Designing art for use on a t-shirt or any other kind of apparel can be a bit of a challenge. Not only do you have to come up with something interesting and creative, but you also have to work inside certain dimensions and use a limited color pallet. The more colors you use, the more ink the printers have to use and that costs a lot more money, so it’s important to keep your colors as limited as possible.
This tutorial will show the process of how I go about creating an illustration. Of course there are a million different ways designers and illustrators go about creating work, but hopefully this will give you some helpful information.
You can find the Source files in the directory labeled ‘source’ that came in the files that you downloaded. You may wish to look through them briefly before we begin.
Tools
These are the tools that I use to go about creating an illustration on the computer:
- Adobe Illustrator
- Wacom Intuos3 Drawing Tablet
- Traditional Drawing Instruments (like pencil and paper)
Sketching
You don’t have to have a sketch before you start working. Many illustrators just begin drawing into illustrator without making a sketch first, but it makes things a lot easier to have a reference before heading on to the computer. Following is what my sketch looks like.
Step 1
Open Illustrator and set your dimensions to what the picture has displayed. These are the dimensions I usually work in for creating most of my illustrations and apparel designs. These settings can always be changed later if necessary, but don’t forget to name it.
Now as soon as your dimensions are set, go ahead and save the project. I can’t stress enough the importance of saving every chance you get. You don’t want to have your hard work disappear because of a program error, computer malfunction, or if the power goes out.
Step 2
Place the sketch onto the art board. This can be done by going to File > Place, and selecting the sketch from your hard drive. Once the sketch is in place, resize it as you feel necessary, then take the opacity down a bit making it easier to trace over.
Step 3
Once you have your image resized, lock the layer and create a new layer. This will be for all the basic line work, so title it "lines." Making different titles for each layer isn’t necessary, but can help with confusion, especially if you work with multiple layers as I do.
