"Le! Roi! Le! Roi! Le! Roi!"
The two teenagers swayed down the street, arm over each other's shoulders, chanting at the top of their voices. Many of the people who saw them were amused. Some joined in the chant, eyes bright. The mood in the seaside port town was upbeat. How couldn't it be, after that goal by Platini?
"Gabe, Gabe, GabeGabeGabeGaaaaaaabe!" Leon drawled, voice husky from yelling at the little TV until their throats were raw. "Gabe, icecream."
Gabriel looked over to the icecream shop on the corner, and the girls sitting outside. "Icecream? You mean girls, right?" He laughed, which turned into a tickling cough. "Yeah, ok. Icecream." He steered their exhilarated careening steps towards the shop. And the girls. Two summers on and the two boys were the same height now, but where Gabriel was still scrawny and light-weight, Leon had filled out in muscle. Some of the girls had noticed, and Leon never minded them noticing. Gabriel preferred to stay polite but distant. He'd rather a girl he saw every day than only on the occasional weekend. And none of the girls here really had any kind of spark that drew him.
At school the next Monday, Gabriel carefully pulled out a piece of newspaper and unfolded it. There was a large photograph of Platini in full flight, ball just at the end of his foot, kicking that goal in carbon black and white. Or another kick, Gabriel was cynical enough to assume that any good photo the paper had taken would be pressed into service for this moment. Around him, the other art and design students worked on their visual diaries or their Pop Art-inspired screen printing project. Gabriel's project was half done, almost ready for cutting into a screen, but... he unclipped the pages, and moved them to the back of his file. He had a better idea. His teacher looked over his shoulder. "Platini fan?"
"Isn't everyone?"
"You seem like less of a sporting type than some others I could think of. So, what's your plan with this photograph?"
"I thought maybe I could cut it out, add some lettering for his name, and print it onto the back of a sweatshirt." He added hastily "Reuse of popular imagery of pop icons", just in case the teacher thought it was off topic.
The teacher hummed. "That's going to be a mighty hard print to cut." He turned to the class. "Listen up, guys. More than one of you are using newspaper photos as part of your design. Now for some of you, the block-style of a hand-cut screen is going to be the most effective way to repeat your idea, especially if you're repeating the print in a pattern. But if it's a one-off or at most a two-off... let me show you something." He went over to his workbench and rummaged until he found a screenprinting frame, and passed it around the class. Several of them oooohed. Gabriel felt like doing so too when the frame reached him. A woman in Art Nouveau styling flowed across the screen, feathers trailing, fabric draping. It was a complex, highly detailed, tight design, and it wasn't cut paper. "This is relatively new stuff", the teacher said, gesturing them over to his workbench and getting out some ink and paper, "at least in schools. It's a special paper that you put into a photocopy machine. Photocopy your image onto it, it melts away wherever the black would have been, and there's your screen." He dropped some ink onto the screen and squeegeed it across, then held up the print. The woman leapt out at them, clear in every detail, eyes looking straight out of the page, gradations of shade on the feathers dropping from her hand. It struck straight into Gabriel's heart in some way he couldn't grasp. The art teacher grabbed a second piece of paper and put the screen on it. "They're not very robust though, so you only get one, maybe two uses out of it." He held up his second print. You could still make out the detail, but the edges were a little fuzzier, the eyes less precise, the feathers more a blurred impression. Gabriel looked back at his newspaper clipping of Platini, and smiled.
Over the next two weeks in class he carefully assembled his image. He looked through the Letraset catalogue and carefully chose a lettering style and size that would complement the photo and fit into an A4 piece of paper, then ordered it. He cut the figure of Platini out and placed it with an almost Japanese sense of assymetrical space, so that it seemed to be taking flight across the frame, and made careful notes about how and why he'd done so in his visual diary. When the Letraset arrived, he spent two hours planning, double-checking and then carefully pressing out the letters onto the image, leaving no part of of any letter still on its backing paper, kerning by eye. It was easy enough to get a sweatshirt in a deep royal blue in Leon's size. Harder to get a properly-opaque fluorescent red fabric paint that wouldn't turn see-through as it dried, but a test run with a simple block print on some black fabric confirmed he had the right stuff. The teacher took him up to the staff office to use the school photocopier, carefully supervising to make sure they didn't jam the machine and have to use more than one of the precious thermal sheets. He attached it to a sturdy frame, laid out the sweatshirt face down so the print would go on the back, and took a deep breath.
One shot at this. He knew he was good, but there was always that little bit of randomness in the way a print came out. He wasn't going to get to do a test run to make sure he was happy with the image, or more than one run and choose the best – the first run was the only one he'd get at full detail, and every run after that would become less detailed, less crisp. Plus he only had one sweatshirt. Maybe he should have planned for error.
No, that was unnecessary. There would be no errors now.
He tapped out just the right amount of paint – navy blue across half of the top of the frame, and fluorescent red across the other half – readied the squeegee, took another deep breath, and dragged.
When it dried, it was perfect.
A/N: Hands up if you ever used Letraset! As a side note, the main artwork I exhibited from my final year of highschool used both this thermal screen printing and Letraset, amongst several other techniques and hand-drawn parts. I know the pain firsthand :-) As another side note: the colour scheme Gabriel chooses might sound eye-tearing by today's terms (though I like it), but it was perfectly on-trend about six months to a year after he makes this. Officially released in marketing style guides and everything (not that I know this first hand, noooooo... oops...). He's got the eye for what's coming.
Reviews: thanks, Wolfrunnerable12 :-) I like savate too. The linked story to this one, Tireur and Tireuse, has Marinette and Adrien learning it. I was originally going to use Kali Sikaram, but when researching martial arts in France I couldn't go past the various styles of savate! It seems obvious in the show that Gabriel at some stage both trained with a cane, and learnt those techniques of space control that savate does so well.