Transcripts
1. 01 Introduction: Years ago, while traveling through Hawaii, I snapped a picture of this old Ford Bronco. Enchanted with it, I added some boards in Photoshop. I later pitch the design, sold it to a local surf brand, confirming that it's possible to mix travel, hobbies in your interests into a design business. My name is Random Brodsky. I'm a graphic designer in Dana Point, California. I design logos and t-shirts.I also run a business called the vector lab, it sells, fonts, textures, mock-up templates. Time-saving resources to graphic designers and screen printers. I never want to give up the freedom that I have working for my own business. I highly recommend that other designers out there find a way to work for themselves too. This class is called T-shirt Design Workshop 3. In this class, I reinterpret that old Ford Bronco design in a new way. I'll show you my T-shirt design workflow, starting with an idea and going into sketching, Photoshop, Illustrator, and my favorite new tools with the iPad Pro. I'll even show you how to set up your design ready to be printed onto a t-shirt. Thanks for watching and I'll see you soon.
2. 02 Tools and Materials: In this section, let's talk about design tools and materials. I'll start out with analog tools. My favorite analog tools are actually little notebooks, and specifically Field Notes. There's a couple of different reasons I like these. One reason is they're always changing up the design, so every quarter you get a new design. It just helps freshen up with creativity if you're designing, if you're drawing little thumbnails in here, I don't know, each notebook's a little different, so I find that that just helps add to my creativity. The other thing I like is, these are pocket size so you can just carry them around in your pocket all the time. Anytime you have an idea, you just take out your notebook and draw it. I prefer this to any note-taking, like with a cellphone or something like that. The other analog tool to go along with this is these black MUJI pens 0.38. They just have a really nice line and weight to them, really smooth, ink doesn't gum up or anything like that. The last analog tool I have is a standing desk. This one I can raise and lower it, it's motorized, and it has pre-set heights. I find that about 95 percent of the time now, if I'm working, I'm standing. If I'm typing, I'm standing, if I'm drawing, I'm standing, if I'm using Photoshop or Illustrator, I'm standing. The nice thing about a standing desk is supposedly it's healthier, it's way better for your posture. If you sit down a lot, you're hunched over, you start to get neck and back problems. This completely eliminates that. It might take you a little bit to get used to it, but if you're like me, then you'll find yourself just standing all the time now and actually preferring it. That's all my analog tools. Let's get into digital tools, and I'll start out with hardware. Now, I have a 27-inch iMac. This one's a couple years old, it still works great. If you're on a budget, you can probably find a used one that still works great. This one, I could update it and it would probably be a little faster, but for now, it's still really good. The other digital tools I have, the hardware tools are the iPad Pro, and this is the first generation iPad Pro, and an Apple Pencil. Now, when I first got the iPad Pro, I was using with an app called Astropad. Astropad emulates your Mac screen. You could go into Photoshop on your Mac, and be drawing in Photoshop. That was marginally good, but I found something way better, and it's called the Procreate app. Procreate app is probably the best five bucks I've ever spent on an app. I think it might be 10 bucks now, but if Procreate were $300 or $400, it would still be worth it. It doesn't really eliminate the need for Photoshop necessarily, it eliminates the need for pencil and paper and a scanner. Now, there's nothing wrong with pencil and paper, and nothing wrong with busting out the charcoal or ink or whatever, there's definitely time for that, especially if you're trying to break through creatively or get a new look. But if you're trying to be quick and you want to be mobile, iPad Pro, the Procreate app is the best thing. The way that I got into that was I was on vacation in Hawaii, I had done a bunch of designs for a client and they e-mailed me and said, "Hey, we need some changes to all these designs. Can you do them?" I didn't have a scanner or I didn't have nice paper or that many good pens with me, so it wasn't realistic, these pen and paper. I used Procreate app and I was hooked. Most of the time now when I'm drawing, I'm using the Procreate app, and I'll show you a little bit about that later on. We're not going to do a deep dive into it, but I'll give you the basics and show you my workflow with the iPad Pro Procreate app, and going back and forth between that and Photoshop. Speaking of software tools, so Procreate would be the first one. The other two are Photoshop and Illustrator. There's a lot of new tools coming out; Affinity Designer, CorelDRAW has been around for a long time, Affinity Photo, there's Pixelmator. There's a whole list of new software tools that are equivalent to Photoshop and Illustrator. I like Photoshop and Illustrator, I'm just used to them. I've been using them for a long time. I think they have a lot of neat time-saving features. The other nice thing about Photoshop and Illustrator is Creative Cloud. They're always coming out with new tools, new little shortcuts, and you're always up-to-date. In the old times, when people had to buy Photoshop and Illustrator, you'd skip every second or third one, and then you'd run into compatibility problems because somebody wouldn't have the same version as you that you're sharing a file with. Now with CC, that's all eliminated. That being said, if you are on a budget, I would look at Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. I think those are $50, and they're pretty good. I haven't gotten into them too much because if you have Photoshop and Illustrator, there's probably not a big reason to switch to those programs. If your design business is generating revenue, I would stick with Photoshop and Illustrator, at least for now. We'll see how that changes down the road. But those are my main graphic design tools. Let's get into showing you how to use them.
3. 03 Pinterest: Let's go into Pinterest and I'll show you how I catalog and keep track of design inspiration. The great thing about Pinterest is when you see something on the Internet, you can pin it and save it to different categories of boards. For instance, here I've got my graphic design inspiration. This is just a general graphic design inspiration board. A lot of this applies to t-shirts but this is my catch-all page. I have a little bit more specific one called type and lettering and this is all type and lettering base so really cool letter shapes, really nice ways of doing type on here. They'll give you a lot of ideas and you'll start to see the differences and the nuances of different type styles, different type weights, scripts, serif, Sans serifs. The third Pinterest board I want to show you is called Tees. Mainly I designed men's Tees for surf companies, outdoor companies, fishing companies, stuff like that. Most of my stuff is guys t-shirts. If you go to this, a lot of it will be men's t-shirts. This board is called T-shirt design workshop 3. It only has a handful of pins on here but I'll go through a few of these and tell you why I picked them and how I think they'll apply to this design we're going to make. This first one is an illustration of a tiger and there's some neat little type arches, type shapes and they're getting pretty creative with the way they're doing their type. I think how ours could be different is we're using more of a photographic image versus an illustrated image. This style, the illustration with the type is pretty popular right now but you don't see a lot of photos locked up with type like this. I thought this layout was really cool, there's an illustration of a palm tree. I really like the vertical type on the sides and I also think these color waves are really nice. Back to that vertical type layout. I really like this vertical type layout and I think that will be one of the things that'll be nice to incorporate in our design. They have an illustration here but imagine that was the Bronco, I think that might be a really cool design. Back to the Bronco, I did pin this on this board so if you want to look at that original graphic you can refer to that. This one was something I hand screen printed at home and the reason it looks like this is because it's reverse printed. The ink is printed on the inside of the shirt, pushed through and that's why you get the texture. Doing a reverse print is a really cool way to add natural texture to your designs. I think this one, this illustration of the skeleton, the pattern of snake has a lot of neat stuff going on with the type. Obviously the illustration is the main part of the image here and the type just accents it. This work-shirt is really cool. I like this monogram and the shape of the hexagon and also we've got the vertical type going on with this pretty neat, pretty basic design. Instead of the monogram, that could be our photo that we're going to put in there. Huf does some really cool shirts. Now, the thing with all this type is your shirt is going to be best if the type makes sense. So if you're using all kinds of things like trademark and all these kind of cliche things that are going on right now, I think it's better to design your shirt if you're putting words on it, you want those words to mean something. Hopefully you can find some type, the name of your brand, the name of your company, the city you're in, anything like that I think is applicable to your design. I'm seeing a lot of this kind of layout. I think the thing that makes it different is it has this little fluid type right here. Anything you can do to change up your design from everything you've seen before. The reason I picked this design is I just really like the color way. I think if this were a Navy shirt and you had these orange and natural colors, it would look really good on a shirt. This is a shirt I did for O'Neill. It's just another way to use black and white photo on a t-shirt. The reason I picked this design is I really like the type, I really like the color. One thing I wanted to point out to you, this may look like a font just typed out on a computer but I think what they did was they hand lettered it. In my opinion, that's something worth doing. If you're making type and you're using a font, maybe just draw over it just to make it slightly imperfect and a little bit more hand-on because so many things that you can do on the computer so perfectly these days can tend to look a little static. So if you can put a little bit of hand-drawn made by human quality, I think that just adds to the value of your design. This one is pretty cool. This layout would look really good on a t-shirt, probably best as a back hit. Here is another couple of designs that have that hand-drawn quality. I believe this designer, his name is Curtis Jenkins. I never met him but really good designer and he's really good at having just a little bit of imperfection in his type. It's so much better. If you look at this ellipse shape, you could just draw that perfectly in Illustrator Photoshop and it would be boring but see how it's just a little bit off. It makes it that much better, that much more handmade looking. These are some cool type layouts that possibly we can incorporate into our design. The next thing I want to do is I want to start sketching and let's see how these ideas translate into the Bronco design.
4. 04 Ideation Sketching: Here we are in my sketchbook and typically when I'm starting out with thumbnail sketches, I'll actually start out with listing out the verbiage, what our T-shirt is going to say. You're going to have your brand name first, that's going to be the most prominent. There might be a catchphrase or a saying, you could have the city of your brand, you could put the year, put the current year or you can put the year it established. You could even do that in roman numerals. This sketch is incorporating some of the things we saw on Pinterest. A lot of type, we have the vertical type and we also have the arch type. I actually think this one looks pretty good. But even if you like your first sketch, it's always good to do a few more and just explore a little bit. The next sketch I did, I decided to get a red pen because I thought maybe adding color to this could do an overprint. The black would be overprinted on top of the red. This one I thought maybe it would be good to do a big three on there to let people know this is T-shirt design workshop, 3. I went over to this one and I thought, what would it look like if the Bronco were red and the type are black? I also thought it would look cool to bow out this type like that. Then I went on to this one. This one has got the arch type at the top. Now I've just got the body color painting on the Bronco, red ampersand and a red three. This design, I incorporated the big three on top of the Bronco, red ampersand vertical type. Just to bring it all together, I've got the arch type on top, vertical letters. I thought maybe it would look cool with some little colored palm trees on both sides. The thing I really like about this one is the three is on the Bronco, kind of like an old race car or something. With this being the main sketch, let's take that into Photoshop and then lay up the type later in Illustrator.
5. 05 Starting in Photoshop: We are in Adobe Photoshop right now. Here's a picture of my Bronco that I took with my cell phone. First, you want to make sure your image is the right size. Let's just go into image size here. In general, working with T-Shirts, you'll want to start with at least 300 dpi. You don't really need 300 dots per inch, but if you start with 300, you can always raise it down later. Let's unclick re-sample and change our resolution to 300. It'll go from 56 by 42 inches to 13 by 10, which is pretty good. The width of a front or back T-Shirt graphic usually doesn't go over about 13 inches and assuming we'll have some type on this graphic, this should be totally fine. If your image is a little small, now is the time that you want to raise it up before we start working on it in Photoshop. What I'll do, is I'll go ahead. I don't really need to. At least I don't think I need to, but I'll change this to 400 pixels per inch. Now, that's going to interpolate the image, which basically Photoshop is guessing how these pixels should look. But we're going to be doing some heavy manipulation to this file. Now, is the time we want to raise it up. If we're going to do so. So I'll just click ''Okay''. Now, I have my layers panel open here. The first thing you want to do, is make at least one copy. You can just do that by dragging the layer down to this little page icon. The first thing we want to check, are our channels. Typically, a photo will be RGB format. What we're looking for here, is contrast. If we can have an image that has a lot of contrast, it's going to be a lot easier to work with. Now, this is a photo of a vehicle against a sky in a parking lot. It's going to be pretty easy. If you took a photo, say, of a bear in the woods, it's not going to really pop off the background. You'll find out pretty quick whether your image is going to be user-friendly or not. Here is a red channel, here is the green channel, and there is the blue channel. This green channel has the most contrast. Let's have that highlighted and just go command A command C. Go back to your layers and paste that channel into a layer. We can either work with this or we could work with the RGB image. Let's also make another copy of this just in case we need to go back to the original. Well, let's just see what it looks like when we play with the threshold levels of this. So let's go image adjustments threshold. This takes our image to very black and white. Very contrast the image. You'll see here, if I move the threshold to 206, the top of the vehicle looks good. The bottom half gets lost. But let's just click ''Okay''. Let's go back to this layer here, and duplicate it again. Let's do another threshold. Let's move the threshold toward the bottom of the vehicle. Looks better. We click ''Okay''. That's the top one. It looks good until right about here. Then you lose everything. I'll clue you into the process here. What we want to do is, erase out the areas of this top image that start to get lost. Let's make a layer mask and that will allow us to erase out areas of this image. But if we erase too much, we can just go back. I'll show you how to do that. Go up to layer, layer mask reveal all. Now, what you want to do is, you see how this layer mask icon is highlighted. If we paint into this layer mask, black, it basically is erasing from our image. You'll see how a lot of this image is starting to come back. I did too much. Just hit your X key, and that'll switch the foreground and the background color and your painting white. Where you just painted black. If that makes any sense. We're still painting in this layer mask. We're just undoing what we just did. Now, I think maybe, seeing the steering wheel and the interior of the car here and the window on the other side looks pretty good. I want to erase out some of that. Let's hit X again to switch our foreground and background painting colors. Let's just paint black into this layer mask. Actually, you know what I'm going to do, I will hide these other two black and white gray scale images so you'll see the color underneath. You can see what I'm doing here, is I'm just erasing out parts of this top image. Let's go back and look at the photo, see what we're missing here. We're definitely missing the shape of the tire. It would be nice to see a little bit of definition under the truck here. We're missing the back tire and the bumper and the exhaust pipe. Let's go ahead and take that green channel again and do a threshold on it. We see a lot more detail on the tires here. Let's go image, adjustments, threshold. Let's just dial it back. We see focusing on this back tire here. I think right about there it looks pretty good. Zoom in a little bit. The next thing I want to do it, let's make these two top layers visible again. Let's go ahead and merge these two top layers. Here's a top layer, here's a layer right underneath. Now, if I erase out some of this top layer, you're going to start to see more of this tire. You'll see the exhaust pipe. Let's do a layer mask on that layer mask, reveal all. Let's paint black into this layer mask, to reveal more of the layer below it. I think I remember seeing the exhaust pipe there. The problem is we're losing some of this area here at the bottom of the body. But I'm okay with that. I'll show you how to fix that a little later. That's better for the bottom of the vehicle right there. Now, you can see the front bumper a lot better. I don't really want to mess with this area because I think it looks good. Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to draw a clipping path around all the edges of this vehicle. That's just going to make it a lot easier to work with. Let's go here and make the color visible. Let's go to paths and make a new path. The pen tool, it's a vector tool in Photoshop. It allows us to draw a vector paths kind of like an Illustrator. It is really useful, especially if you have a lot of nice curves and straight edges and things like that. If you are taking a picture of say like a dog or something that has fuzzy fur, it might be really hard to work with. But for a car or a building, or an image like that, this is really useful. Let's go in here and I'm just going to a draw path. It's underside of vehicle there. Let's just get all these nice lines of the 67 Bronco. It can be a little tricky basically. You click and drag, if I were to just draw another line here, it's going to round that corner. What you need to do, is hold option and drag that handle. Let me zoom in a little bit, you drag this handle. It kind of matches your curves. This just takes a lot of practice. The other trick withdrawing these paths is, if you draw too many, it actually makes it harder. It's just a lot of practice. But you really want to draw these paths with the least amount of points. I'm not going to worry about this latch right here. That's the latch for the windshield that folds down. This is the front bumper. If I remember right, our tires were pretty nicely defined. I'm just going to go to the underside of the body there. You'll see here I won't be able to end on these paths. I'm just going to switch to the Delete anchor point tool and let's just get rid of these little anchor points right here. Then we'll go back to a regular pen tool that we were using before. Click on that to restart drawing these paths and we just need one more to finish it off. There we go. We have this path highlighted so you can see it. Let's go in here and see how it's looking with our art. The next thing I want to do, let's make a new layer up above everything, let's go back to our path and just go make selection. For the radius is zero pixels, and you'll see we have a selection, little marching ants going around our Bronco. What I wanted to do now, let's select inverse and in this new blank layer, let's just paint white and get rid of a lot of this background junk here. Let's get rid of that oil smudge. I want to leave a little bit of this grid in the shadow here. I think it looks pretty nice and it's going to look good on a t-shirt. But in general, we want to just get rid of all this stuff. If you want to size up or down your brush is just left and right bracket keys. Now this is looking pretty good. The only problem here, let me hide those marching ants, is we're losing the borders of the vehicle here. What we're going to need to do is paint in body color on the Bronco and then we'll need to put some color for the top. I still have that selection active. I just hit it and let's go to select inverse. Let's make a new layer and let's turn this to a multiplier. What I want do is I'm going to paint in a cream color like a very light tan. We could just rough it in really quick right there. The reason we could do that is because these are straight lines. We can just easily make a selection here and hit delete. Let's now do the same thing with our body color. Let's go back to that path, highlight it and go make selection. Let's make a new layer underneath that tan top. I'll just click this to make a new layer. I really love this blue color, it's the original color of the 1967 Bronco. Let's just do a little eyedropper selection. Let's go and make all our layers visible again. I'm going to do the same thing with the body that I did with the top and let's just go in here and rough in that color. Let's turn it to multiply just so you can see it over that black, we'll do what we did last time. We'll get rid of the excess. Let's go back to that tan top and go Select, Load Selection, layer three transparency. That's going to select everything that's not transparent in that layer. Now we'll just highlight that blue layer again and hit delete. The only problems I'm seeing out are the window. We don't want the sky, even though the sky is blue, we don't want to print blue in this open area of the window. Let's hit Delete. That's starting to look pretty good. One more thing before I forget, we need our surfboard in there. Luckily, I sold a surfboard on Craig's list and took a photo of it. It's interesting because the shading will be the wrong way. But since we're looking up at the surfboard, we're going to see the underside of it. If you put the surfboard on a roof of a car, it's always going to be upside down because you don't want the wax to melt off. Let's just quickly select that, copy it and we'll paste it into the top of this Photoshop file. Let's go edit, transform, flip vertical. I think that actually looks really good. It's a little big and let's just go in there with our pen tool like we did before and delete it all out. Let's make a new path. We'll just draw our points. Again, practice makes perfect. Let's get this thing really nice. In our paths panel, let's go make selection. Click okay and with this, we don't really need to mask anything. We definitely don't need the background fencer or the garden there. Let's just select inverse and that selects everything that's not the surfboard, and we'll just hit delete. Like I mentioned before, the one problem with this is the shadows on the top of the board, it should be on the bottom. Let's just try inverting this, see what happens. Image adjustments, invert and I think that's too dark, but maybe we can play with the levels, lighten it up. Let's go Command L. That may actually work. Now you get all weird reds in here because I inverted it. But let's go image adjustments, desaturate and it pulls all the color out of that layer. Now it looks like a board that's lighter on the top, which is good. Let's go select Load Selection transparency. Let's make a new layer. Let's fill that with that same blue color, I'll turn the layer to multiply first, Edit fill or Shift F5 and let's use our foreground color. Let's go back to this layer and threshold it and see how that looks. Image adjustments threshold. I think what I'll do is I'll just leave a little bit of black in there. If we want to paint some more black into there, we can do that in procreate in the iPad. The other thing I I want do, let's make this a tan board with a blue fin. Let's go. There's blue layer and quickly select our fin and just cut it, Command X and Command Shift V, which is edit, paste, special paste in place. So Command Shift V is the shortcut. Then with the blue deck of the board, we want that tan. Let's lock transparent pixels and then go Shift F5 and what I want do is fill it with a color and I want that tan color. Let's get our eye dropper tool and make sure it's set to sample all layers, and we sampled at cream tan color and click okay. Now that board is tan. So far so good on the Bronco, I want to save this as a PSD and let's take it into Adobe Illustrator and start laying out our type.
6. 06 Illustrator: Let's go into Adobe Illustrator now. Let's go ahead and place in, that Bronco. The one thing I'm not going to be really messing with too much in this Illustrator document is the Bronco. I'll create a new layer and I'll just go ahead and lock that bottom layer. Let's just lay out our type here and see how it starts to look. What I'm going to do is make an ellipse and it doesn't need a stroke or fill. Let's type on there t-shirt design? Let me select all that. The type is way too small now. Let's see how about 500 point, that should work. Now to get this typed to center, we need to click this align center. There's a little illustrator cork that flips your type upside-down when you do that. The easiest way to get that upright is just to rotate around that ellipse just like that. Now, I think this type looks super plane and super boring. The other thing is, I realize in our layout, the first line says t-shirt. Let's get rid of the design. I know a bold font that I really like is FatFrank. We'll just start laying it out with that. FatFrank is a typeface on Adobe Typekit, so you have access to this if you subscribe to Adobe CC. I'm going to track that out a little bit just to give the letters a little bit more spacing. Then for design, what I think I'm going to do is just type it out straight. It's still tracked at 75. What I want to do here is, let's move both of these up a bit. I want to try to put an arc on the top of this type but not on the bottom. You can go to Warp and then Arc Upper. What you want to do is just bend the top of that design so it matches the t-shirt above it. What that did is it made the characters of the word design bigger than t-shirts. Lets just bump up the size of the t-shirt, so it looks a little better. The other thing is, we are tweaking our type and it's getting a little warped like if you look at the top of this s here, it's too thick. But what we're going to be doing later is bringing this type into procreate. We can fix it there so it's going to be more hand-drawn, more organic so the imperfections will look like they're meant to be there. It's got to say T-shirt design workshop and workshops down here at the bottom. It's already looking so good. The thing with this design is I want to put the three in the Bronco. The problem with that is it's not going to read t-shirt design workshop 3. You'll probably see the three as a secondary thing, but I think that's okay. If people haven't seen my other workshops, they'll figure it out that there's a couple more. The problem is it reads t-shirt design 3 workshop, but I'm not going to lose sleep over that. Maybe if we do it like that or we could do an old racing number. We can make a white circle, put that behind the three and then make the three pink color. I think I want to track out the workshop letters a little bit just so they look like the letters above. That's looking pretty cool. Now we can go up here to this Align Tool, horizontal align center. Click that and it lines everything up. Let's try the rest of our type using, like a really small, because it's secondary photos and type. I do not like that ampersand. I think this type would look better, little more condensed so maybe like a Gill Sans. I don't have a Gill Sans condensed. I love Gill Sans ultra bold. That's such a cool font. You know what, maybe I'll stick with Gill Sans for the ampersand. Let's just get rid of that. Then we'll just type a Gill Sans ampersand out by itself. Gill Sans ultra cool. I don't know. I have a feeling I want to make the ampersand bigger for some reason. Let's lock that, so it doesn't get in the way. What I want to do here is let's see if we can find a typeface on Type-kit that has a condensed version, I know FatFrank doesn't. But let's see if we can find something that will work with the rest of these fonts. Let's go add fonts from Type-kit. We're in Type-kit now and we probably want to pick Sans serif and you can pick your width. Let's try the most condensed width here and our weight is heavy so this would be photos type. I already like this Urbana, Franklin Gothic is a great Sans serif, Nimbus that's really nice. Let's just go ahead and sync Nimbus Sans condensed black. Let's also try this Urbana. Apparently I already like this font before because it's already synced. Remember that. Let's try the layout with Urbana and Nimbus. Let's go back to Illustrator. Both of those font should be synced so let's try this. Urbana black. Yeah, that looks good. That really looks good actually. Let's leave that. This is a different fonts, so the spacing is little different. We can just size that up. Now let's see what their ampersand looks like. Photos and I like the Gill ampersand. It is a little stylized, but we can match it up a little better when we go to re-draw it. Let's get rid of that Urbana ampersand. Maybe this Urbana, maybe that'll look good for the rest of everything. Let's switch it out here and see how it looks. Maybe we should stick with that. Let's see how these look. That's looking pretty cool and shrink down photos and type because we want that to be secondary. We can eyedropper that to switch it out to Urbana as well. I'm almost wondering, maybe we don't need this word using here. I think t shirts are quick reads, so if you don't need the type, maybe just leave it out. That's looking so cool. Let's add in Photoshop and what we can do. Let's use our Vertical Type tool and go back to Fat Frank. Because maybe we can still leave it in there. Photoshop and let's see how that looks with Illustrator on the other side. Now, we want to match the height of Photoshop with height of the Illustrator. We want the letter size to be the same, so we want to alter the tracking. This is vertical type, so it's still your tracking tool, but now it's affecting it top to bottom instead of left to right. Let's go to negative a 100 on Illustrator and will go positive on Photoshop, let's put positive, a 100. If you do Command R and you get some rulers and you can drag down guides from the top or the side. We need to shrink the tracking of the Illustrator side just a little bit more. Let's try negative 110,120. That looks about right. I think this is starting to look pretty good. The problem is Photoshop and Illustrator or just way too big. Let's go in here and adjust type size. Maybe we can turn to blue. The other thing I'm thinking is maybe instead of completely vertical, we can do these arcs along the path. There's a couple ways to do that. One you could go effect, warp, arch, changes to vertical and that tweaks out the letters a little bit. We could also see what arc looks like. Maybe that's the way to go. I did a negative 17 on the Illustrator side and we can do fact, warp, arch and do a positive 17 to match the other side. Let me bring these in a little more of that looks really neat. I'm really starting to like this. We do need to give some love to Procreate app, because if you don't use Procreate app, I think you're missing out a little bit. That would be cool if it were like a window sticker or something and maybe if it's a tan color. That's looking pretty cool, almost looks like a race car or something. What can we put in here? I will put in my logos. Sometimes in your designs, negative space is good and then other times it's good to fill it up and I think right here there's like just this big void of nothingness and it's a perfect opportunity to put in a few logo. I'm going to put in my logo from the vector lab. Let's just copy that, close that, and then go Command V and then let's also do Dombroski design logo, let's just copy these and paste them in there. I think stock standard one we'll look good. It's just moving things around and finding relationships between spaces, negative space, and contrast. Maybe this black logo goes to blue, so it's not as overwhelming. Now, to check your design, there's a lot of things you can do. You can zoom out, look at it really small, you could print it out. Sometimes I'll export a JPEG and just shoot it over to my phone, I'll airdrop it to my phone. You can look at it on your phone or your iPad. You can blur your eyes while you're looking at it. There's all things you can do that'll help you figure out the layout. Let's just drag another art board of this to the right. What I want to do is let's expand all this type, expand appearance and then object expand and now let's turn all to vector lines. Let's just group that and then what we can do is we can reflect it. Object transform reflect and reflected on a vertical axis and this will help you see the layout a little better. It's going to make it look more graphic and less like readable type since it's backwards. I am seeing a couple of things here and this is a little bit sacrilege to do with type, but I'm going to stretch it out a little bit. The reason I can do that is because again, we're redrawing this in Procreate. If it has more hand drawn quality, it's not going to look like really tweaked type, it's perfectly computer generated and now it's a little bit messed up. If we hand draw it, we have a little more freedom with it. I think the word Workshop, photos and type maybe goes bigger. Let's flip it back and now compare it to the original object transform reflect vertical. Move the Photoshop and Illustrator down just a touch. Now that we've done that, I'm not seeing the need for little palm trees that I've drawn in the sketch. Let's forget about those and the other thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to copy and paste this into Photoshop. The one thing we don't need here is the image of the Bronco, because we already have it layered in Photoshop. Let's deselect the Bronco and let's go Command C and let's go back in the Photoshop. There's our Bronco, one thing we need to do is let's make our canvas size bigger. Let's make sure the background colors turn to white so it will match. Now, let's select that top layer and then just go Command V to paste in all our type. Sizing looks pretty good. We have all the type on the top layer. We do want to keep in one of the colored photographs with the Bronco just for reference. Let's leave that layer in there. Let's get rid of all the other layers and mallets, crop it down, so we don't have too much excess space. Now, let's look at our image size. Image size in pixels is 5,520 by 5,746. If you have the new Procreate, I think it will allow this size of a file. Let's go ahead and save this and we'll call it Bronco for Procreate.psd. Make sure you leave the layers in there. What we can do now is just airdrop this file to our iPad.
7. 07 Procreate App & iPad Pro: Here we're in the iPad Pro, in the Procreate app. I've loaded this PSD file. Procreate is so awesome. Let me just show you a couple of things. This isn't meant to be a full Procreate tutorial. There's so many things that are just gestural and a little hard to translate from me showing you how to do it. But I'll show you some of the basics and I encourage you if you have an iPad that's capable of using the Apple Pencil to get the Procreate app. I think it's $10. It's so worth it and it's so usable. The first nice thing is you can rotate your view like that. If you're drawing a line a certain way, you can just rotate the view without actually even moving the iPad. If you want to change the drawing color, you can just hold your finger down. I don't know if you can see that. You can just hold your finger down and just hover over any color. If I wanted to change the drawing color to black, I will just do that. There's a ton of different brushes in here. The're some default ones. People are starting to sell Procreate brushes. I may try to add a couple in with this class so that you can use them. The other nice thing is you can alter these brushes. You can change them to your preference. The first thing I want to do is start altering the type and I don't want to start messing up any of the layers that are currently in there. Let's just make a new layer on the top and I'm going to change the color to white. Remember how I did that. Then what I want to do is I want to pick a brush. I have an inking brush that I made. I should call it untitled brush. If you want to resize your brush, you can just go over here to resize it. What I want do is I just want to start making this type look a little more hand-drawn and I also want to alter the width of it. I want to make it a little bit lighter weight and the nice thing about that is, we can just take what's there and draw white just around the edges. Let's start to do that and see how that goes. If I get real sloppy, it'll look more hand-drawn. If I get fairly tight with it, it'll have a nice effect where it'll look like perfect type and then the closer you look, the more you know that it's not. Compare these S's. See how this one, it really gets fat in here. That's because I put that warp on it where it made it taller. One thing I'm going to do when I get to this lettering right here is I'm going to really thin it out vertically where it gets really fat just so it matches the type above it. I'll just run through here. I'm going to start with T-SHIRT DESIGN WORKSHOP PHOTOS & TYPE, and then I'll meet you back in regular motion pretty soon. Now I think what I'll do is I'll go back over this in black and clean up what I did just a tiny bit. There is a way to switch between foreground and background color. If you hold down that color just for half a second or a second, switch it back and forth. Now I'm going to paint with black and I think I'll just do it in the same layer. I'll just go through them real quick. We're looking pretty good on this design. I think I may go in and clean up the type just a little bit more and then I'll go into this Photoshop, this Illustrator and I'll tweak those letters just a little bit the same way. You don't need to see that because I'm just going do the same thing that I did with these letters. I'm also going to go into this three, tweak that a little bit. The other thing, let's turn on the photo here of the Bronco. I don't know if you can see it on your screen, but right in here under the car, there's some light showing through. When you turn that photo off, it's just full black and I think it's a little heavy. What I want do is paint some texture into there so it'll just lighten up the Bronco little bit. I'm also going to get rid of some of these little palm trees and the fence in the background in the window. Actually, I'll just do that right now. What I'll do is I'll make a new layer. I've got white as my paint color. The other great thing about Procreate is if you want to draw a straight line, it's really easy. As long as you hold the pen in place long enough, it'll make a straight line so that's super easy. Let's go into this window here. I am going to want a straight line. Let's do that, do one up here and then you won't be able to see this but I'm doing one to the left and I'm going to close that back out. Let me show you a couple of things here. Let me switch to the paint color to red. Let's say I wanted to fill what I just did with red. What I can do is with the Apple Pencil, I can just drag that color on top of what I just drew. If I want to fill the inside of that, I can just drag again and fill it in there. That's a really nice feature. I can go and fill that with white. Really cool time-saving things and that's what makes Procreate so good is a lot of this stuff is gestural, where if you were to do that in Photoshop, it would just take a few more steps and over the course of doing drawing, it would take a lot longer so you could save a lot of time with Procreate app. I'm going to make this circle with a three in it, a little bit less perfect just to go with a vibe of our type. Eventually when we go back into Photoshop, I'll drop it behind these black door cut lines so it's going to look a lot better. I could do that in Procreate, but it's really easy to do in Photoshop too so I'll just do in Photoshop. Then let's go into this three and just, it's like a guy just hand-painted the three on the side of the Bronco. It wasn't a factory option. It's more do it yourself. I think what we're going to throw here is just a little bit of imperfection and if you overdo it, it's going to look a little cartoony. Let's get into painting some texture under this vehicle. Let's turn on our photo for reference. You can see the tire on the other side right there. What I want to do is make a selection. I'm just going to start drawing it. Let's see. Let's go up here and then the back tire there. Let's go in here and paint into a new layer. Let's pick a brush. I think either the splatter or the flicks may be good. Let's try the splatter. That may be pretty good. Turn down the size. It's a little too big. Using a light pressure, I'm just using the edge of the brush there. I think that's going to work really nice. The other thing I need to do is draw in the board rack and I want to add a little bit of shading underneath the board. What we can do is let's go down to our surfboard layer. What we can do is get our selection tool, put it on automatic and when you click that, it just turns everything black to indicate that it's selected. Now let's go back to our brush and change it to black. Let's do a little splatter brush. I like that one. Just add a little bit of shading to give it a little underneath shadow look. I think that'll look good once we tweak it in Photoshop a little bit. Now what I want to do is just rough in some board racks. Let's go to our inking brush, the untitled brush and just rough these in. These would have little straps going over the board. Not super photo-realistic, but I think that's enough to get the point across. I'm thinking this looks pretty good. The last few things I'm going to do are, I'm going to tweak the Photoshop and Illustrator lettering. I may play around these logos a little bit, but we're almost there. I'm going to finish this up and I'll meet you back in Photoshop.
8. 08 Ending with Photoshop: I did a tiny bit more work on the image in Procreate, but now I've got it in Photoshop. What we want to do here is, you see how I have a mess of layers. Now, ideally, when I work, I would only paint black in one layer. If I change to blue I'll paint that in a separate layer and tan, same thing I would change layers, but I've noticed here that I have a few layers that have more than two colors in them. So what I want to do here is I basically want to isolate these colors down to three different layers, including a background. So I have the black, I'll have the blue, I'll the tan, and then I'll add the white background so this black we can easily extract. There's only one place where I'm not seeing black that I want to see it and that's under this 3. So let's hide that tan right there and I think that's ready to go. So let's go command "A" and then command shift "C", which is copy merged. Now let's go in our channels and Procreate makes an alpha channel in every PSD. So we'll just use that, will command shift "V" and we'll paste what we just copied. Now, when you paste it into a channel, it's only grayscale. So everything that's tan or blue is a light gray. But we want to get rid of that. We want to go to just black and white in the pixels. So let's do a threshold. Let's go "Image" "Adjustments" "Threshold". What I'm mainly looking at here is the gradient under the Bronco. So we want to move this slider till we get a good amount right there. I'll just click "OK". Let's zoom in. I'll show you what it looks like. So these pixels now are only black and white. What we can do is we can command-click on this "Alpha " channel. What that does is it selects only the white, so we select inverse. Now let's go back into our RGB channels and go back into our layers. Let's go to the top here, make a new layer, and go to "Edit", "Fill" and we fill that with black. So that looks like it didn't do anything, but you'll see here we have a new layer that just all black. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to delete out everything else. That's black. So let me just delete this layer. Delete these logos. This layer here has a combination of black and blue. So we need to go in here, make some selections and delete. I see another layer under here where we painted some black. So let me hit delete again. Then down here at the button, we have this lettering and I'll hit "Delete" Then go back up to this layer that has a little bit more black in it, delete that. Now we just have some black in the border rack. So let's delete that layer. It looks like in the surfboard, I painted a little bit of black and tan together in the same layer. So that was actually a mistake. I'll leave that for now. This layer is just black, so let me delete that. Then these bottom layers are just black and white, so I'll get rid of those. That's black. So I can delete that layer and matches black so I can delete that layer. Now here in the surf board, we need to change his layered back to tan. We have our transparent pixels locked. This little icon right here. But let's go "Edit Fill" and we'll fill with a color and that color tan is already selected. So I'll just click "OK". Now we're getting really close. So let me just select the tan layers, 3 is tan, the board is tan. The [inaudible] is tan. Then the roof is tan. So let's go "Layer", "Merge layers". Now we just have the blue left. So we've got the letters, the fin, and the paint color. We'll highlight those and go "Layer", "Merge layers". Now we can get rid of the Bronco photo in the background. We'll just delete that. Our alpha channel, we don't need that anymore. We just delete that. Now we have a really nice clean file. Black's on the top, and then your colors are below that. Now, there's a couple more things I want to do here. The only thing left here, I'm getting neat picking, but I don't really like this shadow right here under the Bronco. What I want to do is I want to push some of those pixels up. So let's go to the liquify filter. Let's go "Filter", "Liquify". What we can do, let me just zoom in, is we can push up some of these pixels. That's looking a little better. Let's click "OK". Let me undo that so you can see the difference and erase a little bit. I think that's looking pretty good. So one more thing. I just want to add a little bit more texture in here and this isn't knockout texture, this will be a texture on top of the blue. So let's highlight that blue layer and go "Select", "Load Selection", "Layer 10 transparency". Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new layer. I'm going to use a paint brush tool with a little bit more saturated blue. Let me hide this selection. Selection is still active. But what I'll do is I'll go in there and I'll paint with some little half tan dots. And that'll make our Bronco look just a little bit more interesting. And I think that looks really good. I think we're ready to go to print. So let me save this file, and I'll save this as Bronco final design.
9. 09 Wrapping Up: Just to wrap up, we started with tools and materials. We went into finding ideas on Pinterest, then Ideation Sketching, and how to work up your photo in Photoshop, taking that design into Illustrator to add type, then bringing it into Procreate to tie everything together. Then finally ending with Photoshop and setting up your design ready to be printed. I hope you like T-shirt Design Workshop three. Don't forget to download the resources included with this class and also be sure to check out davedombrowski.com and the vectorlab.com. Thanks for watching. [MUSIC]
Ray Dombroski
