Puttering with volleyball tournament tees
Sailing away with a new design
By Lon Winters
Images courtesy of Lon Winters.
If you’ve followed my articles in this magazine over the decades, you know that some projects have a way of showing up on the calendar time and time again. We see the name on the email and before we open any files, we know it’s that time of year again. Putterhead is one of those jobs. The Putterhead Doubles Volleyball Tournament has been part of the Colorado volleyball landscape since 1994, when it started as a small, locally run tournament. In 2003, the Breckenridge Parks and Rec brought Volleyball of the Rockies (VOTR) — a common client of our shop that I have written about before — in to manage the event. Since then, the tournament has grown from 50 teams into one of Colorado’s largest volleyball events with 20 divisions and 1,000 teams participating throughout the weekend, spread throughout Summit County in Silverthorne, Frisco, and Breckenridge. At elevations nearly 10,000 feet, the mountain air makes a fit volleyballer reconsider life choices. A few days of sunshine, parties, and altitude-induced competitiveness and it’s one heck of a volleyball weekend.
As you may expect, every player receives the official Putterhead event T-shirt. The shirts have become collectible over the years, and we have been fortunate enough to do the Putterhead shirts for three decades now. The shirts have become a visual history of the event. There are volleyball nuts who have every year’s shirt. We have been all over with Putterhead art. Some designs simple, while others wandered down a rabbit hole, so to speak. We once created a series of cartoon animals. Apparently, management decided we exhausted the critters supply. This year, the client provided the kind of detailed direction that every designer desires. “Do something cool.”
Okay then. The art needed Colorado, Putterhead, and volleyball thrown into a blender. Something connected to the location and Putterhead with a unique visual. VOTR wanted us to use a photograph of Dillon Reservoir with the surrounding Breckenridge mountain landscape as the foundation. There were some modifications to make. The bottom needed cropped up to the marina, the homes along the right would disappear, and the composition needed room for three sailboats. Each boat would represent tournament locations. Silverthorne, Breckenridge, and Frisco. Putterhead would be incorporated on the sails, and we needed a volleyball net and ball.
We opened the photo in Adobe Photoshop. We cropped away the lower foreground, bringing the image up as requested, removed the structures, and added some water where the boats would live. This was a combination of selection, masking, and cleanup work as well as the Clone Stamp and Healing tools. Once the image was reconfigured, we simplified the photographic information. The Filter menu gave us a useful starting point to reduce the photograph information for a more illustrative look. The sailboats, volleyball net, and ball needed to coexist with the photographic background. Some of the shapes were constructed from simple vector geometry, while others required more careful drawing and editing with the Pen Tool and Direct Selection Tool. The sailboats were going to carry a lot of the identification. Rather than simply dropping the cities somewhere underneath the illustration, we incorporated them into the boats. Putterhead was placed on the sails. Illustrator and Photoshop worked together. Photoshop for the raster foundation, while Illustrator provided the vector components. The boats had to look believable on the water but fit the illustrative nature of the image. The volleyball net and ball were treated the same way.
Once the proof was approved, we noticed potential production issues. The small lettering on the boats looked fine on the monitor but wasn’t going to print clean separated in halftones. Before removing the lettering from the Photoshop file, we exported a TIFF of the rasterized composition and placed it into an Adobe Illustrator document for positional reference. The small type was recreated in vector and positioned directly over the TIFF to match the original locations. Once the vector type was locked into position in Illustrator, back in Photoshop, we removed the type. With the type removed, the raster file was used for our simulated separation. We would be working on white, light, and dusty blue garments. We didn’t need to build a heavy white printer or underbase. Once the sim seps were finalized, they were brought back into Illustrator for output, and the type was positioned over the same TIFF. The vector type was then grouped with the appropriate color for output and imaging on computer to screen at 55 lpi at 22.5 degrees.
The press setup followed a straightforward sequence. Starting with an ironing station, followed by white on a N-166 tpi screen. After a flash, a smoothing station prepared the surface for the colors. Process black followed by royal blue and gold. Next was turquoise and another flash and smooth before continuing with forest green and red. All the colors were printed wet-on-wet on N-272s. The final station was a blending white with 50% halftone clear. All meshes were at 45 N/cm2.
The final image had enough photographic information to give the reservoir and mountains realism, while the sailboats provided the foreground and real estate for the town names. Putterhead on the sails tied the boats directly to the event, and the volleyball net and ball made sure nobody confused this with a yacht club shirt. The total production was 1,500 shirts. After 30 years of Putterhead, we have learned that the challenge isn’t necessarily coming up with anything new, it’s finding a fresh way to tell the same story. Mountains, water, volleyball, three mountain towns, and a tournament that has become a Colorado tradition are all part of the Putterhead story. This time, we just added sailboats. Not bad for what started with, “You know, do something cool.”
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.
