Shrouded in mystery, this month’s featured design, “Veiled Woman,” harkens back to a time when religion was paramount and unyielding. Created by Justin Vu, owner of Huntington Beach, Califonia-based The Shirtsmith, the reverent piece was inspired by his fascination with spiritual themes. The art features careful, yet stunning detail embossed with sentiments of grandeur and a touch of Gothicism.
“My attention has always been drawn to religious iconography,” Vu says. “A certain mysticism usually surrounds this type of imagery, whether you’re viewing it in a museum, church, temple, etc.”
Five screens were hand-coated, then exposed in an M&R NuArc MSP 3140 metal-halide UV screen-exposure unit. Vu used five of Union Ink’s Tru-Tone 3X CMYK process inks (Eclipse low-bleed white, hot magenta, 3X yellow, black and Premium Brite cotton white).
Using 100% cotton crew T-shirts as a vehicle, Vu printed the design with the M&R Sportsman EX, a six-color, eight-station automatic screen-printing press. After printing, the garment was cured in an M&R Economax D dryer.
“I created this design from scratch in [Adobe] Photoshop,” Vu says. “Starting with two separate assets — a photo of the veiled woman (shot by English photographer Laura Sheridan) and a photo of the intricate rose window that serves as the background — it took several hours to painstakingly remove the background from the original photo of the veiled woman and to process a few additional color corrections before it was ready to be meshed into the final composition.”
