03/23/2023 | 4m 51s | Video has closed captioning.
Brothers Dustin and Matthew Wallace are artisanal craftsmen in the art of screen printing. Working from their Norfolk shop, Prince Ink, their motto is "if it holds still, we can print on it." Old Dominion documentary students created this film, helmed by Kyle Coghill, with Yaisha White and Stephen Kimmel completing the production team.
Aired: 03/23/23
- [Announcer] He's got this vision that other folks don't have that has now created a great company.
(lively music) - Since 2004, I was printing my own stuff.
I got involved in the printing industry when, well mainly, screen printing.
I used to do stencil graffiti or stencil art on canvases and I had a bunch of friends that wanted those as t-shirts and doing it that way was miserable.
I figured there had to be a better way.
And that's when I got into screen printing.
I had never done anything before.
I just bought a little do-it-yourself kit and it kind of snowballed from there.
- You gotta think about how it's gonna get printed 'cause that's one of the big things is like when you're setting it up on the press like set this artwork up for it to work the right way.
I pretty much burn all these in the same height and distance just so that that way when they're going to put it on press everything lines up and they don't have to do a lot of adjustments and stuff like that.
I tape it down, make sure it doesn't move.
This is an LED panel back so when I turn the light on it continues to expose it, which it's not supposed to expose anymore.
14 seconds is enough to keep it exposed at the right aperture pretty much to where it'll wash out with the spread water.
Double-check, make sure I got all the details out, especially when you're working like half tones and little dots and stuff like that.
Paying attention to all the details so that way the prints come out good.
(piano music) I'll just dry it off, let it dry.
I mean, what I do is I'll take it back into that machine and post-expose it.
Pretty much just apply more light to it and what it does is it hardens the image up so that way you can print for long periods of time.
We get up to like a thousand prints before the actual screen starts breaking down and the image starts wearing away in certain parts.
Just 'cause the screen, I mean the squeegee is constantly like, running over top of the image, so.
- So the ink that we use, we have a couple different options.
I pretty much decided last week that it's not really ink as much as it is science.
So we can't just open up a can of ink and use it right out the can.
We have to mix everything.
If someone comes to us and say they want a black shirt with neon green ink, we have to make that color.
So down to the specifics of what is that Pantone color, and what goes into making that.
Even then there's not a legit system that says this is exactly how you make that color and then this is how you print that on this color garment.
So we have to be able to compensate for all of that.
When we print it, we can't just run it through the dryer and it comes out the same, it's gonna react with the garment itself.
There's a lot of science involved and educated guesses.
No clear cut, this is how you do it.
We don't have a whole lot of secrets as far as what do people know about Prince Ink.
We do a lot of things that that we don't broadcast.
So we use higher quality everything, when we have the opportunity to do it.
We use eco-friendly inks and chemicals to clean up all of our printing.
Not trying to shortchange the product that we make and if we can make a bigger impact beyond just the quality of the print when you do that at every turn.
I mean pretty much everything that we do is solving problems.
The processes that we use, screen printing wise, are not we can't just order an ink, open it up and print it onto a shirt.
The difficulty I experienced opening this location was pretty much any difficulty you would have building out a space.
Like we had never done that before.
We had kind of just done it incrementally at the previous locations, and then here we had to do it all at once and have like a big grand opening, which we had never really done before.
(upbeat music) The dynamic of him being my older brother and me being his boss and him having to- - He reminded me of that very frequently.
- The whole, our whole life of him bullying me to now I'm the one cutting the paycheck.
- At first it was rough 'cause we have very different styles.
He's very technical, methodical, and I kind of rely on my instincts.
So we butted heads a lot but we've learned a lot from each other.
- I was taking him under my wing and showing him how to print and then standing over his shoulder the whole time and critiquing everything, until I no longer had to critique him.
And then he took over all the printing and I was better.
(lively music)
