February 2022 Wrap-Up: Vintage Ink and More...

Hey everyone, hope you're well! Couple quick updates:

NEW TEXTURES - BEHIND THE SCENES - CMYK ULTRACHROME UPDATE

Quality over quantity this month... 14 new textures, and I gotta say, these are some of my favorites so far. A few HIGHLIGHTS:

Grunge 296: One of several super detailed vintage screen print textures

Grunge 301: A general grunge for subtle printed inky distress

InkPaint 370: Works great as a hand-painted mask.

BEHIND THE SCENES: Screen Print Textures

Here's what I'm most excited about: In keeping with the Vintage T Shirt theme this month, I set myself the goal of creating some super-authentic weathered screen ink textures. I attempted this very thing last year by painting some black cloth, but couldn't quite get the right look. This time, I decided to actually screen print the ink to see if I could get a more accurate result. I ended up with just a few textures, but I gotta say, they're so good!! Proof-of-concept, so I'm definitely gonna create several more of these.

A few of you have reached out asking about the process of creating textures - here's how I approached these. (Check the Patreon Post if animated GIFs aren't showing up in email)

Cutting sections from a few black shirts I picked up at Goodwill. This one's a DISNEYLAND 2020 HAPPY NEW YEAR. It's gonna be some kind of year...

Get it clean.

Iron it out.

Screen printing white Speedball Ink - about 12x18 inches.

Heat setting it will prevent cracking, so I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'll let it air dry for about 48 hours.

Two days later. Stretching it out... nice fine cracks happening... it's gonna work!

Trim it down.

Stretch and mount it like a raccoon skin.

Nothing beats natural diffused light from a cloudy sky. Hurry up, it's about to rain again!

Shooting on the Sony A7R II with a Voigtlander 67mm Macro Lens. Fully manual, but with a lot of practice, I've gotten good a squaring up the image to get things sharp from corner to corner.

Processing in Camera Raw.

The final texture. This one is Grunge 298.

ULTRACHROME UPDATE:

Thanks to Patron Jason at South Bay Creations who helped me refine a few settings in the Ultrachome Photoshop Plugin for working in CMYK. Check this out: Ultrachome typography printed in-house using dye sublimation.

That's a photo of the printed tee. Crazy. Hit up Jason if you need some prints. Here's a link to the Ultrachrome update - it's minor fix, but if you're working in CMYK, a necessary one :)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DljbvhOP9YB2IvUW3LANsQi9KNj2GsRn?usp=share_link

As always, a huge thank you for your support and for being part of the project! More Texturelabs on the way....

Cheers, Brady

New this month: