I’ve been creating designs and illustrations for print since 1987. I’ve done work for silkscreen, offset sheetfed and web printing, flexographic printing, lithography–the list goes on. For this project however I had to separate the Pantone ink colors by hand. Well it didn’t start that way. These images are the roughs and final art for a CIFF (Calgary International Film Festival) poster. I got to choose a movie to illustrate. I chose the 1977 movie “Slapshot”. I loved the three goons–the Hanson Brothers. I created the art and submitted it, the printer made me re-do it because the screen was too fine for silkscreening. But when I re-did it 100 pixels per inch the image was not sharp enough. Great, so I re-did it in Adobe Illustrator (for clarity), the illustrator version was my third version of the art. But the printer then told me that I had to do each separate ink color on a separate layer with no overlap. That meant copying the art on each color layer and then using it to knock out the color on the other two ink colors (fourth version, now). Oh yeah, and making my own 100 line dot pattern too. Twenty hours into the project and I was done. Ink color separations are typically done by a software RIP (Raster Image Processor), but for some reason the printer couldn’t do that so now I can add to my credits; Guy Parsons, RIP.
