Pretty in pink
Hand-drawn design tops AI submissions in T-shirt contest
By Lon Winters
Images courtesy of Lon Winters
Each spring and fall for as long as we can remember, Volleyball of the Rockies (VOTR) faces the same challenge: coming up with another shirt design. We’ve been partnered with VOTR for more than three decades. Twice a year, thousands of players and 50-plus designs later, we may have printed every conceivable volleyball, mountain range, and Colorado sunset possible. The last few years, however, we’ve found a clever solution. VOTR opened the design process to the players. Submit a design and win free entry to the tournament if your design is chosen.
The entries that came in reflected our new era of artificial intelligence. There were dramatic mountain scenes, stylized volleyballs, futuristic illustrations — all AI. Some were pretty impressive. Some not. Some were strange. Some were suspiciously familiar. There was, however, one entry that stood out — and it wasn’t an AI-prompted image at all. It was created with watercolors and colored pencils on textured paper. It depicted the rear end of a pink 4X4 SUV loaded with volleyball gear, including Colorado details, particularly after we added a “Blucifer” sticker (it’s a local thing). It had all the imperfections and personality that appear when a human puts pencil to paper, and that’s what made it the overwhelming favorite. Apparently, authenticity is still a thing.
The design presented for us an opportunity as well as a challenge. The paper and colored pencil texture with watercolor washes provided much of the charm and would need to be preserved. Before we ever thought about channels or halftones, we had to save what made this special.
We started by building masks to lift the art off the background while preserving the grain in the paper.
Before that, we scanned the artwork into Adobe Photoshop at 300 dpi. Several rounds of cleanup eventually got us a file that had the hand-rendered appearance while giving us isolated imagery for separations. We chose a traditional channel SEP method. Color selection was straightforward. We put all the similar and like colors onto the same channels working in RGB. We would also use the CMYK on portions to create individual color channels. Since we were printing primarily on lighter garments, we built our white printer or base using a composite of the white areas and only the very light colors. In this case just the white, pink, and yellow. The other colors would print directly on the fabric. The original illustration relied on texture and softness rather than bold, saturated color.
The final print needed to support that feel rather than fight it. We intentionally designed the white printer to remain thinner than what we might use on a more graphic illustration. We mixed a white consisting of 80% white and 20% reducer and printed it through an N-205 tpi mesh screen. This built the foundation with reduced ink deposit, influencing the hand and drape of the final print. After a flash and smooth, dark gray, blue, and red all ran through N-272 mesh screens to maintain detail. The custom 4X4 pink was printed using a blending technique in which the ink is transparent. Then a second flash and cool, the green, yellow, and the black keyline that tied it together at the end.
The print looked remarkably close to the original. The colored pencil-feel remained intact. The watercolor transitions and washes remained visible. The final image almost looked hand-drawn and painted.
As the design developed, attention drifted to a detail on the SUV in the Colorado license plate. At a glance, the familiar mountain silhouette is instantly recognizable. The plate had a custom VOTR number with the local area code 303. And, voila, this tiny detail from the back became the front print. The artist created an enlarged version that included a registration sticker that referenced the season. Clever, eh? It was a great way to connect the front and back. We like to call it “wearable art.”
The medallion print was 5" wide. At that size, the small registration sticker and type became problematic. What looked readable on a monitor would be blurry once printed. The sticker existed as raster information. We reworked just that area. Using Illustrator, we recreated the registration sticker as vector artwork. The shape, numbers and type were redrawn and set as vector so they would scale. Once completed, the vector components were laid back onto the raster components at output. 45 lpi at 22.5 degrees.
On press, the white printer established the foundation and after a flash, the yellow and green built the classic Colorado plate appearance. An 80/20 blend through an N-272 mesh was a highlight within the green areas. The effect was subtle and created tonal variation for dimension. Black closed it out. The final print retained the hand-painted look while the smallest details were crisp.
A mix of cotton, blends, and performance poly made up the order. Each substrate brought its own challenges. Maintaining consistency across multiple fabric types required switching from standard cure ink to equivalent low-cure formulations. Lower temperatures helped reduce the risk of dye migration.
By the time production was complete, nearly 4,000 shirts had rolled through: two locations, 8,000 impressions on multiple substrates. The most interesting part of the story had little to do with the process. It would have been easy for Volleyball of the Rockies to do same ol’. Instead, they invited the community into the creative process.
The customer sees a pink SUV loaded with volleyball gear and a clever Colorado license plate. We see process. Different perspectives. Somewhere between the two, a hand-drawn colored pencil watercolor original becomes wearable art. And when nearly every entry was generated by AI, the design chosen had scribbles and splatters. There’s probably a lesson in that.
By the way, I saw a pink ’66 Bronco the other day. Irony?
Lon Winters is founder and president of Colorado-based Graphic Elephants, an apparel decorating studio and international consulting firm. He was inducted into the Academy of Screen and Digital Printing Technologies in 2013 and is widely recognized for his contribution to the graphic printing industry. Learn more at graphicelephants.com.
