Design A Rock Band T-Shirt: From Sketch To Vector Art

1. Design A Rock Band T-Shirt: From Sketch To Vector Art: Never teach you how to create an illustrated t-shirt design for Iraq. And I've been designing rock band t-shirts for a long time. I've learned a lot along the way. And so in this course I'm going to take you through my process from beginning to end. First, I must share with you how I use words to come up with ideas. Yes, words. This is actually a secret that I've been doing for a long time and they share it with you. Next, I'm going to show you how I research and gather information for how to create my designs. Next, I'm going to show you my sketching phase and how I work up from really rough sketches to a final detailed sketch. From there, I'm going to take us into Illustrator to actually recreate the whole idea as a beautiful, crisp vector. From there, I'm going to talk to you about color and texture and how to really amp up the pool design. And last but not least, I'm going to show you how I export the file, not only for screen print, but also for print on-demand. These are two different ways of production that I think are really important to know how to export for. So I hope that you'll join me in this course because I'm actually going to challenge you to create your own rock band t-shirt. I'm going to show you step-by-step how I do it and encourage you to follow along. I hope I'll see you in the course and I'll talk to you soon. 2. Attribute Words: The first thing you want to do whenever you're designing for music at all is to listen to the song. I know it sounds crazy and simple idea, but a lot of designers skip this step and then it kinda bites them in the end. Because then you can actually design something that isn't really feel relevant to the sound or to the overall vibe of that something. So listen to the song. Next, we're gonna go through a process with me where I'm going to create what I call attribute words. A lot of people might call this a word map. But using words to help us form ideas is a massive step. This is a trick I learned back in design school and it has served me so many times with a wide range of projects, including designing rock band t-shirts. Attribute words are basically the words that we associate with the project. Now how do you find these words? You'll find them in conversation with the band that you're designing for. Or maybe if you have a Zoom call or a phone call with them, you're basically listening for the real heart of the song. These would be included, even listen to the lyrics of the song, the main chorus of the song. You might also find these words inside of e-mails or any written document or anything you receive from maybe a record label that your client is associated with. Some people call this a design brief, which may not always happen in rock music, but sometimes it does if you're working with a label where they'll actually send you over what they want with their hoping for what the overall vision is for the album or for the song. And so this really helps you and I to actually get inside the heads of the creative people who have made the music so that we know how to create and what direction to go from. I personally like to write down my words inside of a sketchbook by hand. You can absolutely do this on an iPad or on your computer. It's totally fine. But for me it's just a habit I created, but actually just helps me get into the sketching phase of the project and the development of ideas. The first attribute words I always write down is who is it for? It's really important to know who are you creating for, who are the people that are actually going to buy these t-shirts. So in our case, it's going to be the fans of the rock band that we're designing for. So we just think about who they are, maybe what kind of style they like, are they into like 90 style? Are they into like super heavy metal like Metallica style? Are they into like, you know, Guns and Roses, kinda vintage. Look. What is it that they're into? The second place I'll gather where it's from or lyrics. I'll actually ask the band for a lyric sheet, or maybe I'll just listen to the song quickly and I'll kinda get some of the main lyrics as far as from the chorus, especially. And I'll write down some of those may words, even if they're very poetic and out there, it's okay because pulling on those words can help. Another thing I'll write down in my attribute word list is the tone. Like what does the overall vibe of the song? Is it catchy and upbeat? Is it romantic? And, or is it about heartbreak? It's dark and kind of sad and lonely. Like what are the emotions associated with this song? What is the overall feeling This song or this album is creating that I'm designing for. I also think about things like message, is there a message that the song is trying to bring across? And I write down those things as well. In this instance, I'm designing for a song called nemesis. And nemesis is obviously a very clear word. It's a very heavy songs. I know that the style is gonna be kinda more metal, more like new metal, I guess you could say kinda like modern slash, old-school rock and roll mixed together. And I know that the word nemesis has a lot of negative and aggressive feelings. For me. I'm thinking of the word nemesis, like NME, good versus evil, overcoming darkness. Just the idea that struggle, that internal struggle that we all have, where we have an internal nemesis is trying to hold us back. So I'm thinking about stuff like that. I'm thinking of like kryptonite, like Superman. I'm thinking about like Marvel movies where there's a good guy versus a bad guy. I'm thinking about like good versus evil in a spiritual sense. I'm thinking about all of it and I'm reading all those things down in my sketchbook. This is a huge thing for me and it really helps me to know, am I giving the right feeling with the design? And from there we move on to the next step, which is research. 3. Research: Research step of any design project is massive. The reason why we stop and I know we want to just jump in and get onto our sketch pads and actually start to draw and illustrate. But the reason why we stop and we have researchers because we need to know that we're moving in the right direction. So what I always do, and in this case, what I'm doing with this project is I'm going to go online, go and see what other bands have done for their heavy rock metal t-shirts. And I'm going to get a bunch of references because I want to know what is the feeling, what is the rock world right now and even in the past, what is it that they're fans are loving and they will buy Nora, because ultimately I want this t-shirt to sell for this rock band. I want it to do well. I wanted to support the song and support the overall messaging of the songs. So that's really my goal here. Go online. You can do this on Pinterest, on Google. You can just look up band websites, go to some of the most associated bands that you think they sound like. So say e.g. in this case, this artist sounds a lot like Lincoln Park. Maybe pop your Roche, people like that. So I want to reference that kinda stuff And also just think about what is the overall tone of what I'm trying to do. This song also has a feature of sunny Sandoval from POD. So of course, I'm going to research what kind of style of artwork has his music been featured with before, just so that I know kinda what jumping off point I'm gonna go with. So I encourage you to take a moment, do a little bit of research. You might want to pause the video and do that because it will really help you along the way. 4. Sketching: Alright guys, it is now the sketching phase of the process to create our band t-shirt. This is a rock band t-shirt, so we can go wild and crazy. There is no limits at this stage. This is all about having fun and exploring. There are no mistakes. Even if you feel like you're going to make a mistake, I encourage you just to make it quick and move forward and to start sketching what I do and I use my pencils, I use my sketch books about a stack of them here. And I literally open up and I started, actually, this is where we take the list of words that we've created and we break them down and we decide on the top three or four at the most, I would say, to really help us lean in one direction. And also considering the research that we've just gathered, maybe other people's work. Obviously, we never want to copy anybody else's work. But as I say, there's no such thing as a new idea. And so we're always going to be inspired by other people. So what I encourage you to do now is to actually start the process of sketching out loose and rough ideas. This is not refined. I don't use any rulers or any perfect circles or anything for this stage, it's really about quick sketches and ideas just to get the ball rolling. And the words that I've decided to go with when it comes to this whole nemesis project is internal struggle, good versus evil, and victory over fear. Now for me the concept of struggle and that idea felt such a cool way of a jumping off point because then I could possibly have two items kinda going at each other or in a fighter and a friction to me right away I was like, Well, what's kind of like the worst, most vile thing I can think of when it comes to a nemesis regarding an animal. And to me, I'm sorry, anyone who loves snakes, but to me it was a snake. I think that a snake is a symbol of evil in so many ways, even the Bible, the devil is literally referred to as a serpent. So just this idea of good versus evil, internal struggle and then like victory over fear. So I wanted the thing that was struggling with the snake to be the victorious one. I want it to be the thing that represented hope and conquering and not, not a week thing, but something strong. So for me, I decided that that could be an eagle. When I, when I thought of that eagle versus snake idea, I researched it. There's actually a lot of references, so clearly my subconscious had probably already seen that somewhere before. But that's kinda how it is. So I started to play with the idea of a snake versus a eagle. So I start to sketch that out. I start to think about how these two animals can interact. And really how they can look as though they're struggling together or they're fighting each other. Because I thought that was a really interesting and both beautiful and dark way of showing the concept of the song Nemesis, the sketching phase is literally dumping ideas on your sketchbook. Maybe do this on an iPad. That's totally cool. I like to do on a sketchbook and actually work through the ideas like this. So this really helps me to actually decide, is this really going to work? The fluidity of it, you overall tones of it is this working, is it not working? The feathers, the lines is the flow of everything that direction that things are happening. The aggression, the emotion on the snake space. How can I make that feel even more anxious and more interesting to again, just kind of add more emotion. I want to maybe think about what kind of a face am I going to put on this eagle is? It's going to be like a kind of more like a simple phase or is it going to become like an aggression in his eagles face? Like I'm here to kinda take you down kind of thing. And that's definitely the vibe of the song. So I definitely wanted to explore that what I do on this stage. So I encourage you now to go ahead and actually start to explore your own ideas on your sketchbook. Maybe this is something on a piece of paper or on your iPad. However you do it, you do you and create your own process of sketching. Again, this is definitely a loose phase, so don't worry about it. Don't feel afraid of it. Put on some music, actually focus on and find floor and get sketching. 5. Refine Sketch: Alright, at this stage we're going to now take one of the sketches that we've created. And we're going to choose the one that feels the most appropriate. And we're actually going to go ahead now and recreate it on a new sheet of paper. You can refine it on the same sheet if you can erase the parts you didn't like, and then just start to refine the actual lines. They still don't need to be perfect. We can fix that in Illustrator, of course. Because after this we're going to retrace this in Illustrator. How refined we go with this sketch. It will make it easier for us in Illustrator. So I do encourage you to try your best and actually to create as much of a refined sketch here as possible. So for me, I'm literally just going over how it's going to feel. The final placement of where these swings are going to be. The different feathers in the wings. How are the lines going to go? How far away from them are they going to be from the body? I'm also thinking about how is the curve going to go on this snake as it's wrapping itself around this eagle. And I'm thinking about how, what kind of a pattern I'm going to have on this snake? Am I going to use lines? And we're going to do kinda like almost like a dragon scales kind of a pattern. Those are kind of things I'm thinking about right now as I'm working towards a final sketch. So once we've come to a place where we feel really happy with this sketch. What we're gonna do is we're going to take a picture of it and we're going to AirDrop it to our device. So maybe you're using an iPad or a laptop, whatever it is you're using. Go ahead now and actually take a picture of it. Nice, clean shot. And you can actually now go ahead and AirDrop it to yourself. You can email it to yourself if you want. But I find AirDrop is super handy and get it onto the computer for the next phase, which is to recreate it and retrace it in Illustrator. 6. Trace in Adobe Illustrator: Alright guys, so next we're gonna go into Adobe Illustrator and we're going to open up a document that I've made about 14 " wide by 18 " high. That's generally the standard size that I use for t-shirt design. Just because my printer usually uses that size of screen print. Clearly it's going to depend on who your printer is. You might want to check with your printer before you continue creating your illustration. If it's going to be for a t-shirt. So as you can see, there's a couple of things here that you'll notice right away. Number one, my sketch went right off the page and that was a bit of a mistake I made on my end. But hey, this happens sometimes as we're sketching out ideas. Sometimes things go literally right off the page, which is what happened to me here. But I'm going to correct that here in Illustrator. And that's the beauty of creating a vector. You can actually use this sketch as a basis, but you can continue illustrating in Illustrator, which is what I'm going to be doing for you right now. I'm also going to give you a sneak peek as to where we're going to land with this thing. So here we go. This is how it's gonna turn out. The reason why I'm showing you this now is obviously I've already created this art piece, this illustration for a rock band, for our manifests, for the song and nemesis. But in this case I'm showing you the end result first. And the reason why I'm doing that is because I think if you see how it's constructed, then you'll better understand how I'm gonna go ahead and actually outline it and trace it in the next step. So let me just show you something really quick here. Every single section of the wings I've created, e.g. are all separate individual enclosed areas. Each section I basically outlined. Then I create individual sections that I can then colorize and ultimately add a large texture over top. Those are the steps that are coming later on. But I wanted to at least click through some of these things just so you can see it. And this next step can take some time, but depends on how detailed your illustration is. In my case, I did layers of section, but let's go back over to the tracing step. So how did I trace? I'm going to use the pen tool. The pen tool is really my best friend in Illustrator. I use it for pretty much everything. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to actually go over every single section and create a actual pen dragged area. So I'm going to click and drag, and I'm going to actually outline and go round and sketch this. If I had all this filled in and it was very easy to do an auto trace. I could do an auto trace, but in my case, I really can't because I've really designed all this by hand. I'm going to go around, I'm going to create little sections that I'm going to go ahead and trace by hand. So I'm going to go around all these different little wings sections. I'm also going to have to extend past the edge of my page in my case and just create these wing shape. I'll make it red so you can see it. I'm going to basically go ahead and do that for all these wing shapes, as well as the shape of the face and the head and a snake. Let me go over here and show you what I did on this side. So I made it look as though the snake was twisting. It's really simple when you actually break down the different sections. Let me show you. What I did here is I created each section. That would be one piece. And then again. But then for the under mount piece, I actually use outlines. I use outlines to actually create an illusion of an underbelly, so to speak, of a snake. Outlines and stroke became really important in this case. Let me show you again on this side. So I went around and I created a shape here. So I just literally traced this shape here. And I stopped short where it was going to have the snake come under. Wherever I had a kind of a cut line, I literally stopped and I cut there. And that was really how I did that. Again for the stroke. I just literally use stroke lines here, as you can see. And I made sure that they were all the exact same stroke width so that you can really create that same overall look to it. But lines can create a sense of shapes. So it's super easy. That's the way I did that with a snake face. These are just traced shapes, super simple shapes. As you can see, the eye is just a ball underneath this shape. I put this shape on top of the eye. Again, simple shapes. I literally went around and trace every single detail of my sketch. It's when you bring them all together that they create this snake shape. Another thing I would do when I'm tracing to make it a little bit easier for myself. And this might help you guys as well, is to actually make the sketch a bit more translucent so I can take it down to 50% and the transparency, I'm gonna go ahead and lock it so that I can't have it moved by accident. And then I take my pen tool and I start to trace. This is the part in the art process that would probably grab myself a cup of coffee, put on some good music and just start tracing away. And this is something that yes, can take some time depending on how detailed your sketches. So I'm gonna go ahead and just kind of quickly trace it for you just so you can see what I'm doing. But when you really think about it, it's actually quite simple. And this is why it's so important to do a really good sketch up front. Now that whole section of the head is complete, then I can go in and create the details in black to create the eye like I've done here. And that turns into that. Alright, so what do I do now is I'm going to show you how I'm going to trace this snake just because it's got two sides to it. Alright, I'm gonna go like this. Literally just start to trace around the body of the snake. All the curves click and drag. I can go back and perfect this, which I definitely did during this process. Alright, so let's just say I'm happy with that a little bit Genki right now, but that's okay. Alright, so let me just make that a little bit brighter so you can see it. Okay. So there's my first attempt at the snake. I can go back and correct them if I want to make it a bit smoother and so on. And then I'm going to do the other side as well. And then I want to show you how I kinda cut in because it looks as though the snake overlaps itself and twists around itself. I'm actually going to connect these two pieces so that I can fill it if you don't close it in an area and Illustrator as we know, maybe you don't know this, but this is something that you really need to know in illustrating to close in sections so that you can colorize them. So this is now, let's just say I'm happy with this. It's a little bit wobbly right now, but that's okay. Let's just close that and up top just for the time being. So let's say my snake was bright red. Alright, so what I wanna do now is I want to show you how I drew the underbelly of the snake. What I did was I would click on the inside section after locking that top layer, the red layer. And I'm going to draw it with a stroke. I'm going to basically follow along the lines that I drew. Let's make it a bit stronger stroke so we can see it better. Alright, So for the underbelly of my snake, just to give you an example quickly of how I did that, I'm actually going to show you what I did was I use a circle shape. So I gotta circle, made my first circle here, and I'm gonna go to Command Y so I can see the circle going to zoom in nice and close. So you can see this. And then I'm going to cut the scissor tool. I'm going to cut and cut the areas I don't need anymore, which is this side. Goodbye. Now I've got this kind of rounded, circular shape line that I can use to copy and drag to become the lines that feel like the circular parts of a snake. In other words, the rounded edge of the body of a snake. So I did that all the way around. You can later on outline these, these type of lines if you want. So you're not dealing with stroke, but that's really how I created the circular lines that go around the body of my snake in my final. So what I wanna do now is I'm gonna go round and I'm going to trace all the pieces of my eagle and snake. And I'm going to come back to just a black and white version of it. And then we're going to start to colorize and add texture. 7. Adding Color: Now what I want you to notice is my illustration has the feeling as though there are things in the front and things in the back. It almost feels like there are layers in my illustration. I have not used separate layers literally in Illustrator, but what I've done is I've actually sent some things to the front and some things to the back. And this is what I want to show you really briefly just in case you ever want do the same with your own illustration. In mine, I actually have these feathers, e.g. that look as though there's a top layer of feathers and then a second layer here, and then a third layer. If I were to select each individual section that I've outlined. So I'm going to colorize it just you can see it a bit easier. There's one section, and then underneath it I have another section which I will make a random color. And then underneath that I have another layer. Let's just make that a blue. You can see what I'm talking about now because I want it to feel as though there's different layers underneath each other and kind of a layering effect, if you will. Let's just say e.g. I. Move this back layer or this third layer is the front. Now it looks as though there's only one layer. So that's the way I created the feeling of more than one layer of feather. Because for me, the concept of layering was really important to this illustration. It may not be for yours, but I wanted to show you that trick anyway, when it comes to the actual snake, how it wraps around itself. I actually did that a little bit differently. I kinda showed you a little bit of that in the last video. What I did was with each section of the snake, I'm going to click on it. I actually cut off the lines where it was going to go underneath. I actually closed it. That is how I actually made the snake look like it was wrapping around itself. So let me just colorize that so you can see that as well. Some people do the trick of adding a layer or a line of stroke. But for me, for the purposes of what I was doing and just for production in screen print, I want it to be super easy. I didn't want there to be any potentials for errors to happen later or for me to accidentally colorize the stroke the wrong color. I wanted to make sure it was super clear, so I did that way. Alright, so every single detail of my illustration is outlined into simple shapes, as I mentioned before. And anything that needs to be in the front is just laid on top. So here we go, the snake eye again. Same thing. If I take the snake eye and I select it and I bring it to the front. It changes the look, but I put it underneath this piece. This piece also has a stroke on it as you can tell. So stroke can also help create the illusion of layers being in front or behind. I did that a lot with the snake. I use a lot of stroke with a snake because to me it was the easiest way to show details and curves. And the illusion of a rounded edge, as you can see all the way around the snake. That's how I did that there. So I just want to show you a bit of an up close and personal with how I outline this thing. Now we're gonna go into color. When I'm creating a brand new color palette, this is usually what I like to do. I'd like to create a secondary art board on the right-hand side for me of the illustration that I'm working on. Because I know that this band likes a black t-shirt. I wanted to create a certain number of inks that I knew that the band was comfortable using. Now keep in mind, the more inks you use with screen printing, the more expensive it's going to be. So if e.g. my band wanted to keep it simple, black and white, I can literally do this. I could go all black and white. Maybe I can make more black pieces to make it a bit more visually balanced, but I could definitely do that at a white tiling, and there you go. But because I know this band wants to add more color and make it more of a vivid, bright popping illustration. I wanted to add more colors. What I did here was actually worked on a combination of colors, and this is the colors that I personally ended up with. So this is something you can do in your own illustration. Take a moment and actually create a separate art board and play with some color palettes. Thinking about how many inks that your band potentially, maybe this is a fictitious band or maybe it's somebody who are really working on an illustration for think about how many colors they want to use. If e.g. they only wanted to use two colors, I could say take the red and start popping in some red into my snake, e.g. I'm just going to grab the sections of the snake that I would potentially make red. And let's just do this for fun just so we can see what just only one color could look like. I'm gonna go ahead and pop that in there. And already my snake is taking a bit of shape and it's feeling a little bit more three-dimensional when I add color in. So as you can see, if I started to just add one extra color that in itself could make a really strong t-shirt. But I'm going to keep going and I'm going to keep on playing with colors in this case until I get to my final. But these are the five colors I decided on. White, red, this kind of beige color, a deep turquoise, and a kind of like a soft yellow. Go ahead and start to colorize my Eagle by making the main parts of it red. So I'm going to select each section that are the main parts of my ego, like the head, the legs, animus select red. I'm also going to select the front section of my wings, and I've already grouped that section. And that's also really important if, if one whole entire area is going to be the same color, It's really easy when you just group it together. That way you can quickly decide on different colors for it. So e.g. if I'm trying to decide which one I want, I could just select that whole section and try red, or try beige or try Teal. In this case, red is what worked. In my case, I had a stroke on those of black, so I'm gonna go ahead and change that to black. And my stroke is 4.3. So that's the kind of stuff I have to be aware of. In my case. Where did I add a stroke? And what is the stroke doing? In my case, it's actually separating the wings detailing. So that was really important for me. I can go ahead and do that again. On the tail here, I can just click on the eyedropper tool and grab the exact red and exact stroke from here, make it easy for myself. So I'm gonna take my selection tool again and click on the second layer of the wings, which is going to be the beige I've already selected in my palette. And I'm going to make sure I have my stroke on and I'm gonna go again and make that 4.3 stroke. Alright, so now I've got two layers already done. I can go ahead and select the bottom layer or the second layer on my tail as well. Let me zoom in so you can see this a bit better. This is now the second layer of my tail. I'm going to use the eyedropper tool again. Select it there, and I'm gonna keep on doing that until I fill in all the colors of my ego. Let me do one more layer so you guys can see it come together. So that's the third layer there. And another third layer in this case, I have it. Oh, yellow. Let's see. I'm gonna go to yellow. Select the yellow color. And when I selected that way it gets rid of my stroke. So I'm going to go back to my black stroke and I'm gonna go back to 4.3 again and again. I'm going to select this bottom layer now, and I'm going to use the eyedropper tool and grab the yellow from there, the end piece of the wing. I'm going to leave that as white because I like how it looks as a white popping edge against the black. I've decided that my snakes going to be teal, like a dark teal. Again, I'm selecting all these same areas of the snake, kind of like the smooth side of the snake. For the sake of our example, I'm just gonna go ahead and select teal. And as you can see, it's starting to really build up. Now the underbelly of the snake is all the same color and it's starting to really take shape now. Now I'm going to select the strokes of the snake, the underbelly of my snake around lines. I've grouped all of them as I was creating them to make it really easy for myself to select them all. It's exact same time. Right now they're all white and right now they're all at the same stroke size of 2.8. So I'm gonna go and select the yellow eye dropper tool again, make it a stroke to 0.8 is my stroke size. Coming together even more. I'm going to go and lock command to lock all of those strokes now so I could do the outside line of my snake command to, to lock them. Now what I wanna do is I want to make the outer rim of my snake. I don't want it to be white because it doesn't really work with my design. I'm going to eyedropper tool that same yellow. And noting the stroke width I had here, which is 4.2, I'm going to click on it and go back up to 4.2 stroke and boom. I'm gonna do that around all the rim of my snake so that my snake looks a bit more complete and on the outside. So I'm gonna go ahead and finish this off. As you can imagine, it's the same thing. I'm gonna go and select each section and fill it in with a color that I've selected. Again, grouping sections that are all the same color to make it easier for yourself. Noting down, maybe writing down any stroke that you might need to record just so you can refer to later. Sometimes I actually designed with a bit of a pencil and a sketchbook beside me to actually write down things like stroke width, fonts, that kind of thing. Just so that I can refer to it later and make it easy for myself. So I'm gonna finish colorizing this and then we're gonna go on into texture. 8. Add Texture and Typography: Alright, now what I'm gonna do is go over to Adobe Photoshop and I'm going to create the texture that I want to use over top of my t-shirt design. So this is actually a concrete texture I found online. I actually purchased this. This is a high resolution texture. You can buy textures in a wide range of places like Creative Market. Sometimes you can even find free ones online at places like unsplash.com, places like that, depending on what you're looking for, we might get lucky. Alright, so what I do is I open it up in Photoshop and I'm going to go ahead and we're going to make this into a grayscale image. So we'll go to Image Mode, Grayscale. I want to basically get rid of all color. I'm going to double-click on the layer to make it not a locked file. I wanted to just be a regular file. Then I'm gonna go ahead up to Image Adjustments, brightness, contrast. And I'm going to make it as bright and as contrasted as it possibly can be. So I want to make the blacks extremely black and the white is extremely white. Then I'm gonna go over to Image Adjustments, posterize. And I'm going to take the levels down to two. As you can see now it's really, really black and white and zoom in a little speckles. This is one way, there's lots of ways to make texture. This is just one way to do that. Now I'm gonna go ahead and save this as a JPEG file, save as, and save it as a jpeg. Once I've saved as a JPEG, I'm gonna go back to Illustrator and I'm going to open up that file, File, Open, open it up. It's going to open it on its own document, which is fine. And I'm just going to grab it, make it a little smaller. I'm going to turn it vertically because our artwork is vertical, and here it is. And I've got this texture in Illustrator. So I'm gonna do now is I'm going to trace our image, trace this texture to create a little mini many shapes that would create a vector texture with this. So I'm gonna go to Image Trace and I click on it and then go down to black and white. Black and white logo says Tracy may proceed slowly with this large image. Would you like to continue? And the answer is yes. So there you have it now it's traced it. I'm going to grab that copy it command C. I'm going to go over to my nemesis shirt that is now colored in. I'm going to go and paste it. Now the biggest problem is now a sudden our texture as a white background, which I don't, I don't really want. So let me just take it over here for a moment and I'm gonna get rid of the background texture. So I'm going to select this texture. I'm going to click Expand. Now every single element has its own shape. Then I'm going to select the outside area of it, the white background, and I'm going to delete. So now what I have left is a texture that is all black ink. I'm going to go ahead and use that now on top of my t-shirt design, I'm going to group that texture so it keeps it all together. So now that I brought the texture over top of my artwork, we're going to find a problem. And the first one is that even though yes, it did create little shapes for my texture, they have little whitespace is all around it like little lines of white around it. What I'm gonna do to correct that is I'm going to select the texture which I've grouped. I'm going to just use the eyedropper tool. I'm going to eye drop the background. I want it to be the exact same color as my background black. Now, when I let go of that, now, all the white edges have disappeared. So only the texture on top of my illustration is showing. Now as you can see, it's not really showing me much texture. I'm somebody who likes a lot of texture. So what I will do is I'll actually grab the texture and I'm going to Command C, command F to put it in front because I've copied and placed it on the front. Now I'm going to flip the top layer upside down. Alright, so that's going to create a little bit more texture. I'm going to keep on copying and doing that with my texture layer to create as much texture as I would like. I could also just take a piece of that texture and click and drag and copy, make certain parts of it smaller so I can get detailed textures and just keep on layering as much as I want. This is a real like subjective part of the process. Like every part actually. And you can add as much texture here as you want. You can layer textures, you can even add, I could add a layer of white if I really wanted to, just to spice things up a bit, let me just show you what that would look like. Just to kinda change things up. It really is up to you and your artistic eye at this point. But for me I wanted just the texture to only be black. So this is the way you can create texture on top of your T-shirt design. Alright, we're almost there with my rock band t-shirt design. Now we're gonna do, is we're going to add titling. Now in this case, this design is for a band called manifest. So I'm going to click on their logo, which I brought in and color the same color as one of the yellow tones here. I'm going to bring that over to about there. Keep in mind that can also go behind the texture so that it can also add some texture to the titling. And the name of the song is Nemesis. So I'm going to bring that in really nice enlarge on the top here. Now, fun fact, this exact same illustration was also used as the single cover in Spotify. You can use the same design for multiple things. So keep in mind in that you can actually create one thing and use it again and again for maybe stickers, for t-shirts, for sweatshirts, for hats, for a variety of different things. So keep that in mind when you're creating these awesome illustrations, especially once you get them vectorized, if they're simple enough, you can even embroider them into clothes. You can do all kinds of different really cool things with them. So here you have it, guys, this is the final design for my t-shirt. I'm super excited about how it turned out, and I hope you guys have really enjoyed creating this shirt with me. Here is the final t-shirt design on mock-up. Super, super excited about it. And now we're gonna go into how to save this thing and export it for print. 9. Save Vector and Export png: Now that we're happy with our final design, we're going to go ahead and save this as a vector for screen print. The way you do that is to save it as an AI file or a vector file. The screen printer is going to need a vector file so that if they need to manipulate anything or shift anything that they have, the potential route file or the native file in this case. So I'm gonna go ahead and save it as an AI file, File Save As, and find out where you want to save it on your computer. I'm going to save it as an AI file. And that's really it guys. Now it's ready to be sent off to a screen printer. The second file that we want to create for this shirt is a PNG file. This is gonna be used for print on-demand. Print on-demand is when a band can have an order come in on their website and this one shirt will be printed one at a time. That way the band does not have to print any shirts upfront. They just have their print on-demand printer print one at a time, hence the name print on demand. One of my favorite print on-demand companies is print defy. I use it for my own company and my husband, he's a rock artist who uses it for a lot of his own band shirts. We find it really handy and it's a great way to keep things really economical and not print a ton of shirts in advance. Not sure if they're going to sell. Sometimes when having a tour's canceled and events canceled. So what we're gonna do is we're going to create a PNG file of this art. The reason why we want a PNG is because we want the background to not be colorized. We want it to be transparent. So we can do is a couple of ways we can do that. We can actually select the background here and try and delete it. But the only problem is then we have to go in and delete every single detail of black here. There's a faster way for me to do that. File save as a PDF. Okay, Save. And now I'm gonna go over to Photoshop. I'm going to open it up, File, Open, find my nemesis PDF on the desktop. I'm going to keep it as an RGB. It's asking me what mode I want. I'm going to keep it as an RGB in this case, open it up. Alright, so now it's open here in Photoshop. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go over to the Magic Wand Tool and select it. I'm gonna go into the background and select the background color, which is black. Men a bunch of marching ants around it. Oh, and before I do that, I'm gonna go over here and make all my colors on my palette white. Okay, So make sure they're all white. So I've got my marching ants going all around my design and I'm gonna go over to select similar. So now it's going to select every single detail piece of this illustration. I'm showing you the marching ants around everything, every little speck of black is being selected. And we're going to do is I'm going to hit Delete, basically going to delete every element of black on this illustration. Now you're probably wondering, Melanie, what in the world have you done here? But the reason why I've done this is to now create a transparent background altogether. I know this is going to be going on a black t-shirt. I don't need to print black on a black t-shirt, right? So all I'm gonna do Command D, So you can see it. I just want to have only the art colors that are going to be printed on the actual t-shirt. Now let me just put a black layer behind this so you can see exactly how it looks. Found new layer and I'm going to call this black. I'm going to go into my palette here and just find a black color and I'm going to colorize it, phil. Alright, I'm going to put that to the back, pull the layer down. Now my art still looks the exact same. Nothing has changed. I'm just going to open this up a bit more as you can see it. In fact, let me just F2 that. So you can see that even more. My art has not changed and I want you to know that that nothing has changed about the art. It's still a high resolution and it's a PNG, nice and crisp, and it's still at 14 by 18. But now the good news is it can print on a black t-shirt. Maybe you want to try it on a gray t-shirt. Let's just see what would happen, right? So I'm going to select that and let's go find some gray color. Let's do a deep gray at least. Let's fill that. This is a great way of also seeing what the shirt is going to look like on different colors. Guess what? Doesn't look as cool, right? It doesn't really pop as well. Let's try it on white. Just for fun. C doesn't really pop as well, but it's a good way of really trying out the different colors. Again, this is a great exercise before I save this final PNG file That's going to be for print on demand. I obviously need to get rid of the black background because then that would defeat the purpose of a transparent background. So I'm gonna say Delete, I'm going to pull that to the trash can. And now I've got this transparent, fully high resolution but transparent PNG file. I'm going to say File Save As, and this is a RGB file. It is not as CMYK, which is surprising. I know print-on-demand, they actually request an RGB file. Now I'm going to go ahead and save this as a PNG. And there you go. Now I've got an AI file that's ready to go to screen print. And I've got a PNG file that's ready to go to print on-demand. 10. Create TShirt Mockup: Hey friends, now that we've created our awesome t-shirt design, what is really important to do next is actually create a mockup. For those of you who are designers working for clients out there. This is going to make them feel super, super excited when they actually see their design on a real t-shirt. So what I've done is I've found a t-shirt that I use as my, basically my template for showcasing artwork on. You can get these on a variety of different places. A lot of blank, flat lay websites where you can actually buy flatly, Sure, It's like how this one looks. Go on Creative Market. You can go onto Etsy even and download some digital formats of these. Sometimes they come with things around them. I like it really simple with just a white background just to keep it really simple and minimalist, I'm going to go back to that PNG we just created, and I'm going to drag it over to this other file. Obviously it's massive, it's way too big, so I'm going to size it down so it'll fit on top of my t-shirt. And this is how I'm gonna basically create a mockup hold Shift if I'm going to scale it down, and I'm going to basically pop that onto a T-shirt. Boom, size it down a bit more realistic size. Obviously this is a mock-up. It's not exact measurements clearly, but this is a great way of giving people the idea of what the final t-shirt is gonna look like. I will go ahead and flatten this. I would save this as a JPEG and send that through as well. Alright guys, so there you have it. This is the shirt we've created together. I hope you've enjoyed this process and now it's ready to be sent off to the client. So I'm going to send not only the flat artwork, but also this awesome mockup, just showing them how it looks on a real t-shirt. They can then use this and posted on their social media to get shirt sales. To talk about maybe a shirt that's coming out. Maybe it's gonna be available at their next concert. They can go ahead and use this exact photograph or a mock-up, I should say, on their storefront, on there and maybe Shopify store or wherever they sell on their website. This is a great way. That's an awesome tool to give them as a selling tool, all they have to do is post it or add it to their website. As I hope you've enjoyed this process with me. And let's go ahead and talk about the project. 11. Project Challenge: Hey guys, thank you so much for joining me in this process of creating a real T-shirt for a rock band. This has been an amazing process and I hope you've learned a lot. And I want to encourage you to do a project challenge, which is to create your very own rock band t-shirt. So go through the entire process that I just went through and actually create an attribute list of words narrowed down to about three or four to give you a direction. Next, we're gonna do a little bit of research and discover what other people in the same genre are doing. Maybe this is gonna be for a real band that you love, or maybe it's for a fictitious a band. Either way, this is a lot of fun and a great way to put our new skills to practice. Next, we're gonna go ahead and create sketches in either a physical sketchbook or maybe on your iPad, whatever works for you. And then you're going to take those sketches into Illustrator and create detailed, beautiful vector art. You can add color and texture there, export it as an AI and as a PNG. I know I've asked you a lot, but guys, let's go ahead and go through the whole process and practice these new skills. Now I want to encourage you to post your work to the project section so we can all see it, learn from each other. Thank you guys so much for joining this course. I've had a lot of fun creating it with you. Thank you and have an awesome day.