While working at a screen printing shop in San Diego, I was tasked with turning a painting into something that can be printed on a t-shirt.
The biggest challenge in this process is using a limited number of colors (12 in this case) to re-create an image that was made up of hundreds
of colors.
Why the limited colors?
The machine the designs are printed on limits the number of colors. Some machines are capable of running only 16 colors per design, others less, others more.
The machine that this design was to be printed on only had space for 12 colors + one flash coat (base coat for printing colors on dark shirts), so from the
start the challenge was to find colors that allowed the image to be reproduced faithfully, even with such a limited palette.
This design was turned into films via the index separation process using Adobe Photoshop and took roughly 3 hours to complete.
Again, the artwork and layout are not mine, rather, my role was turning the digital (digital image of an oil painting) artwork into something that
could be screen printed on a shirt.