the john shaw club tableware

A factory visit was arranged with the clients to talk through their design brief and at the same time, view our existing range of white ware shapes that could be utilised to match their existing tableware range. This was critical in allowing our design team to get an understanding of the artwork scales and sizing needed for styling and fitting.

Our design teams main problem was that the designs decorated on the original tableware, had no original artwork to work from. Our team using their experience and professional eyes had to work from the original wares to scan and photograph the pieces and re-create the designs, by redrawing and colour separating the image elements of the pattern.

Using our digital printing system the redrawn design elements were collated and printed as decals, using predetermined white ware templates. This allowed our decorating team to apply the printed digital decals onto the white ware. The physical styled pieces were used to make sure all fittings and sizes were correct and in balance to match the original samples.

In-house colour tab trials were then carried out to match the colours and tonal work on the original pieces of ware. This stage of testing is the key to ensuring that the balances were correct, before main production took place. Once the client was happy with the colours we went into the silk screen printing side of the project. This involved a mix of solid, halftone and gold precious metal printing.

The decal was produced by silk screen printing the block colour and the halftone elements. Each colour layer is individually printed, building up the colours after drying. The attention to detail has to be precise to keep the registration of the build up for each colour. The gold detailing decal was printed as a separate entity but mirrored the design so in the decoration process the images marry up.

The printed decals were then hand applied to the white ware pieces in three stages. Our lithographers use their skill and experience to make sure that the positioning of the decals is accurate for each individual piece. The block and halftone decal was applied first and kiln fired, the separate gold detailing decal is applied over the top of the first decal and fired again. A brush applied gold was added and fired once more.