Marshall Atkinson Okay. You mentioned earlier that you made the mistake of washing plastisol ink down your parents' kitchen drain. So how did you move from using plastisol to going heavy into using water-based ink? Eric Solomon Well, we printed plastisol for a really long time. And, I was in a band and we were playing with another band in this space up in Fort Worth about four-ish hours away from us. And I learned that one of the other bands had someone who was in a print shop and this was very early on in our... when I say our, like my wife and I sprinting career, she was there as well. And he was showing us a shirt that he had made that he was wearing that used this, this magical ink that I could not understand called discharging. And it had a discharge print with a plastisol print around it, and they worked that into the design. And if I remember correctly, it was like a Banksy type of shirt with like, a bomb -- like bombs dropping from a plane, but the way that the bombs were done, they were printed with a natural discharge to get the natural fibers and then outlined in black plastisol. So it had a really cool drop shadow effect and it looked just, it looked great. And when I felt it, I was blown away. I want to say that was probably like 2005, 2006. And that sort of design just blew my mind. And that was kind of the first inkling of like, we need to figure out what this is. We were printing a lot of band t-shirts. So a lot of black t-shirts white print. And if we could go from printing a base in a highlight with plastisol to printing just one white screen with discharge. That just seemed like it was like a no-brainer. It just made it easy. So we went down that path and it took a long time to sort of find information about it. And, I don't think that we ever understood the real basics of discharge probably to like 2015, 2016. So you know, about 10 years of experimenting with it. And even then, like, I can recall times of printing a five-colored discharge shirt on an automatic press, but having to stop like every three shirts to retape the screen and try and trace down these like, these mystical lines that were just appearing on our black t-shirts and then having to go in and Sharpie them, to make sure that they stay black. So it took us a long time to figure it out. And even now, there are still challenges that get thrown at us that we're like, what is going on? Marshall Atkinson Is that just because you use the wrong emulsion? Eric Solomon Our screens were not cured correctly for sure. But also when you introduce a tape into a screen that's using discharge, there's, you know, there are some properties like the way that the humidity can affect the ink and the emulsion. So the screen wasn't necessarily breaking down, but what was happening is it was seeping through like our registrationmarks? And even though we had it taped, it may not have been firmly pressed against the screen. And so you just have clear discharge traveling down the screen, forming lines where the tape is.
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