Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 22

SPECIAL ISSUE: INNOVATION

Left, a 1980 Serigraphic Designs four-color process shirt done with water-based inks and a highlight white. Center, by the late 1970s, Andy Anderson
was using solid color inks through halftones to produce dramatic color blends. Right, another of Gardner's early Harley-Davidson shirts from 1984.

dropping a red on top of a yellow and magenta. We were always
concerned about having too much ink down on the garment,
so that meant removing the yellow and magenta in the correct
densities, and it involved a lot of calculations."
In 1979, Coudray's award-winning Nocona Boot series
included the first four-color process shirt that incorporated
a highlight white into the print sequence. By the early 1980s,
Anderson (who would also go on to win awards for his processcolor work) began printing solid color inks through halftones to
produce line art with rich color blends. But a newcomer to the
industry soon took those ideas in a radical new direction.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF PROCESS PRINT
In 1983, Dave Gardner was a few months short of receiving a
B.F.A. in oil painting from SUNY Buffalo when he headed to
Texas seeking a job as an illustrator. He spotted an ad from
a Fort Worth company called 3D Emblem that was looking
for an artist to produce designs for Harley-Davidson T-shirts.
Though he had no professional screen printing experience,
Gardner had experimented with it since he was 15. "My parents gave me a Hunt Speedball home kit and I started making
my own Kiss shirts," he recalls. "I started out with one-color
prints, and then I figured out I could airbrush on additional
colors. I had the drive to do more complex things, and eventually I began making my own heat transfers."
Gardner joined the industry right as the stakes for producing
branded apparel grew exponentially higher. Within two weeks
of starting at 3D Emblem, he says the company received a cease
and desist letter from Harley-Davidson, which resulted in them
becoming one of the first three licensed producers of apparel
for the brand. The artwork wouldn't just be sold to individual
dealers any longer - it had to be great.
To Gardner, the challenge of bringing an iconic brand to life
on the canvas of a black T-shirt inspired him to combine the
techniques he had learned in art school with his earlier screen
printing experiments. "My idea was basically to take what I had
been doing with a transfer and print it in reverse. With transfers,
22

SCREENPRINTING

you would start with the colors through a high mesh count and
then finish with a low mesh white behind it so that it would stick
to the shirt." He realized that if he started by direct printing a
similarly thick layer of ink and flashing it, he'd get a canvas of
sorts onto which he could render highly intricate details.
But instead of attempting to reproduce a photographic
image through process color, Gardner developed his own
highly individual approach. He would start with simple line
art or a photograph and use a Rapidograph to make a master
black-and-white drawing, from which he would then create individual color separations by hand. "No full-color art
existed," he explains. "It was all created with black-and-white
plates, kind of in my head visualizing what the final art was
going to look like. To this day, when I think about the work
that I put in, maybe 40 hours doing one separation, I don't
know that I could do it now."
Because the company only had an eight-color press at the
time, Gardner realized that further creativity would be needed
to achieve the spectrum of colors he envisioned. Significantly,
he decided to use a brown underbase instead of the traditional
white. Beyond freeing up a print station and flashing much
more efficiently than white, the brown allowed Gardner to get
greater depth of color by printing on and off the underbase.
To get around the limited number of print stations, he
decided to print everything but the underbase wet on wet, an
unorthodox practice with design advantages others had not yet
discovered. "As they say, paradigm shifts usually come from
somebody who's got no clue," he laughs. "To me, I was just
creating an oil painting on a shirt. Other people looked at
screen buildup with ink picking up on the back of the screens as
a negative, and tried to flash it and control the dot; I looked at it
more like a palette knife. It was something that was going to help
me blend the color underneath. I used it to my advantage."
Coudray says that this wet-on-wet, "smashed dot" technique
was a big factor in the success of Gardner's work. "The thing
that was really cool was that he understood the relationship of
the underbase to [color] saturation," Coudray explains. "This is

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018