Texsource 3-Day Art Design Essentials Class - June 28-30

THIS CLASS, DESIGNED FOR SCREEN PRINTERS, WILL BE HELD AT OUR GA FACILITY -  June 28-30, 2023

We'll teach you why you should care about art design, how smart, skilled designers can save you money and win you jobs, and how to better integrate your art design team, screen room and production staff. 

Day One 

• Understanding and using the most important tools in Illustrator and Photoshop - Illustrator and Photoshop provide screen printers with powerful tools to bring designs to life. They can also be complex, providing users with multiple options to solve design challenges. Screen printers will learn to understand each program's most useful tools and shortcuts to speed up design work.
• The power of smart workflows and reusable templates - Work smarter, not harder. You'll learn to spot opportunities to standardize design packages and organize and save design files. No matter the job - shirts, stickers, logos, hoodies or hats - you'll learn to quickly create mock designs that work for you.
• Converting CMYK images to spot colors - Converting process colors to solid spot colors is a fundamental skill. We'll show you how to make the conversion process easy, and create custom swatch libraries built around Pantone colors or the custom colors your shop uses daily.
• Creating an underbase for light-on-dark printing - Whether you're trying to produce vibrant spot color designs, intricate linework or simple block art, you need to efficiently create a white underbase to print light colors on dark fabrics. We'll show you how to create underbases that will allow you to print crisp, vibrant designs no matter the color of your substrate.
• Create effective customer proofs - We'll teach you to spend less time and less effort creating customer proofs. Understand at a glance when designs were sent to and approved by customers and keep a record of changes made during the design process. This makes communication with clients stress-free and keeps your production staff in the loop on design changes and job requirements.

   

@tiktok_screen_printer Production art #screenprintermike #customtshirts #illustratortutorial #photoshoptips ♬ original sound - Screen Printer Mike

Day Two 

• Working with distressed images - Adding the right texture to design layers can set your screen prints apart from your competitors, but pulling off realistic textures and distressed looks can be a complex and difficult process. We'll simplify it for you.
• Learn the power of the appearance menu - Learn to edit objects, shapes and fills in a variety of ways - and keep track of it all - via Illustrator's appearance menu. You'll be able to tweak and finetune strokes, fills, graphic styles and effects and learn hacks that will speed up your design process.
• The intricacies of converting raster images to vector designs - Transform raster based .jpg and .png images to easily scalable vector designs you'll need to produce film outputs and screens. Learn to make the best use of Illustrator's built-in - yet sometimes tricky - image trace tool and how to clean up the end result, or manually reproduce designs in specific circumstances.'
• Mastering the pen tool, including digitizing designs - Gain a deeper understanding of Illustrator's most powerful tool, including keyboard shortcuts and workflow hacks. We'll also cover hand-tracing physical designs - like old decals, stickers or physical logos - that will allow you to screen print custom designs.
• Creating custom effects, including glows and halos - Use and create custom effects, including shadows, halo and glow patterns, to bolster designs that look great on screen printed media. 
• Design with halftones in mind - including lines per inch, angle, dot shape and mesh count considerations. Learn how to ensure the halftones in your digital design will translate effectively to film output devices, printing screens and ultimately your press.

Day Three 

• Master color separations in Photoshop - Learn to use Photoshop to manually separate color channels. Then, use custom Photoshop actions to do the work for you.  
• Controlling dot gain - Learn how to define and control dot gain in your designs and screens. You'll understand why dot gain can cost you detail when actually printing your designs, and what screen printers can do to solve the problem. 
• High-end separations, including spot color, CMYK and duotones - A discussion of the factors that can influence high-end color separations, including the role experimentation plays in helping pinpoint and fix problems. The goal is to help your shop quickly determine whether a particular design - or client - is right for you and your shop. 
• How to set up files for stickers, banners and heat transfers - Once you've mastered the mechanics of designing for screen printed t-shirts, we'll teach you how to setup and use those files when producing other media like stickers, banners and plastisol heat transfers. 
• Printing color separations to a postscript film output device or direct-to-screen machine - You'll understand why Raster Image Processor software programs are a critical component of the printing process that can save you time, money and headaches. 
• How to hold detail when burning screens - You'll combine all the previous days' skills by exposing and developing screens. You'll see how successfully controlling variables can help you capture greater detail in your images. You'll also see what a failed attempt at burning a detailed image looks like. 

Location

Texsource Screen Printing Supply
2783 Peterson Pl NW, Norcross, GA 30071

*note - Texsource reserves the right to use video and photos from our classes for promotional purposes.