6 Great Tips On How To Prepare Artwork for T-Shirt Printing

Recently I have been posting about sweet t-shirt designs (here & here) so I thought this would be a good time to share this guest article. Blake from YouDesignIt, a t-shirt printing company, will guide us through some tips for preparing artwork for T-Shirt printing.
As many of you probably already know, doing graphic design, and doing graphic design specifically for t-shirt printing can be two totally different beasts. Have you ever worked extremely hard for long hours on a t-shirt design for yourself or a client, only to have the printer tell you that your design won’t work for t-shirt printing? This problem is not that uncommon and I would like to provide you with a few easy tips on how to prepare your artwork for printing on t-shirts.

1. Use PMS Colors in Your Artwork

You may typically do artwork in RGB and CMYK color modes, but to ensure the most accurate colors with a silk screener, definitely use PMS colors in your artwork. This also makes the colour separations a lot easier and more accurate. Here is a link on how to work with Pantone in Illustrator.
On a side note, the printer should not charge you extra for PMS color matching. That is an old fashion way to get more money because you are actually doing them a favour by being more particular for accuracy.

2. Convert All of Your Text to Outlines

Sometimes your artwork may call for a very obscure font or maybe even a custom designed font. When sending your artwork off for print, the last thing you want to to see, is a substituted font in your design. By converting the text to outlines, any computer that opens the artwork will view the text as an image.   Therefore, no substitutions will be made.
To convert text to outlines right click on the text with the selection tool and then click Create Outlines.

3. Create Your Artwork at Actual Size

Do not trust the printer’s judgment without discussing it with them first. I am a printer… so why would I say that? Because the vision you have of the end product can be very different than what the printer has assumed as your vision. The safest way to defend yourself in this situation is to create the artwork in its final size. Don’t know what size you want to use? Slap a ruler to the shirt you are wearing. Sounds simple, but it works.
You can set the artwork size in the Document Setup menu, found under File.

4. Use Vector Artwork As Much As Possible

This is not an argument over raster versus vector, just more of a suggestion to use vector artwork when possible. It makes colour separations easier and the print comes out cleaner in the small details. This is a general rule for the everyday jobs and not an automatic in all situations.

5. Expand Your Strokes

If you have properly set all of your colors to PMS swatches, then the color separations software will have no problem. This is more of a human error that occurs because sometimes strokes are overlooked. I put this tip at #5 because it is one that can save you from a small mistake ruining an otherwise great project.
To expand your strokes select what you want to expand then go to Object > Expand.

6. Set Your Half-Tones with PMS Colors

This one goes along with Tip #1. Sometimes your design and/or budget may call for the use of halftones to save on the amount of colours printed. The best way to do this is to slide the colour scale down to a percentage of the PMS colour. The colour separations software used by the printer should handle the rest.
In the image below, notice in the top right corner, the number 40? Usually that is 100%. Change it to 40% to set a 40% half tone.

These six great tips on how to prepare your t-shirt design for printing should cover the majority of the problems you might face. This kind of preparation should ensure a faster turnaround time and a much more accurate print.


Enjoy..That's all.....

Design your own T-shirt with a typography portrait

Design your own T-shirt with a typography portrait

Final Image

For this tutorial you can use your own portrait, or the one I took. So, open the portrait jpg and double click the background layer to unlock it and name the layer portrait.

Now go to Image > Adjustments > Black & white (or press ALT + SHIFT + CTRL + B), use my settings.

Before we posterize the image, pick your burn tool (range: midtones, exposure: 20% ). Carefully burn some areas of the images, around her lips, nose, eyes etc. (I marked some spots), then go to Image > Adjustments > Posterize and set the levels to 4

 

Disable the “Portrait” layer for now. Make a new group (call it “words”) and using your favorite font and color ( I used Helvetica and Black) type some words like I did.

Pick the rectangular marquee tool and make a selection like I did. Now go to edit > define brush preset. repeat this step for each word and you will see your brushes in your brush presets.

We’re going to edit the text sizes a bit but with free transform. Select each word and press CTRL + T (hold Shift so that the proportions will be the same). Now, select the “words” group, make it smaller (CTRL + T) then duplicate the group a couple of times and achieve my result (resize, move, etc.) You can edit each word and in the end try to obtain something like a rectangle.

Select all the words and make them smaller (CTRL + T) like I did. Now make a selection with the rectangular marquee tool and go to edit > define pattern

Disable the groups of words and make the portrait available again. Using the rectangular marquee tool make a small selection on black, then go to select > similar.

Disable the portrait again and make a new layer above CTRL + SHIFT + N (call it “black words”). Using the words brushes with different sizes try to achieve my result or even better. Select the rectangular marquee tool and press the right click over the selection, go to save selection “black selection”. Also, create a new layer (“background”) under the “portrait” one and fill it with white.

If you disabled the selection, load it again (select > load selection > black selection) then add a new layer (“black pattern”). Go to edit fill and use the pattern you just did. Your result should look something like mine.

We need to make the big words more visible. So, hold CTRL and click the “black words” layer. This will do a selection around the words. Now, go to select > modify > expand by 3px , select the black pattern layer and hit delete.

Make the portrait available again, and disable the black word and the black pattern. Repeat the steps from above to select the 1st grey. Make a new layer “1st grey words” and disable the portrait again.

Using the brushes and #636363 grey arrange the words then add a new layer called “1st grey pattern” repeat the steps above but this time set the opacity of the pattern fill to 60%. Make a selection again around the grey words (ctrl+ click on the layer > expand by 3px). In the end you should get something like I did.

Repeat the steps above for the other tone of grey (“2nd grey words”, “2nd grey pattern”) use #C1C1C1 for the brushes and 20% opacity for the pattern. You also can play with the layers opacity, so that the final image will look great.

This black and white typography portrait works fine for me, but we can add some colors to it. Add a new layer on top and call it “gradient”. using a linear gradient and this colors #5b002f, #a10070, draw like I did.

Now set the blending mode of the ”gradient” layer to lighten. Your result should look like mine. You can use different colors if you want.

So, if you want to print this typography portrait on your t-shirt or something else, we need to have a transparent background. So if you remember the trick from step 11, but now we need multiple selections that’s why you are going to hold CTRL + SHIFT and click on each layer except the gradient and the background. Now that you have the selection, right click on it and go to “layer via cut”. Call the new layer “color” and delete the gradient and the background layer. Save the file as PNG. 

You can make also a tshirt simulation. Open the tshirt model from the resources and the final PNG format. Check my simulation and do one better.

              That's all, enjoy!

Go Media’s Rapid-fire Illustration Technique

Go Media’s Rapid-fire Illustration Technique

By Junoon

Hey Designer and Illustrator faithful! It’s time for another wicked tutorial from your brethren here at Go Media. I had a particular project I was working on recently that I thought would make a great tutorial. The technique I would like to share with you is a little illustration short-cut.
When you need to create something with that hand-drawn look but you’re on a tight time line – this is one way to do it fast. The project I was working on was a t-shirt design for Black Ace Clothing. They’re great guys and pay us well so I am not normally rushing through their projects. But on this particular project I had already completed a large hand-drawn illustration for the back of the shirt. They wanted an additional illustration for the front of the shirt, but I was concerned about the total budget for one t-shirt, so, I busted out this little trick of mine. It saved me time, and saved them money!
PSST – shameless plug: I recorded a five-hour video tutorial with solid instruction & a healthy dose art creation. Check out my quick video overview on Vimeo and download the full video tutorial on the Arsenal.

The Design

Let’s start by taking a look at the final printed t-shirt:

Here is both the front and the back of the design. The quote on the design is: “Sticks & stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” This is a really cool project because this t-shirt design is destined to be worn by Tiffany Michelle on an up-coming reality TV show. So, given the potential national exposure, we wanted to really hit a home run with this design.
The part of the design that uses my rapid-fire illustration technique is the front design. You can see it here in more detail:

This image shows a 3-color design. In the end production of the shirt you’ll notice that Black Ace decided to keep the front design simple (1 color) as to not over-shadow the back design, which is 4 color with a gold foil print.

The Tools

Just so, you have a full understanding of the entire design process we went through, I will show you how I did the back, then reveal my rapid-fire shortcut for the front illustration. Before I get ahead of myself I should give you a list of the tools you’ll need for this illustration:

• Bristol Drawing Paper (plate, smooth or vellum finish.)
• Pencil, Mechanical Pencil, (I used a Koh-I-Noor Technigraph 5611 mechanical pencil)
• Mechanical pencil sharpener
• Staedtler Mars Plastic White Eraser
• #1 or #2 fine-tip paint brush or crow quill pen (I used a #1 Windsor Newton University Series 233)
• India Ink (I use Higgins Calligraphy Waterproof Black Ink)
• Light Box (Or a window will work too.)
• Scanner
• Computer
• Adobe Illustrator
• Access to the internet or some source of photos

The Concept

Let’s do a quick fly-over of how the back was designed so you can understand what lead us to the front. For starters, Junoon– my contact over at junun.king966@gmail.com(and a mighty fine dude if I may say so) sent me over this concept layout.

Now, I know this may look a little rough, but I was actually very impressed with it. Not many clients come to me with such a refined concept. And while this particular incarnation of it doesn’t look so good – I could easily see that this was an awesome layout with great potential and just needed to be fixed up on the production end. Paul asked me to work with this concept, but to also sketch up two additional concepts for this design. Now, there is no shortcut to this early process. This is just a lifetime of drawing that allows me to do a real quick sketch. But as you’ll see later, the details I put into these are really not necessary. All you’ll really need to focus on is placement and size of your elements.
Here are the three sketches I did for Rakesh

This first one (above) is my interpretation of his rough layout. Now that it’s in this rough sketch phase you can start to see the potential. I KNEW this one was the best of the three, so I pushed to work on this one.


Above are the other two sketches I did, but Rakesh was wise enough to go with concept #1 (his own original layout.)
At this point I just drew this. There were no shortcuts used on the back design. OK, maybe one—we do own a skull over here at Go Media. Whenever I’m drawing a skull and need reference, I can pick it up and hold it at various angles to see how to draw it. And no, it is not the head of a Boston Red-Sox fan (Go Tribe!)

Above is the scan of the pencil sketch for the back before I inked it. As you’ll see, I left the text off because I knew I was going to drop that in with Adobe Illustrator later. Also, there will be a Black Ace logo in behind the banners. So, that too was just roughed in. As I said before, I’m not going to go into all the details of the back design, just a fly-over so you can see what I’ve done. For all my pencil drawings I use a Bristol paper because it’s very thick. This allows me to erase without fear of tearing the paper. Bristol paper also allows me to ink it without fear of the ink bleeding through to my desk. I use a mechanical pencil, well, just because it feels better in my hand then a regular wooden pencil. I use an HB or H hardness lead. Although the B, B1 and B2 leads feel GREAT when I’m drawing, the lead is too soft. It smudges all over the paper and makes a big mess. So, I use the harder leads.

Inking

Once the pencil drawing is done, I bust out my brush and “ink” the drawing. I use a paint brush because it allows me maximum line weight variation. Or, in layman’s terms – I can make my lines as thick or thin as I want. By varying the weight of my lines it gives the illustration a ton of character that is hard to duplicate on the computer.

You’ll notice a big roll of masking tape near the end of my brush. I put this on my brushes because I have big fingers. This gives me a better grip of my brush.
I make a lot of little shading lines that look best if they start as a thin line and thicken as they work their way into the dark. A crow quill pen can also accomplish the same effect. If you’re going to use a crow quill pen I suggest using a Hunt Artist’s Pen tip #512 and 102.

Scanning

Once this Illustration is done, I scan it into my computer using our flat-bed scanner. We’re fortunate to have an over-sized scanner here at Go Media. This over sized scanner allows me to scan the whole illustration in one single pass.

Not long ago we only had a legal-size scanner. I would have to scan my larger drawings in two or three pieces then assemble them in Photoshop. That was always a pain in the ass, but hey – what can you do? As I am planning on live-tracing this drawing in Illustrator, the higher the resolution the scan is the better. I like to scan my inked drawings at 500 dpi.

Typography

At this point I have my finished inks are in Illustrator and I’m ready to add my copy and colors. For this design I wanted an edgy, almost medieval font that looked like it was hand painted so it would match the rest of the illustration. I did an extensive search and found the font you see here.

I won’t tell you where I got it – ancient Go Media secret. Obviously, it was perfect!

I used the Effect>Warp>Arch tool in Illustrator to get the copy to follow along the shape of my banners. Then it was just a lot of nudging, kerning, stretching and scaling to get all the letters where I wanted them.

Coloring

I started the coloring by creating one single shape that filled the entire design. I made this by simply making a copy of my vectorized line art, selecting it, and then doing the following: Object>Compound Path>Release, then Object>Ungroup, then Pathfinder>Add to Shape Area. Basically this process broke all these vector pieces up, then merged them into one single shape.



Next I pick my colors. Paul was printing this shirt with silk screens and has asked me to restrict my design to 4 colors. I know that I’ll need a range of color values so that I can color both shadows and highlights. Here are the four colors I picked. I would love to give you a long explanation for why I picked these exact colors, but I don’t have one. I just picked some colors that I liked and thought worked well together.
As I was planning on putting this design onto a black shirt, I start by swapping my line art’s black with my darkest purple. It needs to be bright enough to pop off the black, but dark enough to act as my darkest value color. Next I fill the entire design with the middle value of the three remaining colors. This allows me to add shadows and bright spots to the middle. That’s much easier to figure out than any other method.
Once the middle value fills the shape I do my shadows next. If you’re wondering how I decide where to place my shadows – well, nothing magical here. I look at the shape, imagine it in 3D, imagine a light source and give my best guess at how the shadows will fall across the object. If I have a reference photograph or the actual object (like the skull) then I can hold it up to a light and see exactly how the light falls on the object.

Once the shadows are done, then the highlights are fun and easy to drop on. Remember where your light source is!

The last step is to add some finishing touches. For this design I added some radial vector shapes from Go Media’s Arsenal. I use these types of stock design resources to finish off a lot of my designs. They’re another fantastic tool for saving time.

And viola! The back design is finished. Last step is to pimp out the design on a sweet t-shirt template and present it to the client. (Designer’s Note: Taking a little extra time to mock-up your designs really has a huge impact on the client. It’s one thing to see a flat design, but to see an actual t-shirt with the client’s design ON it! Wow! Now it’s REAL.) For this, of course I use the FINEST t-shirt templates ever made – Go Media’s of course. And they’re ultra fast and easy to use because the shirt is already masked with the highlights and shadows on their own layer. So, you just drop in your design and poof! It looks like a real printed shirt! (Ok, gratuitous product plugs are done.)

Now for the really good stuff.
At this point Paul was ecstatic with the design (correct me if I’m over-stating your satisfaction level here Paul.) But he wanted a little something for the front of the t-shirt as well. Since he liked the sketch #2 that I had done, he asked me to make that one as well.
This front design was intended to be printed smaller and was also on a very tight budget (since the back had taken so much time/money.) I needed an illustration short-cut. I needed a trick. I needed Go Media’s Rapid-Fire Illustration Technique!
So, here is the way to really speed up an illustration project: just rough-cut together a bunch of photographs into your intended illustration. This will be easier if I just show you.

Rough Sketch

Here is the original sketch.

Rough Photo Collage

Now, obviously, this technique doesn’t work for all things. If Paul had asked me to illustrate a superhero flying with a dog under his arm, well, the likelihood of me finding that photograph would be remote. But this design had mostly common objects – roses, a skull, rib cage, bones and a banner (I couldn’t find a banner in the right pose, so I just left a spot open based on my original sketch.) Also, this is a fairly clean assembling of photos. In truth, it can be way rougher than this. This image is just to be used as a guide to help you get your illustration going. You can clean up and fix all the little details while you’re drawing.

Collage To Sketch

So, the next step is turning this photo montage into an illustration! Start by printing your photo montage at the appropriate size. In this case, I wanted it about 8 inches across. This is approximately twice the size the final design will get printed on the shirt. (Illustrator’s tip: Whenever working on an illustration – create it at about twice the size you’re going to print it. This allows you to be a little sloppy. Once it’s shrunk down to the final size it will look super tight! People will wonder how you got so much detail into it.) Ok, where was I? Oh yeah – turning our montage into an illustration. Now that you’ve printed out your photo montage, you want to tape it to a sheet of your Bristol paper. Make sure the printed side of your montage paper is facing the Bristol that you’ve taped it to.


Now take out your trusty-rusty light box and place your paper on top of it, Bristol paper up! Next, you’re going to draw your illustration using your photo montage like a draw-by-numbers guide.

If you need to change, exaggerate, or edit the photo montage, you can make corrections now. On this design, for instance, I thought the skull’s bottom jaw was waaaay too large. So, no problem, I just ignored the photo and drew it a little smaller.

If you don’t have a light box, you can always use a window during the day! But make sure not to push too hard! I don’t want you falling through your window.
This phase of the drawing doesn’t have to be perfect. The photomontage is there to help act as a guide. While on your light box just get all the major shapes in place. Then you can turn your light box off and finish the drawing using your innate drawing ability (if you have that). You can strengthen your lines, add shading, details, etc.
In this case time was at a premium and I knew I would be inking this myself, so I really just hammered the drawing out quick. I trust my ability to do a sweet job during the inking phase. Here is the finished pencil drawing I did using the photo montage as my guide.

You can see that I invented a lot – particularly the banner. Now, obviously I have years of drawing experience, so it may be a bit easier for me to “invent” details that are not actually in the photomontage.
So, that’s really the end of the “shortcut.” While this shortcut may still seem labor intensive, I can assure you that this will save you some serious time. The photos give you all those little details that you would otherwise have to invent. Also, having the photomontage as a guide completely eliminates the possibility of total failure. If you’ve spent any time drawing you certainly know this is a real possibility. I’ve personally had plenty of days when I simply cannot draw what’s in my head. After several frustrating hours and a waste paper basket full of failed drawings, I’ll usually just quit for the day and start again the next. Using this photomontage technique will leap frog you right over any of these types of problems.

Inking

Now we proceed as we did with the back design. Using Higgins Calligraphy ink and a #1 paint brush, we ink our illustration. Here are a few inking tips. First, your lines should be thinner on the side of your light source. If you have no light source, assume it’s coming from the top. So, if it’s a bald head you’re drawing, the line beneath the chin should be thick and the line on top of the head should be thin. Also, objects in the distance should be drawn with thinner lines. Objects in the foreground should be drawn with thicker lines. Using these techniques will give your drawings a sense of depth and character.
Here is the finished Inking of this drawing:

I was always a big fan of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, of course, who wasn’t. But it wasn’t just the brilliant writing. You could see that Calvin and Hobbes had been painted with a brush. Just look at all the character in the line art. You can see the thickness of the line weight varying dramatically.

Compare that to another comic I love: Foxtrot. The writing is still great. The characters are hilarious. But the line art is kind of flat and boring in my opinion. This is the difference between using a brush (or crow quill pen) and using a regular felt tip pen when inking your illustration.

Now we go through the same process that we did for the back design. I’ll break it down into numbered steps for you here. Sometimes that’s easier to follow:
1. Scan the art at 500dpi – save as jpeg.
2. Place the art into Adobe Illustrator.
3. Select the image.
4. Convert the line art to vector: Object>Live Trace>Make and Expand

5. Get rid of all the white shapes that the Live Trace function creates. Using your open arrow tool, click on any one of the white areas of your art. Then select the rest by clicking: Select>Same>Fill and Stroke. Warning! In illustrator this function grabs EVERYTHING that has the same fill and stroke, so if you have other white objects with no stroke in your document, it will erase them too! Once all the white shapes have been selected, hit delete.
6. Make a copy of your line art. Either select it then Edit>Copy, Edit>paste. Or select it and hit control+C, then Control+v. Or, while using your arrow tool, hold down the alt key, grab your line art and drag it to a new location. All three of these methods will make a copy.

7. Create your primary color fill object. Select the copy of your line art and use function: Object>Compound Path>Release. Then Object>Ungroup, then Pathfinder>Add to shape area.
Ok, now at this point you should have your line art and a single shape “fill.”

8. Add your copy. Now, just like on the back we’re going to use Adobe Illustrator to add our copy. It’s a simple text box with an effect>Warp>Arch applied to get it to fill our banner.

9. Color your design. The coloring on this side of the shirt is even simpler than the back. Paul asked for a simple 3-color design, so – that’s what I gave him. I’m going to be using the same colors I selected from the back. So, the line art is a dark purple and the primary fill color is a yellowish bone color.

The one additional color I’ll add will be the shadows.

After an initial proofing Rakesh felt that the rib cage was not working in the design. No problem! I just created a shape to remove the ribs and then used the Pathfinder>Subtract from shape area. I did this twice – once for the line art and once for the color fill.


And that’s it. Here is the final design for the front of the shirt. I got this entire piece done in about 5 hrs. 1 hr. to find these pics, 30 minutes to piece them together, 1 hr. to do the pencil drawing, 2 hrs. to ink, and 1 hr. to scan, vectorize and color!
I want to give a big shout-out and thank you to Paul and Rakesh for being such cool clients and allowing me to write this tutorial! For some reason a lot of our clients are overly protective of their assets and don’t let us show off our work! This shirt is NOW available for pre-order at BlackAceClothing.com or click here to get directly to this product.
Thanks for your time and attention. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned a few new tricks!