T-Shirt Design

[ian]

Here is another T-Shirt design I did for the Hash House Harriers running club annual national meet up (Nash Hash) with a 5 colour print.
Content

• The event is held in the woods. And features beer. Hence the trees and 1 litre beer glass in the image.
  
• The funny animal is my interpretation of a Wolpertinger. A Bavarian mythical animal. The eyes were inspired by a Gremlin cartoon, and the body was based on Brains from Top cat. But with webbed feet and a white tummy added.
• The beerglass was re used from another t-shirt. But it's not quite right for this job.

Technique

• During the design, it was requested that the t-shirt should be dark green. And no black colour allowed. So my black outlined shapes would need to be converted to the background colour. This i did by duplicating the outline. Then Stroke-to-Path to get the outline as a separate objects. These outline were then removed from each object with a boolean operation to punch-through to the background.
• Curved text was created by adding a Bend path effect instead of text-along-path. Bend is very quick and flexible with 2 handles. But it was buggy if I tried further operations on the text. And it was impossible to remove the effect. I finally recreated all the text and did all the operations when straight and bent the text right at the end. Bend creates a different result to text-on-a-path. And I will only use it again in special cases.
• The Beer glass graduated shading was done with manually created "Benday" dots. And worked well keeping the number of colours down. But this method needs a lot of copying and resizing. And is slow when un-grouping hundreds of dots. I'm told closing the object manager may speed ungrouping next time.
• The main typeface classic style shadow was created using the text copied and offset. With the foreground text outline punched through to the background as described above. A fiddly process.

I delivered the artwork as a RGB PDF with no background. But the PDF viewers usually put white is as a background. So white text on white is invisible. And scary to deliver. RGB instead of CMYK was accepted without issue.
The running group were happy with the result. And didn't notice any of my little mistakes. And I am starting on their next shirt already.
Surprisingly, the background green colour was also printed on a white shirt. The white lettering was the only non printed part of the shirt. Seems weird to me.

[brynn]

It does seem weird in general, not to use a green t-shirt, and just print the white.  Seems like it would be more expensive printing the entire shirt green.  But it sounds like they printed it exactly the way you made it.  You gave them apparently transparent lines and text.  It just happens that the shirt is white.  If the shirts were pink, they would be pink lines and text.....at least the way the drawing defines them.

I'm curious why you didn't just color the lines white, instead of black?

There is a way to create the shading dots without doing it manually - a couple of ways, I guess.  One is using Tiled Clones, and the other is using filters.  Lazur's the expert on that.  If you look around, he has some images and messages in the forum about it.

[ian]

Brynn

My artwork file had a transparent background and colours only where I expected them to use ink. The white lines you see are white, but the dark outlines of the animal such as the round the hand and eyes are punched through to show the background colour.

This printer do edge to edge shirts as well as rectangular front back prints. I wasn't there when they chose the method. But this shirt is, amazingly, printed on unstiched material. And made into a t-shirt afterwards!!

Regarding the dots, to get a graduated shading the dot size is continually changing. So a simple pattern can't do that. Maybe there is a way with filters. But I've given up on trying them. It seems very complex. But it would be good to find a solution.

[brynn]

The white lines you see are white, but the dark outlines of the animal such as the round the hand and eyes are punched through to show the background colour.

Oh I see.  When you said the black lines couldn't be black, I thought you had used difference to make them white/transparent.  I assumed the white lines had originally been black.

But this shirt is, amazingly, printed on unstiched material. And made into a t-shirt afterwards!!

Wow!  That seems even weirder than printing the background color!!  I don't know, I'm not all that familiar with how they make t-shirts these days.  But that really seems like the long way around.

Ooooohhh!  I guess they have websites these days, where you can submit your design and have bolts, or even huge rolls of fabric printed out with your design.  It could be they used one of those sites.  That would seem to explain it.  Visitors can submit their own designs, or they can choose other people's designs, and buy the (I guess a bolt or even whole roll of) fabric.  Or in some cases, as far as I understand, you can just buy products with the special printed fabrics.  (I've seen scarves or sheets and pillowcases.  But there could be sites that would sell t-shirts or other clothing.)

Well anyway, congrats on the design.  Will you show us the next one too?

 
Now that I think about it, I wonder what kind of technology has made that cost-effective?  It used to be next to impossible to get a job where you could create fabric designs (for printed designs).  When I learned to sew clothing as a child/teenager (in the 70s), I always found it frustrating trying to find the kind of printed fabric I wanted.  (Well, even now, sometimes I wonder what someone was thinking when they decided to buy or sell a fabric design.)  You were pretty much limited to what the fabric stores sold, which was comparatively limited.  And I used to dream about finding a job (when I grew up) where I could design fabrics - I was sure I could do a better job, haha!  I guess I could design fabric prints to my heart's content now 

(Hhmm...where's that to-do list....)