Transcripts
1. T Shirt Design Workshop Part 2 Intro: The best part about being a graphic designer is the process of starting with an idea and turning that into something real. My name is Randi Brodsky and I design t-shirt graphics. T-shirts are functional, t-shirts are fashion, but most of all, they are expressions of culture and identity. I'm teaching a class called T-shirt design workshop part 2. In this class, I'll teach you how to start from an idea, all the way to getting back finished printed t-shirt. The project for this workshop will be a mixed media design. Instead of just working completely in the computer or just on paper, I'll show you techniques on how to go back and forth between digital and analog tools. You'll discover that this enhances your own range of styles and abilities as a designer. You'll learn how to lay out your type with Adobe Typekit fonts in Illustrator, and how to color your designs with Photoshop brushes. I'll show you how to properly size your design, pick ink colors, and spec out your design, so it comes back looking great on dark, light and colored shirts. If you want to make your own color separations, I'll show you two methods that require only Photoshop and Illustrator without the need for other expensive software. To cap it all up, we'll send out the design made in the class to three different t- shirt printers and I'll unbox this designs so you can see how they came back. Sign up for the T-shirt design workshop part 2 and let's go make some designs.
2. Tools and Materials: Now what I want to do is show you the tools and materials that I use. First we'll talk about Analog Tools. First here, I've got this marker paper and the thing I like about marker paper is, it has a really nice tooth to it, so it's really good for marker, It's also good for pencil and sketching, and it's also good for pens and the other benefit is its semi translucent. You can use it almost like a tracing paper to draw over. Instead of using a light table, this is a good option. The next thing I have is sketch paper. Now, I'm not really particular with the kind of sketch paper I use this is just a nice pad and it's pretty cheap. The other kind of paper that I'll use is just regular inkjet paper. Just because it's cheap, really good for sketching on. Not necessarily good for final drawings, but just sketching. Speaking of sketching, I'm really into sketchbooks and changing up my sketchbook, changing up the size and the brand and the color. I think that actually adds to creativity and I'm a big fan of Erin Joplin's field notes. I've just got these house eco journals, kind of the same thing very similar, very nicely designed. This is a gummy notepad that I got from my friend Bryce's shop up in Seal Beach.This is really nice. Then this is the latest sketch book I've been using and it's pane made in India. The paper is, it's like a canvas, see rough paper. I like this because it's forced me to loosen up my sketches because the paper is so rough. You can't really do a tight drawing. So that's a good thing. As far as pens my go to pen, or these muji 0.38 black pens. These are really great for any kind of sketching or putting in lines. I also like these copic multiliners. There's also the micron pens which are very similar. I have 0.5 and then a 0.8. It's a little thicker. These are good for laying down really nice, precise lines. In the past I had trouble with these because a lot of times I like to put a lot of pressure down when I'm drawing. When you're drawing with these, you actually don't need a lot of pressure. Just a little tip you can use. As far as markers, I use one marker and it's a prismacolor black marker. The thing I like about this is it's a water based solvent, so you don't get any fumes. This pen has a really small nib on it and on the other end, it's got more of like a wide chisel tip to it. The other thing I really like are these prismacolor PC935 pencils. These are the prismacolor pencils without the erasers, the color or race ones I find, you can't put down as darker color. I like these because you can shade really finally, Or you can really put down just dark black pencil. These are really good and these work well with the marker paper. I've also got a novelty pencil here. It's general sketch and wash it's a watercolor pencil. You can dip it in water or you can draw with it and then brush water over it and you can get all kinds of cool different effects and I'll show you how to use this a little later. Here I've gotten an assortment of paint brushes, and these are just the cheapest paint brushes you can get. We're not looking to get too fancy with painting, but these are good with India Ink and they're good with Acrylic Ink and they're also good with using with the watercolor pencils. Here I've got liquid techs, black ink, it's very similar to India ink. I've got some Dr. Martin's transparent watercolor. Exactly the number one knife is really good for cutting stencils and cutting paper, cheapy pencil sharpener. Here I've got a paper made pro touch to mechanical pencil. This is a 0.5 thickness, and I don't get too particular with my mechanical pencils, but this is a good one. The last analog tool I have is a Pantone solid coded color guide. This is a range of colors, much like the colors you'd find in Home Depot in the paint isle. But this will let you spec out your colors for your t-shirt designs and I'll show you how to use this in a later section. Now let's go on to digital tools. Let's talk about digital tools. I think one thing you can do is get carried away and spend too much money in the wrong places. I recommend to keep it basic and spend your money on really good basic, essential digital tools. Number 1 would be your computer. I use a 27 inch iMac, so it's got the 27 inch screen built-in. I think that's a really good screen size. You know, if you're trying to work off a laptop, you're gonna have problems because the screen real estate is just a lot smaller. If you're working off a laptop, I would recommend thinking about purchasing a larger screen that you can plug into it and that's just going to help your productivity and I think your creativity to,o there's nothing wrong with PCs. I just think if you have the choice, Macintosh is a little bit nicer interface for a designer. There's a lot of production designers and a lot of screen printers actually that use PCs. That's because the color separation software, a lot of that is on PC only. If you have the choice, I would say go Mac, but PC is fine too. Now as far as software goes, I would recommend Adobe Creative Cloud. You get Photoshop and Illustrator, and then a bunch of other Adobe programs but Photoshop and Illustrator are the main things you need for t-shirt design. There's a lot of other graphic design software out there. But I think if you're just starting out and you haven't picked a software yet, definitely go with Adobe Creative Cloud. You can also use Typekit, which gives you access to fonts online through Adobe. I think you'll also want to have access to a scanner and an inkjet printer. I think any scanner or printer made by Epson or HP and last five years is totally fine. Another digital tool that I use a lot as a camera, a lot of times it's just my iPhone because you end up seeing something that you weren't planning. You can take a photo of it right then and there. A lot of the graphics I do are with iPhone photos, but you also want a camera that has a lot more control. You might want to think about getting an SLR, which is replaceable lens camera. You can change out the lenses from like a telephoto to fisheye lens, giving all kinds of different effects. You have a lot more control over the lighting and the image quality is a lot better. Now, with a camera, you don't necessarily need to spend a ton because there's a lot of old digital cameras out there that are pretty good price now, but all am saying three, four or five-year-old cameras and I use a Canon 7D. That's actually what I'm using to record this video right now. But I also take that on chips and take photos with that. The key with an SLR is, you're going to pick a brand. You're going to pick an Icon or a Canon or Sony and each one of those has its own lenses. Just do research on camera bodies and the nice thing is, if you ever want to upgrade your camera body, you still got all those really nice lenses to use. That's it for the basic digital tools. There's other things you can get like drawing tablets, but I would caution you don't get too caught up in purchasing really expensive digital equipment because I don't think it will really save you that much time. If your business is doing really well and you decide that you want a drawing tablet, that's great. There's a couple different ways you can go Wacom Cintiq are really good drawing tablets. But if you're also in the market for an iPad, you might want to look at the iPad Pro. You can match it up with the Apple Pencil. There's an app called Astropad that a link to what's on your main computer screen. If you're using Photoshop, you can draw right into Photoshop on your iPad. That's a nice feature but again, you really don't need it. Anything you can do on a drawing tablet, you can also do on a piece of paper with a scanner. That's it for digital tools. There's a lot of options out there for software and for computers. But these are the tools that I use and these are the tools that I trust. These are also the tools that my designer friends use and just use the right tools and they'll serve you well.
3. Create a Project: Since this is our own project and I'm demonstrating it for you, I want to pack in as much stuff as I can, all the little techniques and things you may not know about teacher graphic design. For this project, I want to do something that has an art element like a hand drawing and I also want to incorporate some type. What I think we'll do is we'll take this Bronco and just draw it in a different style and I'll show you some cool techniques on how to do that. Then, we'll incorporate some type, maybe like this, maybe a little different and I've got some ideas on how I want to do that. After that, I'll show you some different techniques on little tricks you can do to make your graphic really special.
4. Inspiration & Pinterest: Every time I see a design that I like, I'll pin it to a certain board in Pinterest. That way when I go back to it, it'll be easier to find ideas and I won't have to start from scratch. If you've never use Pinterest before, you can catalog graphics by different categories. Whenever you go to a website and you see something you like, say it's a design on a t-shirt, you can pin it to your t-shirt design board. Specifically going for the project that I want to demonstrate in this class, I have a few ideas for things that may work, and one is this graphic from Critical Slide Society. I don't know if it was a t-shirt, it probably was, but I've been seeing this shape a lot lately and I like it. I think we can do a pretty cool version of it. The shape I'm talking about is this shape for the type, so I call it a fat pill shape. It's vertically taller than it is wide. The sides get straight so it's not a complete ellipse. The other thing I have is, this a shirt I did a few years ago for O'Neill. I think what makes it cool is it has a spray paint stencil and it's also got some marker stripes with really nice color. The color in the stripes isn't completely saturated. Some of the t-shirt colors is showing through and I think that's a good thing. This one from Poler. It's very similar to the Critical Slide Society one as far as the vertical pill shape, but this one's all pin line graphics. This one's another cool one. It's very similar to the Critical Slide Society as far as the shape. I really like the bold scissors in here. One thing you'll notice about how the scissors are drawn is instead of it drawn with an outline, that outline is actually turned to white, or in our case, t-shirt color in the fill of that is turned to black. I do like that style. Evan Hecox is a really good artist. He's the artist that did a lot of the chocolate skateboards graphic designs. This is India Pale Ale graphic. That's really cool. Again, it's a tall pill shape. It varies the type, size, and style quite a bit more than the other ones. Maybe we'll do something like that and maybe we won't, but let's just use it for inspiration. These Deus logos are great, I love this stuff. This bottom one in the corner. I like how the type is really bold. I really like this pin. This was, let's see who it was, Alex Roka. He does some really good work. Follow him on Dribbble. These are some chickens done by Evan Hecox. This is a graphic I did for O'Neill a few years ago. It feels very organic and hand-drawn, and has some watercolor elements in it. Also, the vertical shape fits in with the other inspiration pieces we have. This is a graphic I did a few years ago for my own business, The Vector Lab. It's taken a very clean, vector graphic, and turned it into water color with a little bit of hand drawing and it turned it very organic. I want to get that feel in our design. If you do want to see my Pinterest boards, I'll put some links to those in the class notes.
5. 05 Organizing Inspiration: Now that we've found our inspiration in Pinterest, what I've done is I took all those images, dragged them onto my desktop, and then dragged them into Adobe illustrator and just put them on a hardboard. Now here I've got them arranged by the top pins or the top images are composition and shape, and the bottom row is technique and style. For the top, I'm talking about how the letters are laid out and the composition. How this image fits in between the lettering, that sort of thing. The bottom would be technique and style, which is more this one's watercolor, this ones like the Evan Hickox style. This ones got some marker stripes, and some transparency. This ones got some watercolor also, and it incorporates a lot of color. The next step after this, for me, is always sketching. So sometimes I'll print this out really light and just sketch over top. But what I want to do actually for this design is work out the layout. Like how are the words going to fit around and what are those words going to be, they can be anything. I think what I'll do for this project is make up a fake brand, and that brand will be called South Shore surf designs. It's based on like Waikiki, South Shore O'ahu surf. That fits right in with our Bronco graphic because this Bronco I actually spotted on the South Shore of O'ahu about 10 years ago and snapped a photo of it. The next thing I'll do is start sketching. The nice thing about this sketch book is it's different than the last sketchbook I had. For me, that's always a good thing because it forces me to change up my illustration style and keep things loose. One of the notebooks I had before this had really slick paper and it was very precise with the lines. This one's got really rough canvas paper. I think it was made in India. It forces me to draw really loose.
6. Thumbnail Sketching: I started working out these thumbnail sketches just to figure out how I want to do the type. As far as the type, there are a few things I've figured out won't work. For instance, this one looks like it says South Designs instead of South Shore Surf Designs. So that's probably one I won't even try because I know the type isn't going to work. The thumbnails, in this case, aren't meant to be presented to the client. But oftentimes, if the client wants you to pitch ideas before putting all the work into it, you actually will show them little thumbnails. In that case, you may want to make the thumbnails a little more presentable, but these were just for my own reference and to show you how I actually do them in real life. What I'll do with this is take a photo of it, and I'll upload it to the computer, and put that into our Illustrator document with the other inspiration pieces.
7. Creating Basic Shapes in Illustrator: So I airdrop these sketches right onto my art board. The main part of this design, other than the illustration, is the type,. First we want to create that fat pill shape. The way I'm going to do that is create a circle, and then option drag another circle down to approximately where we want it to be. You'll see how when I click with the open arrow tool or the white arrow tool, there's a center point and there's also these anchors that also represent that center point. To connect these circles, we just want to draw a rectangle in between, but we want it to snap, and I've got my smart guides on, that's why you can see these little blue lines flashing. Let me turn my rulers on, that's a command R, and I'll drag down a ruler just so it goes to that center point. Then same thing for this one. When we draw our rectangle, it'll snap to that guide and also that anchor point. In that way we don't have any weirdness when you zoom in close on this shape. If I zoom in really close, you'll see there's not a little step or ledge, it's perfectly lined up. Here's my favorite tool in Pathfinder. Pathfinder is a cookie cutter tool and there's different ones, but I like to keep it simple. The main one I use is called the merge tool, and what that does is if you select everything, it will merge these three shapes into one. Now we have a shape, and the great thing about this path is now we can type along that path and the letters will follow that shape. I am noticing that this may be a little taller than I want so let's look at the points on this thing. If you want to partially select some of the individual points on a shape, you can just use your white arrow tool. But let me get rid of those guides, so you don't have to see them anymore. You'll see how I've just selected the top three points, 1, 2, 3, the bottom three, maybe a little hard to see, but those bottom three points aren't selected. Go to the white arrow tool and just drag down that shape and I'm holding the Shift key, which is going on that vertical axis. Now we have our shape and we'll start typing on that.
8. Laying Out Type: We have our path shape. The one thing we want to do is just as a little insurance, let's make a copy of that. I go Command C, and let's just make a new layer and go Command F, paste in front. Let's just hide that top layer I just made. The reason I want to keep that shape, I'll show you later, but it has to do with the type on a path tool. Let's change this to a stroke and let's start laying out our type to see how it works. Now, the type on a path tool in Illustrator, I think, it's a little wonky. It doesn't work exactly how you think it should, it's not very intuitive. I think way back in the day, it used to work really well and I don't know what they did but it's different now. But in general, if you have a shape, click on the area where you want to start typing. Now, you'll see, I clicked at the very top but it put the cursor at the bottom. In general, it will start typing where you initially click. But I think sometimes when you have different shapes, like if that were just a perfect circle, it probably would have put the cursor where I clicked. But anyway, we can work with it so it's not a big deal. Let's start typing out and I'm not using any special fonts right now. This is Myriad Pro which is a really nice Sans-serif system font on Mac, and equivalent on PC would be Trebuchet. Trebuchet I think is on every PC and it gives you a range of weights that you can use. Now, I want to use bold condensed because I think that looks pretty nice. Now, there's two ways to get our south shore to the top of the shape. One is, because it's a symmetrical shape, we can just hold down the Shift key and then drag this corner so it snaps right in the vertical place right there. The other way we can do it is with the handles. Now, if I just want to drag this to the top, I can drag this handle just up. You'll see how the type is bouncing around all over the place. But once you get it to where you want it, just let go, I don't know if that's quite symmetrical. You can drag down a guide, I think that's good. Now, we want this type to be bigger, try 100. That may be a little too big. The other thing I want to do is let's place the Bronco in here just to see how it's going to look. I just did a file place and selected that file. Where is the bottom of that? Yeah, that looks pretty cool. Now, the next thing I want to do is get the words surf designs under here. So that's where our black shape that I put on a new layer, that's where that comes into play. So let's just lock that bottom layer and I'll select that top shape. Now, let me show you something about scaling. If we scale this shape, since this isn't like a perfect circle or perfect square, it's not going to scale the way we need it to for the type. So you see how the path is very close to the type here and it's a little farther? If we just type in our surf design, it's going to be a little off. So what we need to do is we want to make an offset path, and we want to get it so it follows these letters. We got to hit "Preview", 10 pixels isn't enough. Let's try 70, click "Preview". Yeah, that's pretty good. Let's go 68. Will keep those paths like we did before, so I'll just go Command C, and we'll hide that layer, and we'll paste it in our path here, and click on our type on a path tool. Let's select our selection tool and drag our handle down, to get that typed to go where we want it. That is looking pretty good. So let's start making a few little versions here and we can pick the best one. Let's just shrink our art board down a little bit, and let's option drag a copy over, and that copied over both layers. I think what I want to do is I want to try one like this sketch here where the letters are really spaced out. Let's change this to the Futura heavy, and try extra bold. Now, we're talking, and that's pretty cool. We're going to change this type layout. So it's just going to say south on the top and shore on the bottom. Select that type, hit "Delete", and then here I'll type shore. Here's a cool thing you can do. I've got this bottom type selected, I just go to the eyedropper, and it'll just match the type that's at the top. We have to play around with it to re-center everything. The other thing I want to do is, let's play with our tracking and that's the letter spacing between the letters. We're going to do a really wide space to give this a neat look. Yeah, that looks pretty nice and bold. We're going to need a little more room for the Bronco, so the Bronco is going to be a little smaller in this design, and let's turn on our hidden layer there. What we want to do is make an offset path to put in the surf design type. So Object, Path, Offset Path, and we have to go with a negative number here to make the path smaller. So let's try a negative 30, maybe negative 35. There we go. I think I need to move that type down just a tad, and let's copy that, go ahead and lock our top layer. Hide it, lets clear our guides, and paste in that new path. So we want the top to say surf, and we're going to need this type to be a lot smaller. I just selected it all. Let's try a 36 point type, and we'll drag it to the top here, and let's really space out these letters a whole lot. So let's go 1400, that looks pretty neat. Let me just shrink that down a little bit. It's maybe getting a little hard to read but I think it looks pretty cool. Let's go ahead and make another offset path. There we go, that's pretty good. Let's copy that, hide that top layer again, paste it in the bottom layer, Command F, and type the word designs. We need to change the tracking on this. Let's try like 800. It looks pretty cool, I really like that. We're not sticking to traditional easy read layouts but I think this is still pretty readable, South Shore Surf designs. Has a little flavor just because we're getting flagrant with our type.
9. Using Typekit: Let's make one more version. This one, we'll use a font from Typekit. If you have Adobe Creative Cloud, you have access to Typekit. Typekit is a nice collection of fonts that you can access online. When I go up to my character here, and I can just click "Add Fonts from Typekit", that'll take us to a website, Typekit website. We can search by classification: Sans-serif, Serif, Slab serif, Script, Blackletter, Mono, Hand, and Decorative. I want to stick to a Sans-serif here. Let's click that. Also the Properties, we can choose a weight. I like the really heavy weight fonts. Already seeing this FatFrank looks really cool. Let's click on that. You can do a type tester and you can scale it up to see how it's going to look. Yeah, I really like the look of that. It's got some nice little rounded edges. This T has a kink to the edge of it. It's not totally vertical so it has some neat little character. Let's click that, use fonts, sync selected fonts, and hit "Close". You know what? Let's go back and look for one more font, Sans-serif, thick width. Moving this Acumen Pro SemiCondensed. Oh, yeah, that ultra black looks pretty cool. Let's do the Type Tester. That looks pretty cool. I like that one. Let's click "Use fonts". I'm just going to add in all the different weights, just because some of the secondary type we might want to do a little bit thinner or maybe italic, or something like that. Now we can go back to our Illustrator document.
10. Alternate Layouts: Let's try out this fonts from Typekit. Just select your type and we'll check that acumin and see how that looks and we were going with the ultra black. The type is too big and wide for the layout we have. There's a couple options we have. We can just lower the font size. I think that looks pretty cool, but the problem is, now our paths don't match up. There's a gap here at the bottom, a gap here at the top. I want to make this pretty symmetrical, so it looks good. We can cheat this up a little bit and there goes our Illustrator type along path tool again be in finicky. I'll just have to drag that up again. I think this layout actually looks pretty good. The font may be a little too thick and overpowering though. Let's try the black version of the typeface. I don't know if it has quite the character I'm looking for. Let's try the bold, maybe a little too plain. Let's save that for now. Let's try that fat frank font. Yeah, I like that. I think this design will look at if we add some extra type, some little extras to it. Let's look at our layouts again. You can't tell for my sketches, but this represents a Hawaiian island chain, this represents a marker stripe, and then I've got some other little type things like Oahu 1967, Oahu Hawaii. We can try those and see how that looks. I've got a Hawaii map here that I drew a long time ago. I'm just going to copy that and paste it in. Oahu and we're still roughing these out. I'm not totally particular on if everything's completely symmetrical just yet. Not sure quite yet what to do about this design using acumin, Maybe we can play around with the different layout. What might be pretty neat is to do a narrower layout for this. Let's make sure I still have my guides and, you know what, I'm just going to delete this type right here. Let's grab our guides from layer 2 and hold down Shift option just to scale it proportionately. I want to get weird and make this thing tall and skinny and see how that looks. Let's select our top three points, hold down Shift, and drag up. That may be a little too much. But again, we can use type and the islands and little graphic elements to fill in the gaps if there's too much space. Let's copy that and we'll go back down to our layer 1 and Command Shift V to paste in place. Let's go ahead and hide that top layer, select the type on path tool, click and let's go back to that acumin typeface. Here's the ultra black and let's get some type that matches up on the bottom. Again, we'll make that layer 2 visible. Let me make an offset path of this path again, because if you scale this up, it just gets really weird. See how if I were to put my bottom type in here, it won't match the top. Object, path, offset path. Let's try 50 and hit ''Preview''. We need a little bit more. Let's try 60 and 58. We'll probably put this right in there and let's copy that, lock and hide our top layer, Command F to paste in front, and then let's select our type on a path tool again and type in surf designs, drag our handle so we can put the type where we want it. Let's drag our guide down just to check the symmetry. I think maybe that one's a bit tall. But what we can do is let's just drop the top a little bit and raise the bottom. You can see these are all the same thing, but they all have a little bit different flavor. Let's go ahead and add in some extra type and elements and then we can pick where we want to go. I'm really digging the Hawaiian island chain in here. It fits in really nice too, because you have the Bronco taking up this shape and then the Hawaiian island chain just fits right in that spot.
11. Refine the Design: I think what I want to do here actually, let's go back to those inspiration boards. I think I might want to do something like this, Palm Beach one, where there's two rows of type on the bottom and one at the top, I think that might look really nice. Let's go back into this. I still have my base paths in here, now I've moved them, but I can approximate those. Let's just go Copy and then I'll lock and hide that top layer, Command Shift V to paste in front. Let's just move this up, and we might be able to get away with just scaling it instead of doing an Offset Path. Let's type in here, Oahu, Hawaii, and obviously, this type is way too big and it seems a little bold to me. Let's try the black, that's a little nicer, the bold, I think I like the black, let's just knock down the size of that font, I think even smaller would look good. The reason I put this period in here is I just want to use it as a little dot between Oahu and Hawaii, so we can shift up our baseline for that period so now it's a little like a mini hyphen. The other thing we can do is check the glyphs and see if there's any round dots in this typeface. We go Window, Type, Glyphs. When you open Glyphs, there's a lot of alternate characters depending on the typeface, if you get like a free font off a default, usually there aren't many glyphs, but you get a nicely made font and you'll have a lot of choices. Let's just look through here and see what the glyphs are. We could put almost looks like a little degree symbol but actually, I have to shift the baseline negative to get that in the middle, that's a nice little star there. I want to space out the tracking, should get it so it tucks in there really nice. I think now we have room to really scale up this SOUTH SHORE part, I think we can make this bottom part a little bigger. Let's zoom out and compare all these, maybe we just need to shrink this type down a little bit. I just think something needs to go in here, let's put that 1967, I'm guessing that's the year of this Bronco. Try a couple different weights, let's play with our tracking here. The other thing you could do is draw in a rectangle, send that to back, and then select your type, let's make it white. What I'm doing here is I'm just playing with the overall balance of the graphic, trying to get it where it just looks like it's meant to be. I don't know if that makes any sense, but with this black rectangle, let's give it a stroke and in our Stroke Window, let's click on these little buttons to give it a rounded edge and let's increase the weight of that stroke, and that gives it a nice rounded edge.
12. Pixels to Paper: We could just leave the design like this, but let's try to make it a little extra special and add in some hand-drawn elements and some really cool special effects. We'll also try to add in a little bit of color. So what I'm going to do is I'll take this and I'm just going to put a rectangle of white over it. Let's turn down the transparency of that white rectangle. Just so when we print it out, there's enough that I can see through to draw over it instead of using a light box. Let's just go Command P. A lot of times I like to draw my graphics at full size, but I'm just going to print this out on letter size paper. So it's going to be a little smaller than it would actually be. But what we'll do is after I draw onto that, we'll scan it back in at a higher resolution. That way the resolution will be adequate for our design when it's going to be printed on the T-shirt.
13. Drawing Outlines: Now I've got it printed out on paper, and I'm going to put this on another pad of paper just so when I'm inking this, it has a little bit of a cushion to it. I think if you just draw directly on the desk, sometimes you'll pick up the texture for the desk. I usually like to stack my paper up, even though this is just regular printer paper. What I'm going to do here is just outline everything. I'm not really going to fill anything in. I'm just drawing in black. I'm just going to add in any color later on. So we don't really need to worry about color right now. I'm just going to quickly go through here and not really worry too much about the line weights, because we do want this to look hand-drawn. This is a 0.8 pigment liner. It's pretty thick line, but that's okay. It allows us to put down a lot of ink pretty quickly. You can see how I'm going on this. I'll just speed this up, so you don't have to watch me draw every single line. You'll notice how I left some letters out here. I did that on purpose, and I'll show you why I did that in a little bit. But next, let's go on to drawing the Bronco. I'm going to switch to a 0.5 pigment liner. It's a little thinner than the 0.8. The 0.8 was a little fat. I think it's okay for the letters, but I want a lot of detail in the Bronco and we're drawing it smaller than it's actually going to be. When we blow it up to put it on a t-shirt, this line weight will be pretty good. I'm just going to go in here, and I'll start with the outline. Again, this style is pretty loose, so you don't need to really worry about it too much. We want to just capture all the little significant lines that go through this car. Draw the surfboards on there. In general, we don't want to fill in any of this. Again, this is a pretty loose style. I'm not using a ruler. Not really worried about if my lines are perfect or not. Now I want to show you another technique.
14. Watercolor Pencil: The next thing I'm going to do is add in some pencil. I like to combine pencil and pen, and just blend some techniques. But this pencil is a little different than your normal pencil because it's a watercolor pencil. It'll draw like a regular pencil, but what you can do is just get it, dip it in some water, and you'll get a really nice look out of it. It will look different on different paper, this is just printer paper. It'll bleed a little differently than if we were drawing on a nice watercolor paper or something like that. Anything that looks a little messed up, we can always go back in the computer later and fix it. But I think these letters will be cool if we can do a little watercolor on. The other thing you can do is just get clear water, dabble it onto your paper, and then draw onto it. Sometimes that'll bleed a little bit more and look really nice. I think it'll be nice if we go from some really clean letters to a little more hand-drawn, and a little water colory. This isn't really fine art by any means, but it looks like we had fun with it, and that's what I'm going for. Again, a loose style, not super worried about how it looks. The other thing too is we can go in some of these letters and just not even really completely fill them in. We still want it readable. Let me go up here. When you're using these watercolor pencils, they'll dull out pretty quick because the lead gets really soft when it's wet. You might need to sharpen it every now and then. I'm not too worried about little water droplets, I think anything that's an accident at this point, will add to the composition. If it doesn't, we can just erase it out in Photoshop. That's a watercolor pencil. The other thing we could try is some India ink. Let's try filling in some of these letters with India ink. Always have your paper towels nearby with this stuff. Again, we're just going for a loose style here. The other thing we could do is, do a little wash over this S, with just water, and then add in some India ink and just see how it bleeds out outside the edges. It's a subtle effect, but really nice one. The last thing I want to do is go in and fill in everything I missed. Maybe I'll tighten up some of these lines. Let's get 1967. It looks like a mess and it doesn't look like a whole lot right now, but we'll bring this into the computer and play around with it, and we'll flip out the color for the Bronco. I'm going to scan it in at 600 dots per inch so that'll give us a lot of resolution to play with.
15. Photoshop: Let's open this up in Photoshop, and let's check the image size, let's unclick "Resample" and change it to 300 dots per inch, now the image size is 16 by 20, which is way bigger than we need, which is perfect. Always design bigger than you need. The other thing I want to do is go back into Illustrator, and let's just select this whole design here and copy it, go "Command C", and we'll go back into Photoshop and "Command V", paste it. This is going to be a pixel based design, so we'll just keep the pixels. The next thing I want to do is scale it up until it fits just the same size as the drawing. Yeah, that looks good. Now let me hide that layer and let's make a duplicate of our scan. Hide the background layer, and I always want to keep a copy of that scan just in case we need to go back and play with certain areas of it. The next thing I want to do here is play with the levels. I want to make the darker parts darker, and lighter parts lighter. Go "Command L" for your levels and we'll bring this right slider to the left a little bit. If you see what that does, it'll take some of the weird little shadows, like the paper wrinkles from where it was wet, it'll take some of that out of it because we don't want any of that in it. Let's take up the black, I think we're looking pretty good in that range so let's just click "OK". Next thing I want to do is go into here, into all these open letters and just with a Magic Wand tool, just select the black. I'm just holding down the "Shift" so it holds that selection. Let's go Select, Modify, Expand, and this'll expand our selection a few pixels out just so if we fill that with black, there's not like a little white line in the middle of it. Let's just expand this by five pixels, click "OK", you see how it just expanded that selection. Now when we fill it, "Shift F5" or Edit Fill, if you want to go the long way, let's just click "Black" and then go "OK", and it put a nice fill in there and that kept us from having the shade in all those letters by hand the slow way. That's looking really good. Next thing I want to do is flip out the colors in this Bronco so that the outlines become short color or the outlines become white in this case. What I want to do here is, let's just make a selection, and I'm using the Lasso tool here, and let's just go "Command C" to copy, and then "Command Shift V" to paste in place that Bronco. You'll see it pasted it exactly where I had it before. Now what I want to do is go Image, Adjustments, Invert, and you'll see how it's already got that style. We do need to get rid of this black on the outside here, so let's use our Magic Wand and then let's expand that selection, Select, Modify, Expand, so it grabs a couple extra pixels and that's to keep it from having a little black line around everything. Let's just hit "Delete", and you'll see that we actually do have a little black line around everything and that's just because of the drawing below. The next thing I want to do is make a layer in between those two layers, let's zoom out a little bit, let's make a selection again and I miss a little bit so hold down the "Shift" key and Lasso that and we'll go Edit Fill or "Shift F5" and select white. Now it gets rid of that little pin line. So yeah, that thing is looking pretty cool and now again, we have this Bronco on its own layer. Now that the shadow's gone, there's actually a little bit too much white space in there. What I want to do is I'll actually just move it down a tad so it looks a little more centered. Let's go into our Hawaiian island chain here, select all the little in between areas, zoom in a little more so we can get these small ones. Lanai, Kahoolawe, I think that's how you say it. Let's go Select, Modify, Expand, click "OK", Edit, Fill with black. We missed one, we can just use a Paintbrush tool. You can size up or down your Paintbrush tool with the bracket keys on your keyboard, and you'll see here little bits in pieces of stuff we don't want, so what you can do is, sometimes I'll just make a new layer on top of everything and just paint into that, get rid of some of those little scratchy things or I don't know, little fragments of art, but this is looking pretty clean. I don't see too many little bits, here's another one, here's another one, another right here. This thing is looking pretty good. Now, I messed up right here in the 7, I filled it in instead of outline it but what we can do, let's go back down to that layer that it's on and let me just Magic Wand that, go "Command X" to cut it and the next thing I'll do is select all that area with Magic Wand. Go Select, Modify, Expand by three, then Edit Fill to black and remember I cut that 7, so we can just go "Command Shift V" and Image Adjustments, Invert to turn it to white and there's our little 7. Again, a lot of this stuff, if you make little mistakes or want to change things as you're going along, that's the nice thing about using Photoshop. The other thing I'm starting to think is I like how it gets scratchy and loose at the bottom, but I'm thinking maybe at the top we'll go really tight with the lettering. Actually, we'll use some of this stuff we made in Illustrator. Just so you can see it better, I'm going to fill it with a different color. If you have an image in Photoshop that's just black and white with a transparent background, or any color for that matter with a transparent background, what you can do is, if you want to change the color of those pixels, is you can just click this "Lock Transparent Pixels" button and go Edit Fill, and let's just fill that with blue. That's just for visibility sake so you can see it. You'll see how it just fills exactly where the black was before, so we're not really messing up any of the art. What I want to do here is use some of these really nice and crispy letters. I want to incorporate some of that back into the design just to tighten it up. I want to go tight at the top to loose and hand-drawn at the bottom. Let's just use our Lasso tool here and maybe even some of these islands, grab Oahu there, and let's get the R and we'll just have all that selected. I made a mistake corner here so I'll just Shift and Lasso that and let's go "Command C", we'll go ahead and hide all that blue. Let's make a new layer up here. Now that we have that Lasso, let's just fill out with white, Edit Fill, and then choose white. Now those hand-drawn letters disappear and let's go "Command Shift V", and I just pasted in some of those really nice clean letters back in. Let's lock the transparent pixels, "Shift F5", turn them to black, hit "OK", you know what? I think that looks really good, so I like to go back and forth between computer and hand-drawn. We could stop here but even though these top letters are really clean, I think we need to transition them a little bit more and I just want to play around with this a little more, so let's print it back out, "Command P", and let's print it back to letter size, so Scale to Fit Media, maybe we can get a little bit bigger than that. Let's go to 55. Yeah, that should be good. I'm going to hit "Print" and then we're going to go back to drawing on our printout.
16. Refine on Paper: Okay, so now we've got this printed out a second time and what I want to do here is actually tighten up some of the artwork because I think sometimes when it gets too loose and some of these lines are a little bit fat, as it looks maybe a little too cartoony. So I think if we put in some nice fine lines and shading, it'll help it. What I'm using here is a prismacolor. Just a black pencil. The PC 935. This is the kind without the eraser. These pencils can put down a really nice black line. I think the ones with the erasers, they don't put down quite as much saturated color. The other pen that I'm using is this 0.38 Muji pen. This is my favorite go-to pen for any art work. It puts down a really nice fine line. So we can blend this really loose watercolor, hand-drawn elements at the bottom and we can blend that up to the top and go tighter and tighter to where it's almost just really clean lettering. So I'm just going to go in here wherever I see little places that I could fix. Again, this is just regular inkjet paper. So if you're doing more of a fine illustration, you're probably going to want better paper. But for this, it's perfect. The other thing we can do is put little little sketch lines in here to make it look a little more hand-drawn. These are the perfect letters up here. So we can go in and just lightly sketch the edges so it looks nice and tight, but has a little bit of a loose element to it. We're just given a little bit of messiness to these letters so they're not quiet, so perfect. Almost a drafted look. We can go in here with our pen. It's definitely turning into a mixed media design. Every time we redraw it and scan it back in, it may degrade the image a little bit, but I think it actually adds some character to it too. So it's okay to go back and forth between digital and analog because a lot of people don't do that. They'll either do just analog, just hand-drawn, just homemade and then other people will do just super vector, super clean stuff and I think, if you can get both of those flavors into your design, I think it's a lot more interesting. One more thing now, I'm going to take this opportunity to add in little details that I missed. There are a couple things. One is I want to add some type to the license plate. You're doing a design like this. You might as well have it say something. So we'll put aloha in there and the other thing was I notice I only have one strap holding down all these surfboards. So we need another strap to hold down the surf boards. It's just little details like that that you don't want to miss. But if you do, you can just add them in later. This is Graphics 360 marker paper and the reason I'm using this is so I don't have to use a light box. If you have a light box, you can use that or you can use this method or the other thing we could have done was reprinted the artwork out really light, just to add in these little details. But what I'll do right here really quick is just draw aloha, A-L-O-H-A. The other thing is I want to draw in the straps holding down the other boards. Maybe this thing needs two straps in the front, two in the back and we'll just scan in that by itself and add it in in Photoshop.
17. Back Into Photoshop: Here we've got the image we scanned in. I've also got the details for the license plate and the board straps. Let's just go ahead and select all; Command A, and then copy which is Command C and then let's close that, and let's paste it right into our main drawing. Here's a little trick you can do. You can go image adjustments, invert; that invert is the black and white. You can just change it to screen in the Layer mode. Now we can just move that Aloha up and the board straps to where it needs to be. I'm going to zoom in here. We need to adjust the levels to match the drawing behind it. So Command L for levels, and just adjust that, bring up the white a little bit. I think that looks great, let's hit "OK". What we want to do here, because now we just have this design scanned in, and it's just a black and white image. There's no transparency in it. One more thing, let's rewind a little bit and make sure we have our image size correct. Let's go to Image, Image Size. Again, we scan this at 600 because we're drawing it a little smaller, and we needed to scan it a little bigger. Instead of eight by 10, at 600, we'll change the resolution to 300. Now to 17 by 20 image, that's way more than we need and that's fine so we'll just click "OK". The way I like to set up my files, and I would recommend doing this, It makes it a lot easier, is to use channels and channel selections. Let's select all Command A and then Command Shift C, that's a copy merged. That copies the little details layer and the layer behind it at the same time. Now we'll go into channels and we'll make a new channel. You can make a new channel by just clicking on this little icon right here, and you'll see how it's made this channel called Alpha 1. Let's go Command V, and that paste our design right into that Alpha channel. What we want to do is use this Alpha channel to make a selection. Then we can go back into our layers and fill that selection with a color. The only thing is we need to make sure that we don't have any things like the edge of the paper or the texture of the paper in the white area. You want to make sure everything that's black is black and everything that you want to be white to be white. Again, we'll go to our levels, Command L. We'll drag this slider to make the whites brighter. Then we'll drag this slider to make the blacks darker. Because you don't want the edge of the paper that you scanned to actually show up in your design. That's why we're doing that. I think that looks good. Let's click "OK" and let's look around the image to see how it looks. I think that looks pretty good. Then now what we do, is we want to make a selection out of everything that's black. You'll notice here there's a little dot, we can go ahead and get rid of that. Get rid of the little artifact things, little smudges, fingerprints. You spill some coffee on it or whatever. You can get rid of that by just painting over it. But what we want to do is make a selection. You can go Select, Load Selection and then pick that Alpha channel, and click "OK". The other way to do it is hold down your Command button on Mac, it's probably Control on PC. Hold down your Command button and click on that channel, and it's selected everything that's white. We want to just go, select Inverse or Command Shift I is a shortcut. Now let's go back into our layers, I clicked on RGB. Let's make a new layer, and let's hide everything that's there, and then go Edit, Fill, and let's fill that with black. Now you'll see we have a transparent background, and it's just filled the black areas of the drawing. We could fill that with any color. You'll see here we've got a little bit of the paper texture in there, and I think that's really cool. We'd have to make that a little more contrast to make sure it shows up in the actual screen print, but it's not going to hurt us here because I think the texture looks really good. Let me put in a white background layer. Let's go to Edit, Fill, and fill white. Now you can start to see what this would look like. Let's say it was white ink on a black shirt. Let's just make an adjustment layer, Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Invert, click "OK". Now you can see how it look, white and black, but let's undo this. Let's take the island chain and let's cut it, and then Command Shift V to paste it back in there. Then what you could do is lock transparent pixels and then go Edit, Fill, and then we'll fill with a light blue color. There we could start picking out little elements that we wanted to be blue. We could do the same thing with this 1967, cut it, paste it back in, lock transparent pixels, Shift F5 or Edit, Fill, one of the two, then just click "OK". You can start to get your color way, that way. But for this, I actually want to add in a watercolor flood. Let's go back to where everything's in just that one layer. What I'm going to do now is make a Photoshop brush, and I'll show you how to do that.
18. Make a Watercolor Brush: So to make this watercolor effect for a Photoshop brush, what I'll do is I'll take some Liquitex ink and then I just have a big fat paintbrush here. This is Canson Mix Media paper, it's just a general paper. What I'm going to do here is just flood the page with clear water and then quickly drop on some Liquitex ink and let that spread out and I think that'll give us a really cool effect for a watercolor, and you can move around and let it run and spread out a little bit. We'll just let that dry and scan it back into Photoshop. The other thing I just noticed is some of this ink bled through on the page behind it and a lot of times when you're doing artwork, that will happen, so you'll get some little, I call them, happy accidents. I'm actually going to scan this in too and we'll try to incorporate that into the design as well. We've got our watercolor image here and we want to make it into a Photoshop brush. Now, the first thing we need to do is make sure that all the edges of this image are completely white because we don't want the brush to have a harsh edge to it. To tweak the levels, let's go Command L and we can make the white parts brighter and we can also make the dark parts a little darker. Now, I want a good range of light to dark in here, so we don't want to make it too black like that and I think that looks good, so let's click "Okay" and then let's just check everything. I think we have a few little artifacts in here, little pieces that we can just paint out with a paintbrush. Otherwise, I think that looks really good and I'll give you guys this Photoshop brush. But to make the Photoshop brush what we do is we go Edit, Define Brush Preset, and then we can just call it Watercolor, click "Okay". We also have our little happy accident file here, let's get the whites all bright, then click "Okay" and Edit, Define Brush Preset, Happy Accident, and then click "Okay".
19. Painting with Photoshop Brushes: Now, we're back into our main Photoshop document, and we can get rid of these bottom two layers that we're working on before. Now, we just have the black ink and the white background. What we want to do is create a new layer, and then go to our black ink layer, and go Select, Load Selection, and then Layer 2 Transparency, click "Okay". That selects everything that's black. So let's go back up into that new empty layer we have. I'm going to go Command H to hide the marching ants because we don't really need to see those, and let's go to our paintbrush and select the watercolor paintbrush that we made. Let's select a color. I want to do a nice blue, blue tends to be a pretty wearable ink color for most people. Let's click "Okay", and we can just paint right into that selection, and you'll see the nice watercolor effect that's giving us. The other thing you can do is, if you have your paintbrush, but it's not oriented quite the way you want it to be, you can use the Rotate View tool, and it'll rotate your whole view of your image. It's not actually rotating the image, but it's rotating your view. So now, you can go in with that same paintbrush and just click in some color. The other thing you can do is with your bracket keys on your keyboard, you can increase or decrease the size of your paintbrush. Let's add just a little teeny bit more color in there, and let's rotate our view back to regular. I think that's pretty good. Maybe we'll add just a touch more right there. Now, it looks like we've added too much. So what I'll do is we can make, instead of erasing, we can make a layer mask and paint out areas of this new blue layer that we have. The reason I want to do a layer mask is it's non-destructive. If we erase out something, we can always go back, and I'll show you how that works. Let's just deselect everything and go to Layer, Layer Mask, Reveal All. Now, you'll see there's a layer mask represented right here in the Layers window. So let's go to our paintbrush tool, I'm going to select that little happy accident brush we made, and make sure that the color we're using is black. We'll paint right into this Layer Mask, and it'll take away some of that blue. Again, we can size this up or down. Now, see how you can tell that the brush is repeating. I think that spot is a little too distracting, so let's go to white color and paint that back out. I'm going to use that main watercolor brush we made. I think that's looking pretty good. Let's change our color back to black. There we go. I think we're done with our white colorway. Let's also do this colorway on black, and then we'll do it on a blue shirt. Let's just save it as a PSD file. Photoshop is a pretty standard file format. I like it, it keeps the layers, and it keeps everything in there, and it doesn't flatten.
20. Colorways: The more I think about it, we need to go a little more subtle on the colors. This blue is nice and bright, but I think for wearability sake, we need to tone it down just a little bit. Let's just go to that blue and go Image, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation, and turn down the lightness. Now it's a really subtle effect and I think that makes it a lot more wearable. Let's go ahead and save that. Then we'll do a black colorway. Let's just fill that background layer with black. Edit Fill, and then go black. Let's invert that bottom layer. That turns it to white. I think that's a little too bright, so what I want to do is I want to go for that discharge look, which is a natural cotton look, which is kind of a light tan. Let's lock the transparent pixels of that layer by clicking on that little icon, and then go Shift, F5 or Edit Fill, one of the two. Let's see if we can find that color, that light tan. It's probably right about there. Click "Okay". I think that looks really good. Now, we need to change the blue, and again, I want it pretty subtle, pretty tonal. You know what we can do, is we can lock the transparent pixels of that. Go Edit Fill, and then in color, let's just sample that color and then, maybe make it a little darker. I think that looks great. Let's save that as South Shore on Black. Now, let's do like a medium blue colorway. Let's fill that background layer with a blue. When you're doing a colorways, it's good if you can make it work on a white shirt and a black shirt, and then a medium color shirt. Then you know, whatever other colorways you need to do, it's going to work. I think this type will probably look best black. Those transparent pixels are locked. We can go Edit Fill, fill that with black, and I'm thinking like a navy would look really good in here. Let's go Edit Fill, and again, I've got my transparent pixels locked, and let's pick a really dark version of that same blue as the background color. Maybe it needs to be a little brighter. Let's unlock the transparent pixels and go Image, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation. That'll be our one bright colourway.
21. Sizing Your Graphic Part 1: So the next step is to size your design, and the best way to go about this is to actually find something that is relative to what you're designing. So this is a design that was done on a men's large t-shirt, and that's what I'm designing for. So if you're designing, say, for a women's medium, you're going to get a women's medium shirt with a comparable graphic on it. This graphic is about nine and a half inches wide. I think our graphic is going to be a little taller, but I'm just going by width here. So I'm going to size my graphic on the screen to nine and a half, and I may do a bigger version and I may do a little smaller version. What we're going to do is print it out and put it on the T-shirt to make sure that it looks good. It's actually a prototype, even though it's just going to be paper. The other important thing here is if you're sizing on a colored shirt, you're going to want to print out that color way. So I'm sizing here on a black shirt, I'm going to want to print the black background with it. Let's say I printed out the white color way and I'm sizing the white color way on a black shirt, everything's going to be white. So you'll just see this giant white space. This white blob, so it's going to mess up your perception. So again, I'm just going to print this out on black, so it'll look correct on this black t-shirt. The other thing we want to make note of is I'm talking about the image size of the actual graphic, not the image itself with the border. So let's check and see what the image size is. It's 17 inches across at 300 DPI. That is way too big. So what we can do is let's size it to 11 and see how big our graphic is. Again, I'm not re-sampling so I unclick re-sample. That way our full resolution is maintained. If we want to go back and make it bigger or change things later, we haven't lost any resolution. I'll click "Okay." You can look here in your rulers and gauge how big it's going to be. So that is about nine and a half right there. Let's go ahead and print that out. Now, it's way too big for our letter size ink-jet printer so what I'm going to have to do is print it in two pieces. So we'll print the top and the bottom, and then tape it together.
22. Sizing Your Graphic Part 2: Here I've printed out on inkjet printer a small, medium, and large version of the same graphic. This is just on paper and I've taped it together. Notice that I've cut out the shape as close to the graphic as possible. The reason I did that is because, it's just less distracting when you're trying to gauge the size. If you just print out the graphic with the white border and all that, it's really distracting and it makes it much harder to gauge your sizing. This was the graphic that I did at 100 percent, and I did one at 95 percent and I can already tell that's way too small, so let's not use this one. I also did one at 110 percent and I'm actually liking that a little better than the one at the original size, but I'm thinking maybe it's just a little bit too big. What I'm going to do is go back into the Photoshop file, size it up to 105 percent, and then make sure I size up all my other color ways the same way. The other thing you can do is get somebody to wear the shirt or put it on a mannequin and that will even give you a better idea of the size and you can just tape on your graphic. It really works and the thing is, I may have used a little bit of ink here on the inkjet, but using a little bit of inkjet ink is much better than sending this to press and getting them back and the size is all wrong, and then at that point, there's nothing you can do. It's better to prototype it, get it on the front end, and then you'll get back something that you expect and it'll look much better. Again, 105 percent of the original. Let's size this black one up 105 percent. Just go "Image", "Image Size", and then select "Percent", and then go "105", and notice again, I do not have Resample clicked and that will retain all the resolution. Now, our resolution is 446.753 pixels per inch, and that is 100 percent okay. When you're doing a t-shirt graphic, it should be around 300 dots per inch, but a screen printer won't get mad if your resolution is higher. Now if your resolution is too low, then you're going to have problems. Anyway, I like to keep my files at full res just in case like, let's say I were to want to take out this Bronco and turn it into a different graphic. If I go ahead and size this down, and that's the only version of the file that I have, that's the maximum resolution that I'll be able to get out of this new file. Anyway, as long as you don't have any problems with sending over a file that's a little bit bigger file size, then you can keep your resolution. Let's just click "Okay" and let's go to the other files and do the same thing, "Image", "Image Size", "105", click "Okay". There's the blue one, "Image", "Image Size", "105", click "Okay." The other thing I'm going to do, and this is for the CAD or matrix or spec sheet, those are all the same thing. But this is for the spec sheet set up. I'm going to turn off the background color and I'll show you why in the next section. But let's go ahead and turn off the black here and just save that file. Same thing with the white, we'll turn off the background so it's just the blue and the black with the transparency. Save that and then the blue color way and click "Save". Now we can go to picking Pantone colors and setting up our spec sheet.
23. Pantone Colors for Screenprinting: In preparing your files to send off to this screen printer, what we need to do is do some color ways and we need to pick some colors. We're going to be using the Pantone formula guide, the solid coated colors. These are basically just like paint chips that are a standard of color formula. When you give your screen printer the number of the color you picked, they're going to be able to match the color that you want. For instance, I really like this color in here, and I want to do this graphic with this color range. So what we would do is we'd thumb through this book and we try to find something that's pretty close. I think this 7529 or even this 7530 is very close, so we want to stay in this range. I think for the light color, we'll go with a 7527 and for the dark color will go for the 7530. I'm thinking for the white shirt will do a black. For black, you just call out black, you don't have to call out a Pantone color, and maybe this 7700c. Then on a blue color way we're going to have black ink. We'll probably do something like an 1815, which is that right there. Let me show you how to set up that spec sheet and call out these colors.
24. Setting up a Spec Sheet: So this file in Adobe Illustrator is our spec sheet. This is where you can call out the colors and show the sizing and talk about any printing techniques that you want the screen printer to follow. Let me zoom out here. To the left I've got a full-size men's front T-shirt and here's the back, full-size again. We'll use that for sizing and showing the placement of the art. But first let's go in and here's a title. That's the name of the graphic; South Shore. Let's go ahead and placed in those Photoshop files that we made; South Shore on Black. Let's scale this down to the CAD and just show the center chess placement. Then we want to show our white colorway. We had a medium blue colorway so let's change that color, it goes a little darker. We'll place in our blue colorway; South Shore and Blue. Then we'll just scale that appropriately and we can take our black one. Let's make this swatch black so now we're calling out the black version here. What we want to do is fabric color name, just type white and then this one medium blue and this one would be black. Now, here is this section for each of these shirts is where we call out the ink colors. I'm going to sample that blue ink and that's going to be our color number 1. Then I'm going to sample the black ink, that's going to be our color number 2. Here I'm going to sample the red ink, that's our color number 1. Black is our color number 2 and then this ones are light tan and this ones are medium to darker tan. There's two ways you can go by the physical solid coated book that I showed you. There's also a swatch library that you can load. Windows swatch libraries, other library, and go into Swatches, Color books. The one we're using is Pantone plus Solid Coded so let's find it in here, that's the one we want. Click Open these are all our colors here. This is a larger view, let's go to the medium view. If you want to find a color by numbers here, you can usually just type in the number. Like 7700 was the blue that we called out. What we do here is type 7700 C, and your screen printer should know that it's solid coated. If you haven't worked with them before, you might want to just put in Pantone Solid Coated. Then here, black is just black, so you can just type black. Then in this one we wanted an 1815, so I'll show you that in our swatches. Just type in 1815, there it is. The other ink color was a 7530, 7527 Pantone Solid Coated. Now what we want to do is we want to go to our full size shirt and place in that full size Photoshop image. Go File place and in South Shore on Black. Because we already size it in Photoshop, it will plop in full size right there, we don't have to change the sizing of it. You can just leave that as is. The final thing we need to do is talk about printing technique. In here, we would type Soft Hand Inks. The other thing you might do here is if you have a custom neck label, you might put the custom neck label art into this file. If you have specific hang tags or any labels that you're going to attach to the shirt. That's where you'd spec this out. So PST files in the spec sheet are all the screen printer will need from you as a designer to make your T-shirts.
25. Optional Lesson: Color Seps 02 Index Separations: In this project, we've decided to send out the designs for directed garment and for sublimation printing. The thing about those kinds of printing is you do not need color separations. But I think a lot of people are going to ask and will be curious. So for those of you who want to do your own color separations, I'll show you a couple different methods. There are tons of different ways to do your own color seps. The methods I'll show you only require Photoshop and/or Illustrator. In this section, what I'll do is I'll show you how to make an index separation. If you watch my teacher design workshop number 1, the thing you know about index separations is, they will work with all kinds of different images. They'll work with photos, they'll work with logo graphics, and you can print those separations on any color shirt, a light shirt, or a dark shirt. Again, there's a bunch of different ways to do this. I'll just show you my methods, and in this first example, we're only going to use Photoshop. Let's go ahead and open that color way on our blue fabric, and let me go ahead and turn that blue on. Now, there's two really important things to know when you're setting up your file for indexing. First of all, it has to be an RGB file. So if it's a CMYK file, go ahead and go image, mode, and then choose RGB color. The other thing that's very important is, when you're setting up an index file to make color separations, you have to size it first. Even though we've already sized the physical dimensions of this, roughly 11 by 14. If we go to image size, this 446 pixels per inch is way too fine for index separations. The reason is, at that 446 pixels per inch, when you do an index separation, instead of halftone dots, it takes it down to the pixel. So if that pixel is too small, it won't translate to your, say, 200 mesh screen. With index printing, you want your resolution to be somewhere between a 150-225 pixels per inch. Now, if you're using a course or screen, you're going to want to use a lower resolution. As long as you don't go below 150, you're not really going to notice the difference. I'll just put it somewhere in the middle here. I'll put it at 200 pixels per inch. The other thing about index separations is we index from a flattened file. So let's go ahead and go layer, flatten image, and you'll see in my layers panel how there's only one layer now. The quickest way to make an index file is just go mode, index color. The problem with that is, you don't have control over your ink colors, or how this thing is going to be broken up into separations. What we actually need to do is make a color palette, and we do that by, let's first create a new RGB image, and I like to make these a lot wider than they are tall. So let's do 11 inches wide by one inch tall. The first thing I want to do is get my eyedropper tool. First of all, let's get our t-shirt fabric color in there. Let me sample that blue, and I'll go back up here to our color palette image, and just go edit, fill, and we'll fill with that foreground color I just sampled. The next thing you'll want to do is get your Rectangular Marquee tool, and make sure feather is set to zero, and just draw a rectangle selection. What we could do for this design, because it's pretty simple, is we could just make it a two color design, a red and a black. But I think for showing you this process, I'm going to index it to three colors. I'm going to index the bright red, the black, and then a color somewhere in between, like a dark red. First of all, let's sample the brightest color, or that bright red, and go up here to our color palette, go edit, fill with that foreground color we just sampled. Now let's grab our marquee tool, drag over our little rectangle. Let's sample the black from the other file, and then go edit, fill, foreground color. Let's get a in-between color. What I want to do here is with the eyedropper tool, let's do a three-by-three average. That way when I go in a sample, it's not going to sample the exact pixel, it'll sample a three-by-three average of the area I'm sampling. Let's go edit, fill with that medium red. So we got a bright red, a black, and then our medium red. Now what we want to do is go image, mode, index color, and what we want to have here in palette is exact. You'll see that it says four colors. If you look, we have our blue, that's one, we have our medium red, that's two, black is three, and then the bright red is four. Make sure transparency is unclicked. Also, if this says forced black and white, just change that to none. So now we go okay, and let's look at that color table we just made. Let's go image, mode, color table, and you'll see with this color palette we have four colors in here, and those are the four colors that I sampled. Just cancel all of that. We can actually minimize this window. Let's go to our main window here. To index this graphic to those four colors, including the background color, all we need to do is go image, mode, index color, and then select previous. That'll force it to the four-color palette we just made. The other thing you want to make sure you have checked is diffusion dither. I'm leaving at a 100 percent, and I'll show you what diffusion dither is. If you zoom in here, you'll notice it's made little teeny dots everywhere. That's diffusion dither. One more thing here, I want to put in registration marks at the very top and the very bottom of this image. When we print out our films, when we print this out on a transparencies as color separations, we'll be able to line up our screens when it's on the press. I could have done this before, but let me do it right now, and let's just increase our canvas size vertically, just a little bit. Let's just change it to 14.5, and let's make sure our canvas extension color is that blue background color. I'll click ''Okay''. Now we have room for our registration marks at top and bottom, and I'll show you that in a little bit. The next thing we want to do is separate these four colors. When I say four colors, I'm actually talking about the fabric color 2, which will discard that. We don't actually need that. But let's separate these colors into separate layers in a new file. What we want to do is go image, mode, color table, and let's just start from the bright red. Let's change that to black, and let's change all the other colors in here to white. Now, everything that was bright red in this image is represented by black and all the other colors are white. Let's just go Command A, Command C, to copy, and then let's go command N to create a new document and this can be RGB color, that's fine. Just for illustration purposes, what I'm going do is drag this new file over to the left, and then you can see this other file as I'm working on it. Let's go Command V, paste that into the RGB file, you'll notice how in the RGB file the image looks a little smoother and it looks like there's more grayscale, but when you zoom in, you'll see that these pixels are only black or only white, there's no in-between gray, and then when you zoom in on the index file, you'll notice it looks exactly the same way, this is only a Photoshop Cork. The next thing I want to do, let's go back to our color table, Image, Mode, Color Table in our index file, let's change that black to white and let's go to the next color, which is the medium red, change that completely to black, select ''Okay", select "Okay", again, now go Command A, Command C, and then we'll open up our RGB file and just paste it right in there. Let's go back and do that once more with our black ink color, so let's go Image, Mode, Color Table, and we'll change that color we just had, black, we'll change that to white, and remember, the t-shirt color in here was the third one, so we don't really need this, so let's cancel out of that. Let's go to this fourth color here, change that to a pure black, click "Okay", now, go Command A, Command C, and Command V. Now we have our black color, our medium red, and our red color in this RGB file. If we wanted to, we could just go ahead and print this out and these would be completely adequate color separations, the only problem is we don't have our little registration marks. So let's open this little registration marks file that I have, and all a registration mark is it's a little crosshair bullseye. So let's just select all, copy that, close it, and then in the file we've been working on let's just paste it right in there. What I want to do is hold Shift, and it's pasted right in the center of that document, we want to just drag it up vertically, and it looks like we ran out of room a little bit. I'll just shrink it down a little bit, it's not really going to matter. When you do registration marks, typically you want one at the top and then one vertically below that at the bottom, so I'll just hold Option and Shift and then just drag this down. Now we have our color sets. Again, this is the black layer, that's the medium red, and that's the bright red. Essentially we're done, the only thing we're missing now is an underbase. Let's go back to these colorways that we made and I'll show you why we need an underbase. I'll just open all three colorways, the one on white, the one on black, and the one on blue. The one on white we're printing black ink and blue ink on a white shirt. On a white shirt, you never need an underbase, so let's forget about this one, so let's close this. Now, I've got the black colorway here, and with this image, we need an underbase under the whole thing, so we're going to need to print white ink under this whole design, but that's a little different than the one on blue and I'll show you why. The design on blue, we only need an underbase under the red, we don't need and underbase under the black because that's only going to make the black ink look lighter. We actually need two different underbases for this design depending on how it's going to be printed. Let's go ahead and close that, we'll go back to this RGB file that we've been working on. I'll just name the layers here so you don't get too confused. That one is the bottom registration mark, and I'll just merge both of those into the same layer, so those are your registration marks, this layers is your black ink, the one below that is your medium red, and the one below that is bright red. Let's first create the underbase for the whole image. Probably the easiest way to do this is just make these two layers multiply layers so everything is multiplied on top of itself. Let's go Command A, to select all, Command Shift C, to copy merged, and then let's go Command V. You'll see here how it's done a real nice job of merging those three layers all back in one black color. We're not quite done with this underbase, let's call it underbase for black fabric, the reason is if you print this underbase with a thicker white ink and then you'd go on top of it with the other colors, and maybe your registration is a little off or something like that, what you'll see is a very thin white line around some of your artwork, and that's going to look really bad, it's going to look really low quality. What we need to do is choke this down by a pixel or two, and the easiest way to do that is, let's go Select, Color Range, turn-off Fuzziness down to zero, and just sample this black and hit "Okay". Hopefully, you should be able to see the marching ants in this file. Let's go Select, Modify, Contract, and contract by two pixels, you'll see that how that selection contract it by two pixels. That's going to give us a little breathing room if the underbase is off by a hair, you won't notice it. Let's go select inversed and then fill that with white, edit fill, and then just click "White". Now, this is a proper underbase for the black colorway. The last thing we need to do is make an underbase for the blue fabric colorway. I'll start by duplicating that black underbase layer that we just made. What we need to do here is take the two red colors, so I've got our medium and our bright red. Let's go Command A, Command Shift C, to copy merged, and let's go back up here to the top layer and hit Command V. The area that's going to be black ink, like the bottom type and the tires for the Bronco, we don't need an underbase on that. Let's just use this layer we just made as a selection, so again, we'll go Select, Color Range, Fuzziness down to zero, we'll just sample that black and click "Okay". Now we can delete this layer, and let's go back to our underbase layer for blue fabric, you zoom out a little bit, now let's select, inverse, and hit "Edit fill", and we'll fill that with white. Now we have a proper underbase for the red inks, and the reason I did it that way is because our underbase for the black colorway was already choked, so I used that, to begin with, and then just deleted out what we didn't need. Hopefully, you've followed everything there, these colors separations can get super complicated, and they're pretty difficult if you've never done them before. The other thing I'll do is post other resources and video links to other people that have their color separation methods, and you can get a handle on it that way. I will also put links so you can download all of these colors separation files and examine them in Photoshop for yourself. Anyway, if you're looking to be a graphic designer for t-shirts, but not a production designer, not working with a screen printer, probably don't need to know this but feel free to rewind it, watch it a couple times, hopefully, you followed what I was saying. In the next video, what I'll show you is how to make color separations using halftones and that's a little bit different method, but this method is also nice because you don't need expensive RIP software that a lot of screen printers have, you just need Photoshop and Illustrator.
26. Optional Lesson: Color Seps 01 Halftone Separations: Now what I want to show you in this section is how to make manually generated halftone separations in Photoshop and Illustrator. So let's go into our white color way here. The nice thing about this file is it's already very simple setup in separate color layers with the blue on the top, the black on the bottom, and then the t-shirt color blue there. Maybe I'll use this time to explain a concept with screen printing. Going from a computer file to a silk screen with emulsion on it. If you look at how computer files setup, let me just hide that black layer. You see how there's all ranges of transparency in this file with this blue. The thing about a computer file is you can have different layers of transparency. For instance, this part of the blue is completely opaque. This part of the blue is completely transparent. In here, in this blob, there's all kinds of different ranges of transparency. But if you think about a screen with emulsion on it, there's no half open pixel. If you think about the screen mesh like a screen door. If you think about the screen mesh and all those little rectangles, and you have the emulsion, the glue on it that's creating your stencil. There's no half open hole there. So we either have to rely on diffusion dither, which I showed you in the last video. Or we have to rely on a halftone. Halftones are just black and white dots. There's no gray. But when you zoom out, the difference between those black and white dots makes it look like there's gradations of gray. Hopefully you understand that. I don't know of a better way to explain it, but let's just go ahead and I'll show you how to make these halftones separations. We'll start out in Photoshop. With halftones separations is not as critical as with index separations to size your file down first, but let's just get this to a standard size. Let's go to image, image size. We'll take this down to 200 pixels per inch at our 11 by 14 Image size. Let's first isolate that black ink layer, hide the blue and let's just go command A, command Shift C to copy merged. So we're copying everything that's visible. Then command N, to make a new document. Let's just paste in that black layer. There's not a whole lot of gray scale in this image. There's a little bit like you'll see in this D, there's a little bit of that. Let's go ahead and bitmap image and create halftones with it. We'II go Image Mode, turn it to gray-scale, flatten. Let's also check our levels just to make sure this black is a pure black. Let's go command L. With our little black eyedropper tool, let's just select an area that's black. You can see that didn't do anything. So we know this black layer is as black as we need it to be. Go Okay, and go Image, Mode, Bitmap. You'll see our output here is 200 pixels per inch. The method we use is halftone screen. Let's click "Okay". With our lines per inch, and lines per inch is basically how many dot rows of halftone dots per inch? Typically with t-shirts screen printing, you're going to want somewhere between 45 and 60 lines per inch for halftone screen. Let's, just leave this at 55, that'll be fairly high resolution. Our angle here, a lot of screen printers have a specific angle they like to use with specific colors. But since I'm not a screen printer, I don't quite have those preferences. So let's just start out with say like a 60 degree angle. Some people choose round halftones screen dots, but we'll just choose ellipse and click "Okay". Now you'll see that it actually didn't change the image very much. But let's just zoom in here back to that D and you'll see a little bit of halftone dots going on. That's good for a black layer. Let's just save this and we'll call this BLACK-HALFTONE-LAYER.psd. Let's go back to our layered file here. Let's turn off the black ink layer. Now all we have is this blue and we'll go command A, command Shift C again, and we'll make a new document. Hit "Okay", paste it in here. Let's just flatten that and let's convert this to a gray-scale file, Image Mode, Gray-scale. Now the thing we want, if you think about how this file looked, this blue right here is completely opaque in this area. It's a 100 percent blue. When we make our film, we want that area to be actually a 100 percent black. So our blue ink will get to the screen. Let's just go command L for levels. Let's use this little black eye dropper sampler right here. Click on that, and then select that gray area. What it's going to do is skew your levels. That blue area will be completely opaque. Let's just click "Okay". You'll see how our gradients here have been preserved by doing that method. Now let's change this to a Bitmap halftones. So let's go Image, Mode, Bitmap halftones screen. Leave that the same. Click "Okay". Now we want to leave our frequency the same 55 lines per inch. But let's change our angle by 15 degrees. That way if there's two different colors of halftone dots that gets screen printed, they're not directly on top of each other. Let's change this to a 75 degree angle. Keep it as ellipse, and then click "Okay". Now this layer had a lot more in-between gray-scale so you'll notice a lot more half-toning going on. Let's save this image and just like the black halftone layer, we'll name this one BLUE-HALFTONE-LAYER, and click "Save". Now what we want to do is let's go into Adobe Illustrator and make a new document. If you remember right, the image was roughly 11 by 14. Let's make it 11.5 by 15. Still give us a little breathing room. Click "Okay". Now let's place in that BLACK-HALFTONE-LAYER, and let's place in the blue and on top of it. Let me just quickly assign that blue color so you can see it. I'll select both of these. With our Align Tool, click the Horizontal Align Tool, and the Vertical Align Tool. Now these two Bitmap Images are completely exactly on top of one another. The nice thing about Adobe Illustrator is you can output color separations straight out of Illustrator. Even if this were a completely vector file, you could output separations if you have placed Bitmap images, as long as each color in your design is assigned to a spot color, you can output separations directly out of Illustrator. Let's go ahead and assign these colors, a spot color. Now what we want to do is let's just duplicate that color and double-click on it. We want to change it from a process color to a spot color. Click "Okay". Now that it's a spot color, you'll notice it has a little white triangle in the corner. It's got a large thumbnail view so you can see a little better. That's one of our spot colors. Let me just lock that layer by clicking command tool. Now let's select the black layer, which is here. We need to do the same thing. We need to assign it a color. We'll just duplicate that color. Double-click on it and assign it color, type, spot, color, and click "Okay". We could output this to separations right now but the one thing we're missing are registration marks. You can easily make your own registration marks. I'll just make a little circle and then a little vertical line. Let's use our alignment tools just like we did a second ago to align those vertically and horizontally. Command C, and then paste in front another copy of that line and just Shift, rotate it 90 degrees. Now you've got your little registration mark. This is another important thing. Let's take that registration mark and assign it registration color. What that'll do is when you output separations, let's say this was a 10 color file. It's going to print those registration marks in every single layer or every single film, or every single color separation, depending on how you want to think about it. Again, we just assign it this registration color. It looks black, but it'll print in every color separation we have. Let's also select that hold down option and shift and drag a copy of it down to the bottom. I just noticed a problem here. I don't have this light blue color assigned to the spot color swatch that we made. Before we output this to separations, I need to make sure that that's properly assigned. Now we can go to output this to separations. Let's go File, Print and then for printer, select Adobe Postscript file. We want to make the media size custom so it matches our art board. For output, select separations, host based. You'll see now the two spot colors in this file are the two swatches we made. Let's go ahead and click "Save". Let's call this, halftone-seps and that's a post-script file. Let's click "Save". Now, let's go find that file. What we want to do is drag that halftone-seps postscript file into Adobe Distiller. That'll make a new PDF. Now open this PDF and you'll see there's our black ink layer and our blue ink layer with halftones and registration marks intact. In this section and the previous section, those are just two ways that you can make color separations without using expensive specialty RIP software that a lot of screen printers have. You can make these just with Photoshop or Photoshop and Illustrator. There's a lot of different ways to manually make your own color separations. I'll put some links in this section so if you want to see other ways to do color separations, then you'll have those resources available. Now will get back on track. Forget about color separations and screen printing for awhile and we'll send out our graphics for DTG and for sublimation printing.
27. Sending Designs to Print: I've already shown you screen printing and how to set up your design to be sent out to the screen printer. But what I want to do here is something a little extra, I'm going to send each of the three color ways to a different direct-to-garment printer and we'll send those out and then see how they come back. I'm on the Zazzle website, what I'm going to do is choose a men's basic American Apparel t-shirt, and then let's add image, it looks like they don't support Photoshop files, PSD files. So let's cancel that, and what I'm going to do is I will go into Photoshop, and I'm going to save this as a PNG file. First let's go to image size, I know they're not going to need the full 446 pixels per inch, let's just change that to 300, select ''OK'', and then let's do a Export as PNG. I'll make a new folder, Zazzle, Z- A- Z- Z -L-E, and then we'll just click ''Save'', let's just double-check this PNG. So here I've got it open, looks good, it's not in layers anymore because it's a PNG, but the transparency is still in there, let's check our image size, image size looks good. Let's go back to the Zazzle site, and let's see if it will use the PNG. Looks like it's compatible. Let's click ''Open'' and then click ''Make it Now'', and it places it on the t-shirt. It looks like he can't move it up too high on this template, so that automatically looks good on white, but this is a t-shirt we want to do on a blue shirt, let's just click on some of these blues and see what looks good. I think that's close to what we designed, lets try this blue, I think this turquoise looks good, so let's go with that. The design looks a little bit low to me, so let's click this just to move it up, and it looks like it's getting cut off, so we'll just move it back down. We've already uploaded the art and I'll fill in my information, pay for the shirt, and then we'll see it when it comes back. Now, I'm on the Spreadshirt website and we'll just go up here to Create, Custom T-Shirts. Now, we'll do a women's American Apparel shirt, let's click on ''Upload an Image'', and it looks like they take PNG, JPEG, GIF, SVG, EPS, AI, and CDR. The PNG, the JPEG, and the GIF are pixel based, the other ones are vector-based format. What we need to do is go back to our Photoshop file and do what we did on the blue colorway. Let's open up the black colorway, South Shore on Black, and let's go ahead and raise this one down to 300 DPI, image size 300, and we'll click ''OK", and we'll go File, Export as PNG, and we'll make a new folder, Spreadshirt, and then click ''Save''. Let's upload the image, South Shore on Black, click ''Open'', and we'll upload it. This is on a black shirt, so lets click ''Black'', and I'll just move it up a little bit, and I think that looks really good. Let's go and check out. I can't wait to see this one when it comes back. So here, I have the Jakprints template open, and one of the things you'll see here is that there's three layers, and the middle layer says, ''Place your artwork here.'' The top layer is just the template, and the bottom layer is also part of the template. What we want to do first is check the resolution of this template. Let's go Image, Image Size, and you'll see that it's at 150 pixels per inch. What we need to do is we need to go to our South Shore white colorway, if you remember, the image size here was really big, it was 446 dots per inch,so we actually need to raise this down. Every printer will have their own preferred resolution depending on if you're screen printing, what detail is in the image, but this one's going out for sublimation and their template is 150 DPI, so that's what we're going to do. Let's just res this down to 150, and you'll see that our dimensions didn't change, it was just the pixels per inch. It's going to make the image a lot smaller based on the pixel count, but your dimensions are actually still roughly 11 by 14, let's just click ''OK''. The other thing I want to do is leave this in layers just so that their designer or their person setting up the art will be able to manipulate it. We don't really need the background in here, but what I want to do is I want just select both of these layers with the art, and I'm going to group them. Then what I'll do is I'll just drag this window down, and now I can just drag this group right into the template, and it should just plop in there at full size, which it looks like it did. I'm just roughly center that and their person actually doing the printing and setting up everything will be able to center it, if I didn't get it 100 percent. I think that looks pretty good, let's just save this file, let's do a Save As, I'm going to leave the file name the same, I'll just add a South Shore onto the end, and will just click ''Save'', and that saved as a Photoshop file. This file is basically ready to upload. Because they're going to be sublimating it, they aren't asking for Pantone colors, they're just going to print it out on their sublimation paper and then sublimate it. Let's go into the Jakprints website and upload this art. Here I'm on the Jakprints website and I'm going to go to T-Shirts, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to select All-Over Printing, because if I just did Crew Neck, I think what they're going to do is they're going to do a direct-to-garment or a screen print. Let's go to All-Over Printing, and it's obvious that this is sublimation because it says, ''Sublimation." They have little video about it, and if you look, this guy wearing a cheeseburger shirt, and that has to be sublimation because a direct-to-garment printer can't print that big. Even though our design is not an all-over print, I want to get this sublimated so that we can compare sublimation to direct-to-garment. Here, they're showing the problem with doing a flood color where you get those little wrinkles. But what I want to do here, is I think I'll select this American Apparel Crew Neck. I'm going to order one-sided. We only want one shirt, so I'll slide that down at one, our size breakdown, I'm only getting a large, and our style is already in there. Let's create the order. Now, we get to a page where you fill in all the information. I'm going to fill that out and upload the file, and then it'll take about a week. I can't wait to see what they come back with.
28. Printed T Shirts Arrive: Six days has gone by and I've received all the t-shirts. In our screen printing and large print runs, you'll normally get a strike off or you'll be able to do what's called a press check where you actually go out to the facility and you'll see the design on press while they're making it so you can make any adjustments that you need then. This is different because we're doing just one t-shirt, so we don't really have the opportunity to approve or disapprove of a sample or make changes. What I'll do now is open these up in order that I received them and we'll have a look and we'll talk about the print quality and how these came out. This one's from Zazzle. Now this was the one on the blue shirt. Now, with this shirt, there's a couple of things that I see. The first one is that color red isn't as saturated as the file that we sent out. So it would be a little nicer if that red were brighter. The other thing is, I thought, wow, that design looks a little bit bigger than I thought. Now, what I've done here is I have our file and you can see that it actually is quite a bit bigger than the file that we sent out. Zazzle didn't have a specific area for you to call out the sizing, and with their system, we weren't able to upload our spec sheet, where we call out the specific pantone colors and sizing. If you print a t-shirt with them, you might want to make a note in their memo section that says, "Please print this design at 10 inches wide." The last thing I see about this shirt is, I believe the placement is a little lower than I would like. If I were going to talk to the printer, I would tell them, "Hey, why don't you move the design up a couple inches?" Because I think I want the bronco to be more center chest and that's okay if the letters come up really close to the color. I would give them a specific, "Hey, I want the top of the H here to be down half an inch from the color seen." But other than that, the print quality is amazing. It's a lot better than I thought it would be. It doesn't seem like they did an under base, they may have done a discharge under base. Not quite sure, but there's no hand or feel or thickness to the ink, so I really like that about this shirt. The next one is from spread shirt and we did this on a black women's T. I'm imagining they had to put down an under base. We might have a little thicker print than the one from Zazzle, but let's have a look. Obviously, the printing is a lot smaller on this shirt. When I was setting up this design, I was hoping that they would just go off the file size of the graphic that I sent them. But I think that's the thing with sending off your designs. You're going to want to call out as much as you can; colors, sizing, placement, everything that's important to you and don't assume that they're going to have the same design sense as you. If I were to do this again, or if I were to get it printed again, I would tell them, "Hey, print this thing at 10 inches wide, the same size as the file that I sent." But other than that, I really like how this design came out. The printing is really soft and it's a lot softer than I thought it would be on a dark shirt. I was worried that this design was going to be thick, that they would print a thick under base under it, but it's really soft, detail is really good. But again, it's a little small. But still cool, I like it. The last one was our Jack prints order, and this was on a white, a 100 percent polyester shirt and it was sublimated. I'm excited to see how this one came out. Let's open it up. Very nice, love it. I think the color looks really good. They totally nailed it as far as the sizing. Here's the size we sent out. The reason they nailed it is because they have a proper photoshop template, and the size we sent out was the size we got back. Colors look amazing. Now this, remember, is dye sublimation, it's not ink, it's dye. This has absolutely no feel at all, you can't tell the difference between the printed area and the non-printed area by touch. The only thing I would change on this one is to move the design up a couple inches a little closer to the color. Overall, it looks great. Other than that, the only thing I'll say is a 100 percent polyester shirt isn't quite as nice as a 100 percent cotton shirt or even a poly cotton blend. I wish they had an option to do a poly blend shirt, but otherwise, I think this thing looks great. I think the big takeaway here is if there's a lot on the line and you're doing a big print run, you definitely need to get a strike off or be at the printer for a press check. That way you can double-check the colors, the sizing, the placement, and anything else that could go wrong with the printing of your t-shirts.
29. Wrap Up Workshop 02: We're getting towards the end of this workshop. Just a recap, we went over digital and analog tools, finding ideas and inspiration on Pinterest, sketching, laying out basic shapes and type, fonts on Adobe Typekit, Illustrator, Photoshop, hand drawing techniques, colorways, sizing your graphic, and then filling out a spread sheet for the screen printer. We finished up by sending out the design and got back printed samples. If you enjoy the workshop, please post a review. A positive review is the best way for me to get the word out about this workshop to other potential students. Be sure to check out my other classes. I have another class called typographic logos, where I'll show you how to design a type-based logo, perfect for t-shirt design. Also, don't forget the t-shirt design workshop is a series. If you miss out on The T-SHIRT Design Workshop Part 1, it's all about: fabrics, inks, dyes, and washes. You'll learn about specialty printing methods like: direct to garment, sublimation, and screen printing. I'll even demonstrate the screen printing process in the workshop so you can see how it all works. I think that covers everything. Thanks again.
Ray Dombroski
