Images Magazine Digital Edition July 2018

www.images-magazine.com JULY 2018 images 37 DECORATOR PROFILE enjoy having the T-shirt when you get home, but it’s not that personal. “Once people see it being printed, or print it themselves, they’re pretty proud to get the T-shirts, or whatever has been made, on. By the end of the festival you can have 10, 15 percent of the festival walking around in something that you’ve helped them make, which is an amazing feeling. “We try and get people involved as much as possible. Screen printing is the most satisfying: it’s the theatrics of it, getting a screen and then actually seeing your print appear as you do it yourself. Screen printing has that immediate ‘wow’ effect.” “Ridiculous challenges” They use Gundelfinger carousels because they are often bought by people looking to learn screen printing, who then grow out of them and sell them on, resulting in a steady and constant supply for Live Ink to take to festivals and other live printing projects. They do, explains Tim, modify the carousels to make sure they’re capable of standing up to all the work Live Ink demands of them. One project they are working on at the moment is a brand activation with printing taking place in seven destinations all on the same day: Prague, Marseille, Singapore, Sydney, Incredibly, the business only has a permanent staff of two: Louise and Tim. Extra staff are taken on for festivals as needed, but the remaining work they manage between them, due in part it seems to their huge enthusiasm for their work. Louise is what appears to be a rare find in this industry: a female screen printer who actually pulls the squeegees and fixes the machines herself. “I think there needs to be a light on women doing screen printing in the industry. I think it’s important just to say that there’s an extra voice out there, that I’m doing it as well, and highlighting that it’s not just a man’s world.” The next step in the business’s growth and development is to increase production (and ease some of the manual labour) by introducing an auto carousel in its Bristol studio by the end of the year, as well as taking delivery of its new R-Jet 6 DTG machine. Despite this, Live Ink is not going to be moving into mass production any time soon – it doesn’t fit with the pair’s business philosophy, nor with their obvious love of screen printing. “For us, it always goes back to the experience of actual printing, because seeing some gloopy ink on a screen, making your own screen print using your hands, is infinitely more satisfying than watching a digital printer run over a T-shirt,” concludes Tim. www.theliveinkco.com Garment choice Stanley/Stella is currently the brand of choice at Live Ink. "It's so nice, and prints like a dream," says Tim. "It's ideal for what we do because it's so good for screen printing, and obviously a lot of brands are more conscious about the tone of production and what fabrics are going into the shirts, so Stanley/Stella is great for that." Madrid, Stockholm and Senegal. “We’ll be going out to some of them but part of that challenge is finding local people to do what we need to happen. But that’s why we’re having so much fun with the live printing, because we take on some ridiculous challenges and to date they’ve all gone well,” says Tim cheerfully. “We get approached by a lot of people who have ideas and then quite a bit of what we do is help them turn that into something almost realistic. We don’t want it to be too realistic though, otherwise there’s not much fun in it.” The company’s Resolute DTG printers run for 12 hours every day All inked up and ready to roll