image. Doing so allowed us to select and remove the
type and other undesirable areas to dial in the shape we were shooting for. After choosing a
type tool, font and size, we replaced the type with “Calvary.”
We created a path to wrap around the curves of the circle in the main shape. We were able
to shape and twist the type just right to fit the spaces and, to add some texture, we threw a dis-
tressed filter over the top. This also busted everything up a bit and created some negative space.
This layer was duplicated to a second layer, which was reduced considerably by selecting
and dragging in a corner. Some scrolls from our vector art collections and archives were
added to each side of the smaller shape to give the second layer a classic, yet up-to-date look.
Both shapes were rotated oppositely by selecting each on the corner and we placed the smaller of the two circle images over the upper-right location of the big seal. We even added the
recognizable dove floating off by itself for a third color, where we could throw in some foil.
In order to achieve butt-to-butt registration, the two seal shapes would normally need
to be knocked out of the other. Illustrator does this automatically for output in the layers
it creates. But we wanted to change it up a bit so the two layers were output separately.
Beyond Special Effects:
Specialty Printing Inks and
Technique
1 p.m. to 2: 30 p.m.
May 7; Fort Worth, Texas
June 4; Indianapolis
Aug. 13; Long Beach, Calif.
Nov. 5; Charlotte, N. C.
Learn valuable techniques to add unique
textures and dimension to your prints and
offer these dynamic results to your customers. Move beyond special effects and
into becoming a specialty printer.
Doing so enabled us to print wet on wet
and create an additional color where they
overlap.
We decided on a couple of super soft-tone
inks that would go on most any colored
T-shirt—an antique lighter tone-on-tone
in the foreground and a grayed-out darker
tone for the background shape. Because the
colors are both lighter and darker than the
substrate color, a white printer or base plate
would not be necessary. We wanted the color of the shirt to influence our shades in this
case, so we used a white and a black ink cut
down considerably with Fashion Soft and
curable reducer as well as a foil adhesive for
the floating dove.
