Illustrate a Vintage-Style T-shirt Design

1. 01 Introduction: Hi. Welcome to my course on creating a vintage style T shirt design with a character, all done in clips. Studio paint. My name is Ben Walker story. I'm an illustrator, and for the last few years I've just been focused on creating my own content, T shirts, books, etcetera and making them available online print on the man style. I'm excited to show you some of the tips and tricks that I've learned on the way, and hopefully they will help with your success if you love to draw but have never really turned it into a T shirt design. This is definitely a course for you. If you have been making a lot of T shirt designs and just want to see some different ways of going about it, I would encourage you to stick with this course and see what we do. By the time we're all done, you'll be able to take your idea from a loose sketch all the way through the illustration process and end up with something that you are ready to upload to any print on demand service. For this course, you're gonna need a wakame tablet or similar drawing tablet or you could use your iPad pro with the pencil or similar drawing tablet like that. Also, you're gonna need a copy of clips, studio paint or pro. Just know that there is a 30 day trial you can download, and if you end up loving it, it's very inexpensive. Well, I don't know about you, but I'm excited to start digging into this. Let's do it. 2. 02 Setting Up for Success: All right, let's dive in of clips. Studio paint open. Go to file new. Let's name this something that will remember vintage T shirt. We're gonna change the units two inches and then the width is gonna be 15 inches. HaIf 18 inches. The resolution is gonna be 300 d p. I basically expression color will leave his color, and the paper color will leave as white. I'm gonna hit this floppy disk here and make a preset. We'll call it. Ah, Amazon. Sure. Since that's the specs 18 by 15 300 dp I that a was on once, all right? And they were like, OK, and then whenever I need it, Elsie in the presets here. Okay, The first thing I do when I open a new file is make sure that all the panels I want to be working with are open and in a place where I can find them. What were to need is let's just paste him right in here. The tools just here. Sub tool navigator, tool property, layers, brush size layer property. And we'll have some colors here in the color set. And if you don't see any of those, you'll find them all up here in the window. Dropped down 3. 03 Step 1 Get your ideas together: Okay, so this course is focused more on designing rather than selling. But I will say that if you're doing print on demand shirts selling them online, it's important to know what you're going to be designing before you dive in. In other words, you should have a written description first, at least a few he words. So I keep my ideas in Evernote. For the purposes of today, I'm gonna be making ah, funky roller skating cat. So I'll just copy right here, and I'll just paste it right in as a reminder. The first thing I like to do when working on any illustration project is to gather some inspiration and reference images. Now I should mention whatever I grabbed for reference. It's not to trace or to copy in any direct way. This is just to get a sense of the look I'm going to shoot for, and I'm gonna combine lots of inspiration in my head and come up with something fresh. That's my own. I like to look up reference material on Pinterest. What I want to do is is ah, graphic that would look sort of like a 19 twenties and 19 thirties era character. So in order to see some specifics, I'm gonna look up. Fleischer Studios. Max Fleischer and his studio Did Betty Boop. They did Popeye a lot of the leading cartoons from the twenties and thirties. So this way I can check out some stuff that it was actually made 100 years ago. Almost. I love looking at these old character sheets, so I'm just gonna grab this one on a Mac. It's control. Click or I think, right. Click. Oh, with a with a PC. And I'm just gonna pasted directly into my file and clip studio. And as you can see, I've already been collecting some stuff, some reference once I feel like I have enough images to sort of keep me company while I work on this. I go ahead and grab each layer in the layers panel by holding down shift and then emerged those layers. Okay. And then finally, I've found a couple images that are specifically gonna help me with ideas for the pose and everything like that. So I'm gonna grab those and blow them up and keep them on their own layer as my sort of main inspiration to do that I use the lasso tool, Select each graphic copy and paste them and then I'll just hit command t to transform. Go ahead and scale up this image. Now, if you if you know the rule of not scaling up images, that is true. You're gonna lose quality. But since this is just reference photos were not printing this or anything, it's fine. I just want to see it bigger. 4. 04 Step 2 Sketching roughs: All right, so now it's time to get to sketching. I'm just gonna speed things up with the video as I tell you about some my processes and tools that I use. I like to rough out my ideas in light blue or purple color, and I use the pencil tool. Now, if you're like me and you've grown up using Photoshopped, don't be confused. This pencil tool makes lines that really look like pencil on paper. So working with this pencil tool reminds me to stay rough and loose as I sketch out ideas. The blue pencil is a traditional way of working for illustrators and animators when they're in their beginning, rough stages that goes back to the way cameras work and everything like that, but also for us, it's gonna help differentiate that light blue are from the black final art that we're gonna draw over. If you find it hard to see when you're drawing, you can draw with your pencil tool in black as well. And then when you're ready, the ink you can hit this button up here in the layers properties. It looks like a blue square, and that will turn your drawing light blue. When you're ready, you'll also notice that I've found a picture of a guy actually roller skating. I think it's really important when you want to show somebody when you want to show a character doing a specific activity to really see what people look like when they're doing that activity instead of trying to make it up. I'm just drawing the basic form of my cat character. There's no details. I don't know where the eyes are going to go yet or anything like that. I'm just sort of figuring out a naked shape, and it's pretty hairy and rough still, Since this is digital, I'm able to go ahead and select areas like his head and move them around. Maybe if I need to resize something, I could do that at this point. And that's something that it would have had to have happened, you know, with layers of tracing paper back in the day, doing this on paper, so it's great doing this digitally. I've noticed that my tail needs some adjusting to. I had just kind of tossed out a little tail back here and it's it's not really doing it for me. So I'm gonna go ahead and select that and resize it, reshape it so that it kind of flows past his hand and kind of gives more of a sense of motion again to reshape things in clips studio. I just hit command T for transform. There's also this button up in the top left here with the four prongs coming out of a circle that will bring up the transform tools well, and then I'll just rotate and scale is needed. And I'll hold down the command key to distort it from one corner or another. If I need Teoh, I'm gonna keep this pretty simple. Just a character and maybe a circular shape behind it. Some not bothering with a lot of thumb males. This is the time to decide where all the body parts of your character are gonna be and how they're gonna flow together rather than trying to fix something once it's all drawn and really rendered out, right? So I'm just moving things, re sizing things a little bit. Great. So I've got a thumbnail sketch that I'm happy with, and there's still plenty of room to build up detail and, uh, plenty room to play. Now it's time to clean up this rough sketch and start figuring out what the details will look like. So I've turned down the opacity of the layer for that first sketch to about 32 faded back. Lock that layer with a little padlock symbol in the layers panel that will create a new layer to do the next well, layer. At this stage, I'm still not making any marks that will show up in the final. Our work. I'm still keeping it pretty loose, but I've switched to the pen tool so I can get a clearer idea of where my final lines will go. This is called the Turnip pen, and it's the one that I use for a lot of my work. Alright, so I've got a design that is really shaping up here before getting into thinking and coloring this. This is the time to make sure this design is the right size on your T shirt. Now again, there is the rule of not scaling up your roster designs or you'll lose quality. But this is the rough, so it doesn't matter. Clip Studio, for some reason, doesn't display all the numbers up here on the ruler, but I see a 10. So that means that this mark here is 11. I'm just gonna fudge up my design a little bit, make it closer to 12 inches wide. I think that'll be good. Before I export the final artwork, I'm gonna move it up to the top here. But for now, so I can see better. I'm just gonna have it live down here. So for the next phase, I'm gonna turn off the visibility of this first rough. The tighter rough. I'm gonna turn down the opacity. Knock that back, lock it so I don't accidentally draw on it. All right. So I'm gonna use the circular selection tool over here and create a big circle. And I'm going to create a new layer for this shape. I'll call it Moon. The reason I want this background shape behind the cat is I would like this cat to be black . I would also like to make sure that this design works on a black T shirt. So if I have a black cat on a black T shirt, that's not gonna work. Enter this moon shaped. That's gonna make sure that the cat stands out and has a nice silhouette. I'm going to go at it outline selection. And now this is still just for rough purposes. So I'm just gonna choose 13 pixels, folks. Fine. And then I'm gonna go ahead and hit command T and scale this moving around a little bit. Make sure I like the size and placement. So I'm keeping in mind that the cats, gloves and skates will be light colored. So that means they can hang over this background shape and they'll still show up. And then, lastly, I'm just gonna take down the opacity of this rough circle lock that lock all of my roofs, and now we are ready the ink. 5. 05 Step 3 Inking: All right, So now that I've got a cleaned up a rough sketch, it's time to get to thinking You call us the final our work. But don't be intimidated by the word final its digital, you know, And you can change things. You can start over if you need to. I do it all the time. The first thing I'm gonna do is go ahead and change this blue here to a black. Next. I'm going to create a new layer to draw on, but this one's gonna be a vector layer in the layers panel. That's the second little icon at the bottom, the one with the three D cube in front of it. All right, I'm gonna show you one of my biggest secret weapons that I've been using when creating graphics for print. And that is turning off anti alias ing. If I grab a brush here and make a test stroke and then we zoom in on it, you'll see the fuzzy edges. That is something called anti alias. Singing it. It takes away that stair step picks elation. I'm going to take a look at my layer property panel and change the expression color from color to monochrome. Now, what that's gonna do is anything on this layer will now be either a black pixel, a white pixel or transparency. This will make coloring in this graphic super quick and simple. And the colors will drop in with that satisfying click of Legos coming together, no matter what brush you choose or an airbrush pencil, whatever having it on this monochrome style layer will have a really a really unifying effect that I really enjoy. It takes some getting used to and some experimenting, but I encourage you to play with it. Anyway, let's get to thinking this thing in. I'm gonna choose the turnip a pen to do this initial line work. It's got the pressure sensitivity, so it's gonna come to Ah, nice point at the ends, but it's not too severe either. And then I'm gonna need to choose a size toe work with going to go with 15. We don't want to go to find because with T shirts, if you get too fine with the graphics, things get muddled. Inks might run together. You don't know. The next thing I'm gonna do is set my stabilization. Now, if you've never worked with an app that has, ah, stabilization feature like this prepared to have your life changed. This is a huge game changer. Basically, it evens out any jitteriness in your hand and makes it look like you're working with French curves. Just know that the more stabilization is turned up, like if you're, say 100 the more it's going to slow down your strokes and slow down your work. So it's really gonna be a compromise of how you like to work, how you like to draw versus the time that you're gonna be putting into it. You're gonna notice how the drawing is rotating around a bit. Sometimes as I draw, I'm using this slider at the bottom of the Navigator window to rotate it. What that does is allow me to draw with my whole arm from my shoulder and my elbow. If you draw this way and take advantage of the way your joints move naturally with your body, it's gonna show in your drawing. Now that I have the basic line work done, it's a good time to stop and show you the magic of working with these vector layers and why I use these overlapping lines. I want to choose the eraser tool. It's set to rough, which is great. Then if you go to tool properties, there's an area with these crosses, and I'm going to make sure that the middle one is clicked. Erase up to intersection. Now, if I drag the eraser across any of the lines that have intersected with another line, it's gonna clip off that overlap cleanly, you know, from drawing on paper or even another roster based formats. It can be really hard to get lines to meet up, but not overlap. So I just love doing this so quick and easy. It's not always gonna be an exact science with this kind of stuff, and sometimes you're gonna need to adjust some things. Luckily, since this is a vector layer, every stroke that you have drawn, it's gonna be edible, movable, scalable. So like here on the wheel, where it looked like the lines had overlapped and I could trim them, they didn't quite overlap, So all they have to do is grab this line here, move it up a little bit, and now I can trim off the excess lines. Same thing up here with the bottom of his sweater. It looks a little bit more like an intestine than a ribbed sweater, so I could just go ahead and grab the lines and move them around, rotate them and make it a little more attractive. There's a couple spots on my illustration where I left it blank because I wanted to use a different tool or a different brush, and up here in his mouth own it. A nice, fatter line. It still is. Not quite. Rice is a great time to show you this tool here. When you're working with a vector layer, you can grab onto this tool at the bottom of the tool bar that looks like a little hand grabbing a funnel or something says Correct line. When you hover over it and then you go to the tool property panel, we'll set it to thin width. Now, if I rub kind of click and drag over the line that I drew, it actually thins it out. Is if I had used ah, smaller brush. So everything is very malleable with these Dr Layers. That's why I love it. I wasn't happy with the look of this cat sweater. So I went ahead and made a new layer drew ah, more cable knit looking sweater for him. And then, if I locked that layer, I can go ahead and just go to the original drawing on this first vector layer and delete out those lines. If you've ever tried to draw a circle either on paper or digital, you know it's kind of impossible, especially trying to get the line to kind of meet back up where you started. Now, if you click on this bottom right tool in the toolbar, hopefully will be a little triangle. If you don't see it, go to the sub tool menu and choose ruler and then choose figure ruler. So I've chosen the elliptical. You can go ahead and drag it out and then used the object selection tool to reshape it and move it around is needed. The nice thing about these guides is instead of trying to make a selection and stroked the selection that can produce a really mechanical look, So instead, if you use these guides, you can use whatever pen or pencil you want to work with and have pressure sensitivity to it and maintain that hand drum Look. Now, the one drawback to working this way on a vector layer, this object selection tool does get kind of confused as to what you are trying to grab onto . So I end up having to move the line. I just drew out of the way, then grab the guide, moved over to where needed next, and then move this wheel back into place. 6. 06 Step 4 Coloring: So now it's time to get to coloring this. Our work in it could be tough for me to come up with color schemes out of my own head. I think I mostly think in line, so it really is important to start with some inspiration. You'll also want to start with a T shirt color in mind. It's really hard to color in a design and then just hope that it works on one color of a T shirt or another. It's better to star with a T shirt color and then build up from there. So let's do that. It's time to find some color schemes that say not of this time. And it should be probably three colors that work well together, maybe four. What I like to do is go onto Pinterest and look up stuff like vintage matchbox vintage coasters, vintage packaging design. Just the goal is to try to find some images that were printed pre 1960. Maybe you're gonna end up finding images that were designed by professionals. Toe look good with one or two colors printed on white paper. Color schemes aren't copyrighted. They can certainly be trademarked, so I wouldn't grab like the San Francisco 49 years colors and then make a football related shirt. That would be a bad idea, but there's nothing wrong with grabbing the color schemes from these old packaging designs . Once you find a couple of things, did you like a copy of the image and paste it right into your workspace? Like I said, dark shirts sell best. So I'm gonna see what I can do. Using orange cream and medium blue on a Navy blue T shirt. I'm gonna use the eyedropper tool and click right on this orange here and then I like to open up my color and see what I'm working with. What I like to keep in mind is that the T shirt color might end up showing through a bit when things have been printed and washed a few times. So it's better to hike things up as faras contrast and saturation from the beginning, instead of just going with what looks perfect and subtle and aged on screen. Anyway, I opened up and make any adjustments I need, and then I hit X do the same with a different color, and then I'm gonna go ahead and use the color palette and save the colors. Using little button here with the droplet and the addition symbol. I'm gonna make a new layer down at the bottom here and call it t shirt color. And then I'm gonna drop in this Navy color. Actually, I'm gonna go ahead and take down the a pass ity of this layer just so I can see what I'm doing. All right, So to color this in, I'm gonna make a couple new layers. This one here will be the the final moon shape. You saw this. Call it background moon, and then this one will be called color. And before I start dropping color and I'm gonna make this Leinart layer a reference layer by hitting the little button up here, that looks like a lighthouse. I want this moon shaped to be teal. I'm gonna get the selection tool that you lips hold down shift to make sure it's a perfect circle, and then I'm just going to use the arrow tools to kind of nudge it into place a little bit better. All right. And then I'm gonna go up to edit Phil, And that way it will fill in the whole shape and not get confused by the fact that I made this a reference layer up here. Now I can get orange, his ex. Okay, so I've got the cream, I've got the orange. I'm gonna pick this paint bucket tool and just start dropping in color. That's the wrong one. And as you see, it just drops in instantly. And if you zoom in real quick, it just snaps right in cleanly. And there's not gonna be any confusion about the borders of these. These colors. It's weird. It's still getting confused by the background moon shape. Oh, that's because I'm coloring on the wrong layer. All right, let's lock that one. And I want to speed this up a little bit. As I start dropping in colors, there'll be a couple of finishing moves that I need to put on this character so we'll check back in when I'm done dropping in the colors. But I'm gonna speed this up for now. One thing you can run into when you're coloring this way is gaps in the Leinart. What happens is the color runs through that little escape hatch and goes out into areas that you don't want color in. So when you have the paint bucket tool selected, you just go into tool properties and hit close Gap. I'm gonna pick this second rectangle here, and that should be enough. You had to close up that little gap, and then I'll actually maybe turned the close gap threshold all the way up here and try again on this mouth. And that works to close that huge gap between the lines there. You know, this color schemes looking kind of familiar. I'm just gonna need to check something. Run online real quick, A and w Yeah, maybe this is a regional thing. But I knew this guy looked familiar. His outfit is basically the same as the old A and W bear for A and W root beer just so that I feel better. I think I'll probably change the color scheme before actually publishing this guy, but he's fine for now. I want to get rid of everything on this design that's black. If we go down to the T shirt color and take the transparency back up to 100 you see that the black is really sort of redundant and doesn't help. So what I'm gonna do is instead have that navy color or black T shirt color come through and take the place of any ink. In order to do that, I'm gonna need to have a little bit of an outline going around his ears and tail. Make sure everything shows up better. First, I'm gonna make a backup copy of this moon shaped by just dragging the layer down to the new layer icon. And then if I go up to the line art layer and just hold down the command key on a Mac or it's the windows button on the PC, click right in that preview window and it will make a selection from that Leinart. All right. And then still on this layer with the moon shape, I'm going to go up to edit outlined selection. Draw outside is the setting. Lee. When I said it on 20 hit, okay. And so that made an isil outline around him. And then with that selection still active, I'm just gonna hit delete, and that's gonna pull the line artwork out of that moon shape. Turn off the visibility on the line. Art de Select that I'm gonna make a copy of this color layer just so that I'm again not destroying something I might need. Later, I'm gonna go select color gamut and just click on anything that's black. Then I'm gonna hit, delete, go down to the background. Moon shape, layer hit. Delete again. One thing I'm noticing, though, is that there's a couple spots that quite get filled in. There's little dots here. There's gonna need to just get filled in with the brush tool real quick. So now I have a design on a navy blue T shirt that is orange cream and medium blue. 7. 07 Step 5 Vintage Halftones: Before we wrap this up, I want to add one extra tidbit that will add some vintage flair. I'm just gonna add some half tone dots down here on the skate wheels to give the illusion of rounded nous like ingredient. But it's gonna be in a very clean, print friendly way. So I'm just gonna grab the magic wand tool and click here in the wheel. So the layer with my Leinart on it is still set as the reference. And then I'm gonna go ahead and create a new layer and in the layer properties, I'm gonna click this box here. That's checkerboard ID. I'm gonna take this number of screen frequency down pretty low. I'll just set to 17. That should be fine. I'll show you more about how that works in a minute, but next I'm gonna choose as my foreground color black. And then I'm gonna choose the Grady Int tool. And in the sub tool, I'm gonna choose foreground to transparent. So now I can just drag out a little Grady int along this wheel down here that's gonna go from black to transparent with the's pretty big dots, which I like. It's gonna have more of a purposeful vintage. Look to it now. If you were to go into the layer properties and dragged that number of screen frequency up to a higher number, it's gonna make the dots finer and finer as you go up, and that can work well for you to in certain situations. But since we're going for a vintage look like I'm nice and big, it's gonna print better on a T shirt this way. So I'm just going to speed this up as I finish out the wheels. But I want to show you that when I work with these half tones, I've just been using black, white and transparent, and it just makes life a lot simpler. But yeah, if you get involved in trying to paint with different levels of gray, it can get kind of ugly and unpredictable. It's better to distinct a black way and transparent. Then I go ahead and Rasta rise it and color, and we'll do that in a minute. One way to help find tune these half tones is to just go ahead and slide the transparency slider on the layer itself and that will shrink or grow the dots and create a lighter or darker effect, and you can watch it happen in real time as you play with the slider. I think that's pretty cool. So I think I'm actually gonna knock this down to 78%. I like that. So now that I have something that I like, I'm gonna control Click the layer with the half tones here, choose roster eyes. They really need to bring the transparency all the way back up to 100%. And then I'm gonna lock the transparency. I'll grab the color picker, pick this orange, and then go at it, Phil. And now we have nice, clean orange, half tone dots. 8. 08 Step 6 Saving: So I've got some finished our work here. That's awesome. I'm gonna go ahead and export this as a ping and then before were done. I'm gonna do a weathered version to kind of give it a little extra vintage feel The first thing I want to do is go ahead and turn off visibility on any of these background layers. So we should have the checkerboard showing, and then I'm just gonna double check that All of the layers that I wanna have as part of this final artwork are in fact visible. And if I control, click and choose combined copies of display layers that will just consolidate everything into ah, fresh copy of all the artwork on one layer. And now I'm gonna move the image up to the top here, kind of so that the circular background shape and the cat line up around the sternum of somebody wearing this shirt on merch by Amazon. It's got to be ready to go AST's faras placement and sizing. I know that you have more freedom on something like red Bubble, but I just make sure that all of my our work is ready to go for Amazon So to export this out, I'll just go file export single layer dot PNG And then you're just gonna need to be in charge of naming your files something that you will remember that makes sense and that you will find when you need it. I'll click, save, and then I get this extra little window here. Just double check that your settings. I want to make sure that it's being saved it 100%. It's gonna be 15 inches by 18 inches at 300 deep EI. That's gonna equal 4500 by 5400 pixels, so I'll click, OK. 9. 09 Step 7 Weathering effect and save again: I'm gonna make one more version of this with a weathered effect. It's gonna be up to your tastes, what you want to do with your image of whether you want it, whether it or not. I'll just say that you will run a little bit of a risk of getting returns from people who don't understand that that it's weathered on purpose. I don't think that happens very often for me. If you go to any major brand big box store from Target Toe Walmart, at least half the T shirts that are available are gonna have some weathering discretion to it. So I think people generally get it when they see a distress shirt. I bought these textures through Ray Dombrovskis Vector Lab. I'm not getting any kind of commission from telling you about that, but, yeah, the vector lab dot com I brought this image in from that vector lab collections called Plastics all It looks like it's ah, the old inks have been through the wash too many times. I'm just gonna take this layer and change it to a monochrome layer, then go to select select color gamut, and then just use that I dropper icon to click on a black area. Copy it and then I'm gonna go back to my cat artwork paste in those black crackles. If I command, click this layer, it will select the texture again. Now, if I click back under the layer with my artwork on it, I can go layer, layer, mask a mask selection. Boom! This mask punches the texture effect out of the artwork. But in a nondestructive way, I can always disable it. I can go back and change the texture. Play with it, delete it. Whatever I need to dio. All right, so I'm going to save this version out as well. File exports, single layer, choose dot PNG name this I just add a little w at the end of my files toe designate that it's the weathered version. And then if you save all these export settings should be the same as last time. So no problem there. Hit. Okay, 10. 10 2nd Colorway: I want to quickly show you how to make more color ways for your designs. So the fastest way to start making a different color way is to just go up and do a file save as and then save the file is a new name, second color way something like that. I found this old Halloween card on Pinterest with Black Cat in front of the moon. I think I'd be pretty cool to do something that's inspired by that. So I'm just gonna speed through. It's basically the same process. It's going to be a nor INGE T shirt, and then I'm gonna just drop black in most of these areas. No big difference with this is, is now that everything is going to be black, his legs, a sweater, everything. We're losing the detail. So what I'm doing is hitting the transparency lock on the Leinart layer and then painting by hand over the details of his sweater. Just make those lines show up again as orange. Actually, what would make more sense is to take the transparency lock off and just erase these lines . Well, you get the idea. It's takes, um, playing around to make things still work with different color ways. So just to check out the final lineup, I now have a clean three color treatment, a weathered three color treatment and a second color way, all for different shoppers with slightly different fashion tastes. 11. 11 Closing and Assignment: All right. So for your assignment, I want to see you design your own vintage retro inspired character as a T shirt design. And if you can try to come up with a second color away as well, maybe something that works on a light T shirt. When the 1st 1 worked on a dark T shirt, I'm excited to see what you come up with. Thanks for checking out the class and I'll talk to you next time.