Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 24

SPECIAL ISSUE: INNOVATION

one of the reasons he was able to get such great-looking flesh
tones, because the dot gain that is normally really intense in
the highlight areas was now mixing with wet white, and in the
process, it caused the color to pastel back."
More than 30 years later, those early Harley-Davidson prints
are still astonishing. "Dave's work kind of set the foundation
and the bar," says Anderson. "It was very dynamic for what we
were seeing in four-color process work back then, because it
used solid colors to get all the forms and shadows of a fullcolor piece of art. It was very refined." For the next few years,
though, the work would remain known mostly to Harley enthusiasts until Gardner returned to Buffalo and entered into one of
the most productive partnerships in the history of the industry.
Meanwhile, process-color printing advanced throughout
the 1980s as the technology improved and printers learned
to tame the many variables, the subject of Joe Clarke's book,
"Control Without Confusion" (developed from a series of
articles published in Screen Printing in 1985-86). Coudray
remembers when a local separator purchased an early drum
scanner, eliminating the painstaking logarithmic calculations he
had been doing in his darkroom to get the reproduction quality
he wanted. Soon after, he bought a used Crosfield 640 and was
among the first to interface it to a Macintosh computer. "It was
a hack to the system," he explains. "We intercepted and jumped
the signal out of the Crosfield, ran it through a special computer
to interpret the signal, and sent it to a Quadra 950 where we
could manipulate it and output the film to an imagesetter."

WHEN SIMULATED PROCESS WENT VIRAL

Top, the NFL designs
from New Buffalo Shirt
Factory gained widespread acclaim. Center,
an early simulated
process print done in
1991 by Serigraphic
Designs. Bottom, this
1992 shirt from New
Buffalo celebrating the
back-to-back championships of the Chicago
Bulls was worn by Michael Jordan and Scottie
Pippen during the Bulls
victory parade through
Chicago instead of the
official shirt the players
were supposed to wear.
A photo published the
next day in USA Today of
the players wearing this
shirt led to hundreds of
thousands sold.

SCREENPRINTING

Jon Weiss was a motorcycle fanatic and the third-generation
owner of New Buffalo Shirt Factory, then a small screenprinting business in Buffalo. He had done some Harley designs
before the company started its licensing program. Soon, he
began seeing shirts at his local dealer with prints like nothing
he had seen before, all featuring the signature of the artist, Dave
Gardner. "He did one that was an image of a panhead motor,
and what fascinated me was that in the reflection of the chrome
air cleaner, you could see an image of somebody taking a picture," Weiss remembers. "That kind of stuff just blew my mind."
Then one day, he got a call from a young artist who
explained that he was semi-retired and looking to do contract
work with a local printer. Weiss quickly realized that the caller
had worked with all of the companies that then held Harley
licenses, and asked him his name. "He said, 'Dave Gardner,'
and I said 'Oh my God. I'm wearing one of your shirts right
now.' It was the panhead shirt, my favorite."
They met, trying to find common ground as Gardner
explained that he was looking for a set fee for each design
and the accompanying separations, as well as a substantial
royalty on orders that exceeded 6000 pieces. Realizing that
they shared a love of sports, Weiss suggested that they take
Gardner's distinctive look into a new vertical niche.
Gardner went home and created a design of the then-Los
Angeles Raiders mascot that started with a selfie he took with

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