Some artwork help!

[Printhouse]

Ok gang!  I was approached by my daughters orthodontist about printing some shirts for them.  They held a contest over the past two months where patients were allowed to submit and vote on designs to be printed.  Today they picked the three winners.  One is a very simple text only, 4 color design.....  the other two, slightly more complex.  I am trying to decide the best way to print these.  The smile design is to be printed on black tees and the artsy design is to be printed on white tees.  I thought about taking the time to trace them both and and just create spot color jobs out of them.  The artsy one would be a nice easy print with some half tones for the shading of colors.  I worry about the smile design getting too thick using plastisol with an under base and top colors, I thought about discharge printing the entire thing or maybe a discharge UB with reduced plastisols on top.  So, I guess my question involves both the conversion of the artwork AND the printing style.  I look forward to ANY insight!!!  As far as programs I have Photoshop, Illustrator and Coreldraw al at my disposal.

[jason-23]

HAHAHAHA...Sorry...I couldn't resist.

[Printhouse]

Sadly that was my initial thought!  I was hoping to take the ideas they had and make actual art based on it.

[Homer]

this came up a few weeks ago - are you SURE they want a redrawn look or do they like the "crayola" look of this art? I think it would fit perfectly to keep the art as is, sep it and run it.

[Printhouse]

I was trying to find the post from a few weeks ago!  They are indifferent to the way it gets printed. 

[Printhouse]

Also keep on mind that i am just a simple little old spot color printer!  That being said I am ready to learn.

[Sbrem]

Halftones are spot colors too, don't let them throw you. The smile doesn't have to be thick with plastisol; you could use 2 whites, both on fine meshes, an underbase and highlight white that wouldn't feel thick. The discharge underbase will also work, though it's been a while since we've used it here.

Steve

[Printhouse]

I was thinking two whites originally.  My biggest issue is not know how to really sep this thing out.  I am so used to straight forward vector style art. 

[Sbrem]

Do they want it to "capture" the childlike qualities, or redo it to look more professional? In which case you can just recreate it in Illustrator or Corel Draw...

Steve

[Printhouse]

I was thinking of buying Simple Seps today and trying to run them through it.  I do have a graphics guy that helps me out coming to take a look at them today.  Just way more advanced then I am used to dealing with!

[tonypep]

A lot of these companies like Ultraseps have a free one month trial

[Denis Kolar]

I tries UltraSeps with a success. I'm just waiting to have a job that needs it so I will need to buy it.
I do not want to spend money on something I do not need right away.

It is a good software, but you will still need to mess with the file before you sep it.

[Ripcord]

I'd take the "artsy" design and print the parts that show in black as both white graphics and also underbase for the two other colors, which I would overprint as halftones. In my opinion there's no reason to work any harder on it. It will look fine as a 3-color print and would be easy enough to separate as spot colors as is or to add your own fonts to the replace the hand written copy.

[screenxpress]

Well, the "Smile" ain't a gonna work some too good on black.

Not unless you change the text on the top and the phone number on the bottom to white.  Well, that is IF they expect to be able to call.