Dear Spot Color Printing Gods......... Please Help Me!

Question

Ok so here is my story...
I have been doing graphic design and 3D work for about 7 years. I have NEVER worked in print before, and no NOTHING of color separation or spot color, etc... I am learning all this right now on the fly for my new job, and its not going well.  I was hired and expected to hit the ground running, even though I made it clear I did not have any screen printing experience. (I was mainly hired to help with web design) I have had some mistakes doing the color separation (not 4 color) and its costing the printer money to see if I did it wrong or not.  The printer has no experience with the software (and only speaks English fairly well), nor does my boss know the software, but they both know how its SUPPOSED to look, and they are getting impatient.. Needless to say, I have to turn to the internet for help, so please be gentle with me not knowing much...
SO....Im a PC user working on a Mac & Illustrator Cs3(I know Mac fairly well).  I have learned the basics pretty fast for screen printing.  The printer is using spot colors only.  After I get the Illustrator file (yes its vector), I delete all swatches except the "Pantone Solid Coated" colors used in the art - or I have to add them from the Solid Coated color book.  After that, I would separate the colors by 1) Duplicating the image however many times that there are colors. (So a splat of soup has 3 colors, I duplicate it 3 times with register marks)  2) I remove all the color except the one Im trying to show. (Im showing the green peas, so I remove the red and yellow colors from the other objects) 3) then I make what the printer calls the "Flash" (the white undertone that the paint adheres to on the garment)  I make this by taking the art, and reducing the size to 1pt smaller.  Once all the colors are seperated, I make each color 100% black, convert the image to grayscale and THEN Im done.  Problems I have been running into have been registration marks somehow not lining up and some colors do not end up 100% spot tones.. One other wierd thing is when I convert to grayscale on the Mac, the art work retains its color on the screen.  When I tried to do that at home on my PC, the artwork turns gray????
WHEW!  So what I am asking for is a fast, simple way to color seperate a vector file and then create the flash.  And/or how to create a template that I can reuse, that is ready for me to just drop artwork into for spot color seperation.   I have included an image to show you a project I am working on.  Its an  ice cream spill on a shirt.  I have tried to start a template with reg. marks, and that is what you will see here.  There are 5 colors that I have to specify.  The printer actually told me that I do not need to split up the art work the way I have been, nor do I need to change it to black, and all that I have to do is specify all the colors,(spot colors/100% only) and then the printer does the seperation on the clear film. (it only prints in black)  I was also curious why my PC would change the artwork gray and the Mac does not when converting to grayscale.  I thank you VERY MUCH for even reading this maddness that is my life right now, and hope you can give me some helpful wisdom to assist and lead me on my journey.  The job pays well, and I need the money badly!  Thank you very much for any and all help you can give me!
~LiQ

Answer 1

Some misconceptions evidenced in your post.
You don't have to use a Pantone library to create spot colors. Pantone is just one brand of spot color definitions and inks intended for offset lithography; not screen printing. You can define any color you want as a Swatch and then specify it as Spot. A Spot color is simply a color that represents an individual ink that will be physically used in the printing process. Therefore, if you want to please your boss:
1. Get the color chip brochure for the particular brand(s) of screen ink your operation uses.
2. Open Illustrator. New CMYK document. Delete all the Swatches that can be deleted.
3. In the Swatches palette, for each color of your screen inks, create a new Swatch. Use the CMYK sliders to make its color match the ink as best you can. Name the swatch according to the name of the actual screen ink (ex: Nazdar_BrilliantBlue). In fact, the ink manufacturer(s) you use may already provide a ready-made Illustrator Swatch Library for their various series of inks. Check their websites to see.
4. After creating the swatches, save the Library, and/or save the file as a tempate file. Now you'll always have your Spot colors available for new projects.
Now just draw your design and apply the spot colors to the paths as fills and/or strokes. When you print the file as separations, you'll get a separate print for each spot color used. One of the simplest ways to "proof" (test) this is to "print" as separations to the Adobe PDF virtual printer. That will result in a PDF file that has one grayscale page for each ink in your design. That way, you can check what overprints and what knocks out on screen without wasting time or materials. Once confident everything is right, you can then use the PDF to print the actual film positives.
One of your swatches should be a spot white for your underprint. ( "Flash" is not actually an ink color. It's a production step in which a dryer semi-dries an imprinted ink before overprinting it with another. You usually flash a white underprint, but you just as often flash any color with significant density that needs to be overprinted with a following color.) Understand, you don't have to make this swatch actually appear white. For example, I often make it a pale magenta just so I can see it on screen when working with it.
Just because the white underprint is going to be printed underneath the other colors, doesn't mean it has to be layered under your other colors in your Illustrator document. Remember, each ink is going to be printed to its own plate anyway. So it's simpler to just put your white underprint objects on a Layer above the rest of the artwork, and set it to overprint, so that it doesn't knock out the rest of the artwork on layers below it in the stacking order.
Assuming the white underprint has to underprint all the other colors, creating the white underprint should be the near-last step. It's simply a matter of duplicating the colored artwork objects, moving them to the Underprint layer, filling/stroking them with the spot white color and (for efficiency) merging them into as few paths as possible. The Merge or Union Pathfinder commands are typically used for that.
JET