Famous award winning Screen Printers

[alan802]

Nobody has mentioned Lon Winters and Graphic Elephants or New Buffalo Shirt Factory.  I don't know who the production/print guru is at New Buffalo or who their Lon Winters is.

[sweetts]

Pierre is the man

Sent  from samsung gem(the worst smart phone ever)

[JBLUE]

The following people are members here and are among the TOP printers in the US.

Dan Zamuda   - Castle Shirt Co.
Rick Roth        - Mirror Image
Toni Pepitone  - Not sure where he's at now.
Mark Coudray - Not printing himself but is consulting

How about our own, Pierre.
He took some awards in last few years, and that is only after a few years of printing.

Yeah but didn't he work with an award winning and famous art sep artist to win the awards? I mean that raises the question " what is award winning mean"? Your only as good as the artist really. Anybody can shoot screens, make films, set up a job, and put ink in it but if your art is junk you get junk.... my .02!

This is not entirely true. Art is only a portion of it. A good printer can do a lot even with art that is not the greatest.

Anybody can shoot screens, make films, set up a job, and put ink in it

This right here is what separates the men from the boys. You could have the best art in the world, with the best seps, and if the above is not done right the print will still look like sh i t! Its not that easy. If it were than this would be an art forum and not a printing forum

[alan802]

It all comes together when every part of the process is world class.  If any of the major variables are sub-par, then the final print will show that.  If you have the greatest seps in the world but use 10 newton screens with swollen threads then the print will show it.  Everything works in unison and I really think that the old adage about a chain being as strong as it's weakest link holds true in screen printing when you get to that "world class" and "award winning" level of printing.

[tonypep]

The following people are members here and are among the TOP printers in the US.

Dan Zamuda   - Castle Shirt Co.
Rick Roth        - Mirror Image
Toni Pepitone  - Not sure where he's at now.
Mark Coudray - Not printing himself but is consulting

Thanks for the nod Dan. I am with Music City Networks in Nashville. Right around the corner from Andy. And yes we must include Pierre in the list.
tp

[Frog]

As long as we're analyzing this, who is (or should be) the actual "winner"?
The artist, the separator, the guy who made the screens (or the guy or cleaned them), the guy who set the job up on the press, the guy who actually loaded the shirts?
In the end, though I suppose that it would be the owner, even if he was on vacation at the time.
Of course, it's really the shop itself, with an extra nod to the production manager.

[blue moon]

trying to catch up after being gone for 5 days so not time to get into details, but there is no question the award winning requires equal amount of art, seps and printing. As Alan said, if any one of them is off, the whole print is not as good as it needs to be.

From what I have seen, Andy Anderson is the top dog in the US right now. I have seen many others and think that on a good day we are on par with all of it, but Andy's stuff is in a league of its own! His prints are superior on every level one can think of. . . (not to upset anybody, there's product from many printers that I have not seen yet, so this is just a general assumption based on the stuff from the ISS, SGIA and few other places)

Andy is a very nice guy, I had an opportunity to exchange few emails with him and meet him in person, but he is very busy and is a man of few words. 'not that he is trying to keep any secrets, he just comes across as uncomfortable with all the attention.

gotta go!

pierre

[Screened Gear]

I want to take a stab at explaining what makes a award winning screen printer. I have been around award winners in the past and they all think the same just to different levels.

Here it is. An award winning person, at anything, is a person that first can see room to improve. Most of these guys are OCD (I said Most not all). They are the person that can see room to improve were others give up or don't think it matters.

Here is an example: Lets take shooting free throws. The task is to shoot 10 free throws. How does 3 award winning people do it. They all know what is expected. 10 out of 10. So the first one gets 10 out of 10 and said there I was perfect you can't beat me. The second award winning guy said I can do better and shoots all ten without even touching the rim, there I did it better you hit the rim on 5 of yours. The third guy comes up and shoots all 10 perfectly without even touching the net. The other 2 guys said that’s cheating you used a tennis ball. The third guy said the task was to shoot free throws and to do it without touching the net I had to used better equipment then you guys to get the job done.  The rules said nothing about what I had to use to get the job done.

[ebscreen]

Andy's Tee Shirts not 5 miles from my shop has been winning awards for years.

And as far as I know, up until a few years ago it was all done on American Multiprinters.


As for art vs. printer, it really comes down to art. Bad/stupid art printed excellently is still
bad/stupid art that no one likes and is boring. Awesome art printed badly is still awesome art.
What's more interesting, a 700 micron HD print stacked eighteen times in the shape of a square
or Godzilla crushing Bambi printed on a Speedball setup with wood frames and a halogen
exposure? Any decent shop can or should be able to expose and print in register 60 LPI screens.
The rest is in the art/seps. And the best are artists that know and can make use of different
types of screen printing.

It reminds me of a post by a certain longhaired Texan in which he exalted a printer in India that produced
apparently beautiful prints using much less than the setup described above. All things he would chastise
any American printer back to the land of AB Dick for doing.

The true test of a printer is when a screen pops on press or the blanks come in late or they are some ridiculous
fabric content or you have 1 flash and 8 spot art plastisol colors to print on an underbase on poly garments.

[tpitman]

It all comes together when every part of the process is world class.  If any of the major variables are sub-par, then the final print will show that.  If you have the greatest seps in the world but use 10 newton screens with swollen threads then the print will show it.  Everything works in unison and I really think that the old adage about a chain being as strong as it's weakest link holds true in screen printing when you get to that "world class" and "award winning" level of printing.

Absolutely. I would add that for those of us who only use manual presses, completing any run with perfect consistency from print to print demands a level of concentration that we likely often don't maintain out of boredom, distraction, or fatigue. That isn't to say that the shirts can't be sold, and often the discrepancies are only visible to the printer, but it does point out that optimum work isn't simply a matter of some slacker pulling a squeegie across a screen, at least if you take any pride in your work.

[blue moon]

Andy's Tee Shirts not 5 miles from my shop has been winning awards for years.

And as far as I know, up until a few years ago it was all done on American Multiprinters.


As for art vs. printer, it really comes down to art. Bad/stupid art printed excellently is still
bad/stupid art that no one likes and is boring. Awesome art printed badly is still awesome art.
What's more interesting, a 700 micron HD print stacked eighteen times in the shape of a square
or Godzilla crushing Bambi printed on a Speedball setup with wood frames and a halogen
exposure? Any decent shop can or should be able to expose and print in register 60 LPI screens.
The rest is in the art/seps. And the best are artists that know and can make use of different
types of screen printing.

It reminds me of a post by a certain longhaired Texan in which he exalted a printer in India that produced
apparently beautiful prints using much less than the setup described above. All things he would chastise
any American printer back to the land of AB Dick for doing.

The true test of a printer is when a screen pops on press or the blanks come in late or they are some ridiculous
fabric content or you have 1 flash and 8 spot art plastisol colors to print on an underbase on poly garments.

two points here:
1. any decent shop should be able to hold the 55lpi down to about 6-7%. That will produce much better than average results. I don't think 60lpi at that level is easy.
2. any decent shop will produce decent results rather than award winning prints. To get to the award winning level you have to hold at least a 4% at 55lpi and spectacular press control. 3% at 65lpi is much better and has significantly higher chance of winning anything. There is a big gap between decent and top 1% and it is visible in the print. 

I'll also agree that the art is the most visible part of the print, just as the seps are not obvious at all. But when the print is out for judging on technical merit, the HD block will place higher than the speedball print. The customer might not care, but judges do. This would all be silly since the judges are not customers, but in the end better printers will produce better results for the customers. If they provide crap art, they will get crap back. With good art, good printers can make it be appreciated (think Mona Lisa, would anybody get excited about her if she was done with crayons?).

There is also a fine line of ROI. How much time should a company spend on improving the prints? I think we are at the level where our primary goal is to improve efficiency and the print quality is on hold. As the other parts of production catch up, we'll devote efforts to the print quality again, but right now, it would not get us any more work and produce anything discernible by the customer.

Andy's Tees prints some pretty impressive stuff. They are definitely better in some aspects than we are and not as good in others. Anybody looking at their prints at the show and not saying that they are excellent is missing something. If every print we made looked like the stuff they show at ISS, I would be ecstatic!

As far as the manual presses, I think that once you have the screens done,  most of the battle is over. The only issue I can think of with a manual is the consistency of the run. But, I only printed with a manual for 4 months so I could easily be waaaaay off!

And to keep going, there might be a little bit of OCD involved, too. I would say, at least in my case, it was the drive/desire to learn and the ability to see/grasp the difference rather than OCD. First part (drive/desire) is easy and can be forced, but the ability to perceive and quantify the problem and then solving it requires analytic thinking. Not everybody poseses that skillset and those shops either have to hire it or get there slowly, instinctively over a rather long period of time. And again, not trying to brag here as even though I can analyze things and have a skill that some ppl don't, I also lack many that an average person can do in their sleep. I have a strength in one particular section and am taking advantage of it. The places where I am weak, I have somebody else do it. Important part is to realize what your issues are and put something in play to deal with them. So after all this tangential babble, it is probably not OCD but just a desire to improve unlike the OCD which is mostly about repetition. It is a type of personality that is always finding a better way to do something and trying to fix things. We often end up being entrepreneurs and . . . DAMN, I sure feel like I am preaching to the choir here!!!!!! 'time to go fix something!

pierre

[Screened Gear]

"it is probably not OCD but just a desire to improve unlike the OCD which is mostly about repetition."

Pierre,

I heard some study once that many CEOs have some level of OCD. OCD is not a bad thing at a small level. We could call it a lot of things, drive, perfectionist, very dedicated. I only said that to put the picture in peoples head of how some award winners view their work. (not talking only about screen printers)

"which is mostly about repetition"

I would guess if you keep printing a shirt and making very fine edits for hours on end that would cover the repetition part of the OCD. Again OCD is a serious disease and I am not taking that lightly here. I am just saying a little OCD is found in a lot of people that excel in their field.

Sorry for the derail.

[tonypep]

I don't think it's ever one individual we should be referring to but a team that has developed a unique synergy. I've said before that a printer who can think like a separator and a separator who can think like a printer makes a dynamic that is hard to beat. Sure it's great to have the latest gadgets and equipment but in the end they are only tools. Knowledge of ink rheology, color theory, chemistry, physics, and interdependant variable theory are IMO more important.
You'd be suprised what we could do more than two decades ago!

[killergraphics]

Tony you are 100% right.

the ability to ,for see, the print you are after and the knowledge to know how to get their, in it's self puts one on a different plane.

I am going to Andy's shop soon and did not know you were in music city now.

If you knew in advance...be it Ok to stop by.

I'd love to meet ya and talk shop.

Johnny

[tonypep]

Sure Johnny but I more than likely won't be able to spare too much time. I'm in the middle of an acquisition right now; bringing in more equipment, allocating another bldg, etc.
Send me a PM and I'll give you my #