Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 21

At a time that many high-end garment printers were
struggling to produce realistic images in CMYK, an
artist took an entirely different approach that would
eventually take the industry by storm.
STEVE DUCCILLI, ASDPT

round the time that printed T-shirts were becoming the
uniform for American teenagers in the mid-1970s, the artwork
of the medium began to grow beyond line art and boldly lettered slogans. Litho transfers such as the iconic Farrah Fawcett swimsuit photograph created a new demand for realistic
images on apparel. The problem was that litho-printed transfers were uncomfortable to wear and had terrible durability,
causing them to quickly fall out of favor with consumers.
Screen printers were poised to fill the void, but none had
figured out how to get a process-color image onto a shirt. "The
consensus was it couldn't be done," says Mark Coudray, who
by the time of the litho transfer boom had changed his major
at Cal Poly from mechanical engineering to graphic communication and devoted his thesis to the limitations of halftone
screen printing. He began playing with process-color prints
onto shirts while still at the university, quickly realizing that
the halftone work of the day was being done for other printing
processes at line counts that screen printing was incapable
of reproducing. "I found a guy who could do separations, but
the coarsest screen he had was 85 lines," Coudray remembers,
laughing, "so that's what I had to start with."
He taught himself tricks with a process camera that gave him
more suitable line counts for screen printing, but this was just
the first of many obstacles. The transparency of CMYK inks -
the quality that allows them to produce secondary and tertiary
shades through the overlapping of halftone dots - exposed every
limitation of the garment screen printing technology of the day.
And there were many, from the quality of the inks, meshes, stencil systems, and printing equipment to the countless variables
that had to be controlled in order to get consistent results.
"It was a time when we learned that our squeegees had to
be sharp, our tensions had to be correct, the [emulsion] coating had to be consistent," recalls Andy Anderson of Anderson
Studio. "Everything had to be documented and dialed in so the
variables were controlled. It was a very involved process, and
very technical, and if you didn't have all of your procedures
and elements in place, the outcome was iffy, at best."
Pioneers like Coudray and Anderson soon discovered the
advantages of supplementing CMYK with additional colors.
"We'd always been using touch plates and bump plates because
you couldn't get a good red or a deep royal blue," Coudray
says. "The process-color inks that were available then were
horrible. I used photographic masking and multiple contacting
techniques to reverse and drop colors out, as opposed to just

The award-winning Nocona Boot series (top), produced by Mark
Coudray of Serigraphic Designs in 1979, was the first four-color
process shirt to feature a highlight white. The bottom image features
what may be the first simulated process-color print, a 1984 HarleyDavidson design and the first work Dave Gardner did at 3D Emblem.

Thanks to Dave Gardner, Mark Coudray, and Andy Anderson for
contributing the shirts shown in this article.

DECEMBER 2017 / JANUARY 2018

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