Today’s TIP.
Perfect doesn’t come easy. Be more critical of your own art and separations but more open to being less critical of the results of what is provided to you by someone else to produce. What?
Here’s what I mean.
We all strive for perfection or to do better than the last time. With apparel printing, it’s a challenge and what makes apparel printing so great is that the challenge is actually always obtainable with more time. But what I want to say, is to not get ahead of yourself. It will come.
As an artist, I know that one of the biggest setbacks or holds on an artist growth is ourselves. We struggle with wanting that perfection right away. This is why so many creative people just give up on art and do something else with faster results. They want what they want it to look like “right now” and when starting out, you can’t get that right away and it’s very frustrating. This is often the same for color separations and printing on apparel. To ease the pain of waiting on perfection, we need to document our accomplishments so that we can track them, learn from them and also appreciate just how far we have come or have grown.
When we “create the art ourselves”, and we separate it, we are less critical of the results. It’s ours and we can be less critical and more forgiving and might see some things that can be changed but we know the customer may never see what we see wrong with it...and the customer may even think “this is what it is to look like". Others see what we have done and we receive some accolades and become satisfied with the results more easily.
When we are given someone else’s art to reproduce, we find it far more frustrating because “we” didn’t create it with screen printing and color separation in mind. It doesn't have the multi layers to easily make isolated corrections and adjustments so it's far more time consuming to get it just right. Often, we need to move along onto another project and we must let it go as is, without making it perfect. Customers have no clue what we need or how we do what we do and they don’t really care. They want nice looking tee shirts.
It’s very easy for any of us to post up a picture of something we’ve printed that is ours, it’s our art and our separations. Often, the original art is not posted up for a comparison and we receive the comments “great job!, Well done!, Looks fantastic!, "Oh, I wish I could do that” but in reality, if we compare the original side by side with the results, how much honest feedback would we really get and when we do get honest feedback, how many times would you continue to post the comparison side by side and ask, “How am I doing”?
Any printer with a few years under their belt of servicing difficult customers with critical art, with multiple colors knows, it’s not always so easy. They don’t all always look “perfect” when compared to the original. Some of these customers want far more than we can possibly give them on a tee shirt with the color restrictions we have on press...and the customer does not know this. Many of the "outside of the industry”artist are the worst! Painters and photographers are very difficult. They can be the toughest customers because they expect it to look like what they gave you and they don’t understand why it cannot be like the original by this Tues. It’s just not always easy to accomplish.
As an artist that is a screen print shop employee, We try, we get as close as we can within the time frame given. As an owner, we want to do the best we can, and go the extra mile, but sometimes, that’s just not enough yet, and we still need to meet the deadline. That’s “business”. We have to get jobs in, and get them completed. Often, not to perfection, but as long as we are always striving to do better, each jobs gets closer and closer with time.
As a freelance color separator, we work on jobs much longer than the average (in house) color separator. Often times, not making very good money when breaking it down per hr. This tho, is the sacrifice a good separator makes. Some jobs, we make good money on and other, not so much. It’s a choice to do your best...and often takes a very lone time. So much so that print shop owners would cringe and call an art staff meeting to solve this problem if they only knew just how much time is put into completing a job and making it perfect. You can look at any of the award winning tee shirt prints in any competition and know, they did not simply run the art through an automated separation program and then started to burn screens. They tweaked, adjusted, and re-adjusted over and over again until they felt they got it as close as it could be. Some of these award winning jobs had taken 4, 6 or 12 hours of separations time.
Perfect doesn’t come easy. Perfect comes with time.
