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The Ultimate Round-Up Of T-Shirt Design Tutorials
Among all of the graphic designers in the world, many of them have probably had a go at designing some cool artwork for t-shirts. The t-shirt, after all, is one of the world’s most purchased products, and a lot of us wouldn’t know what to do without them!
If you have yet to design for apparel goods, today is your lucky day! Below, we present over 20 useful t-shirt graphic tutorials written by fellow designers, followed by a selection of great resources (such as vector apparel mock-up templates), an inspirational showcase to get your brain thinking and some great websites where you can submit your new t-shirt graphics.
You may be interested in the following related posts:
- The Ultimate Round-Up of Print Design Tutorials
- 50 Clever Tutorials and Techniques on Traditional Drawing
- Back-to-School With 40 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Tutorials
[Offtopic: by the way, have you already visited Smashing Magazine's Facebook fan page? Join the community for a stream of useful resources, updates and giveaways!]
T-Shirt Graphic Tutorials
Create a Balanced T-Shirt Graphic
- Work with vector image tools to trace stock photos.
- Learn how to make great compositions.
How to Design a T-Shirt on a Budget and a Tight Deadline
- Use existing vector packs to produce new graphics.
- Work with limited color schemes.
- Work with the Saturation Settings to manipulate photos.
- Use the Circular Marquee Tool to produce custom shapes.
Super-Slick Screen-Printing Separations with Illustrator
- Set up documents and bleeds ready for screen printing.
- Use Calligraphic Brushes to trace photographs.
- Separate colors to be ready for screen printing.
How to Create Photorealistic T-Shirt Mock-Ups
- Use apparel templates to produce realistic digital mock-ups.
- Use layer masks to hide unwanted areas of a graphic.
- Simulate silk screen imperfections in Photoshop.
- Learn how to use alpha channels.
Create a Custom T-Shirt Stencil Design
- Create stencils for your t-shirt artwork.
- Use craft knifes and spray paint to produce home-made t-shirts.
- Get your hands dirty and produce home-made screen-printed t-shirts.
- Use various objects from around the home to save money on one-off production tees.
Separating Colors for Screen Printing in Photoshop
- Use the Magic Wand Tool to select individual colors.
- Use registration marks to help line up artwork when screen printing.
How to Win at Design by Humans
- Learn tips and tricks for submitting your artwork to Design by Humans.
- Use Pantone Color books to get your colors correct.
How to Prepare Artwork for Screen Printing in Illustrator
- Use various Pathfinder Tools to separate your colors.
- Use the Magic Wand Tool to select individual colors.
Designing Ultra SceneXCore Apparel
- Manipulate stock photos using various tools.
- Use existing vector images to spice up your artwork.
Create a Three-Color Illustration for Screen-Printing
- Separate colors in Photoshop to be ready for screen printing.
- Learn about trapping to avoid slight alignment on press.
Easy Color Separations for Screen-Printing in Photoshop
- Learn the process of screen printing and how it all works.
- Learn how to separate your artwork colors in Photoshop.
How to Create Awesome T-Shirt Mock-Ups like Jimiyo
- Use the Transform Tool to correctly position your artwork.
- Use the highlight and shadow levels to give your digital mock-up a realistic look.
- Combine Photoshop and Illustrator to produce stunning artwork.
- Use an imported sketch as a guideline.
Rapid-Fire Illustration Tutorial
- Use the Live Trace Tool to quickly and effectively trace traditional ink drawings.
- Use the Pen Tool to create custom shapes.
How to Create a T-Shirt from Scratch
- Use various Photoshop Tools to create custom shapes.
- Use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to delete unwanted areas of artwork.
Create a Complete Apparel Tech Pack
- Learn how to prepare your files correctly.
- Learn how to separate colors correctly.
CMYK Process Printing for the Emerging T-Shirt Designer
- Learn how to mix existing resources to create a good composition.
- Work with unusual color schemes to produce eye-catching artwork.
Digital T-Shirt Mock-Up Resources
After giving a few of the above tutorials the once over, you should have enough knowledge to begin making your own separated t-shirt artwork. Below are several links we have collected to help you present your work in the most stylish way possible.
GoMedia Ultimate Apparel Vector Collection
T-Shirt Templates: Free and Paid
Huge Collection of T-Shirt Design Mock-Up Templates
T-Shirt Inspiration
Now you’ve got everything you need… except maybe for some ideas! Take a look at these great inspirational posts to help you get your thinking cap on!
- 20 Awesome T-Shirt Illustrations by Glennz
- 50 Best T-shirt Designs of 2008
- 40 Rad Vintage T-Shirt Designs
- 30 Kick-Ass Vector Based T-Shirts from Top Designers
- 30 Clever and Cool T-Shirt Designs You Will Love
- Super-Cool ’80s T-Shirt Designs
- 20 Super-Cool T-Shirt Designs
- Amazing Typography T-Shirt Designs
- Designer Tees: Wear your art on your sleeve!
- 20 T-Shirts Designs about Typography
- Geek Fashion: 55 Fresh T-Shirts for the Creative Community
- Tasty Designer T-Shirts
- T-Shirt Factory’s Photostream
Where To Sell And Submit Your Artwork
Below we have collected various online stores and open-ended competitions that invite you to submit your t-shirt designs, with the chance of getting them printed and taking home some well-earned cash!
- Design by Humans
An ongoing design contest and community where artists and t-shirt lovers can create, buy and talk about everything related to art and t-shirts. - Threadless
Threadless is a community-based tee-shirt company with an ongoing open call for design submissions. - Teetonic
Teetonic is about passion for design. It wants to create the best t-shirts and is always open for submissions. - Allmightys
Submit designs to win tees, commisions, fame, friends and more! - Oddica
Submit your artwork for a chance to earn 41% of every sale made. - Zazzle
Make money online by selling your designs on hundreds of retail-quality products! It’s free and easy. - Cafepress
Design, make and sell your t-shirts. - La Fraise
This is pretty much the French version of Design by Humans. - Spreadshirt
Create your own t-shirt shop for free, and fill it with your very own designs. - BigCartel
BigCartel is a simple shopping cart for artists. Create an account and start selling!
Related posts
You may be interested in the following related posts:
- The Ultimate Round-Up of Print Design Tutorials
- 50 Clever Tutorials and Techniques on Traditional Drawing
- Back-to-School With 40 Excellent Adobe Illustrator Tutorials
(al)
Callum Chapman is a freelance graphic designer and illustrator based in Cambridge, UK. He is the creative blogger behind Circlebox Blog, a design related blog offering articles, inspiration, tutorials and free, high-resolution textures. Drop him a line at Twitter!
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...- 33 Comments
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October 16th, 2009 5:56 amI found this awesome tshirt tutorial (made by david from iloveyourshirt) some years ago.
- 3October 16th, 2009 5:58 am
Cool graphics, i just find t-shit graphic trends change too quickly. but, cool stuff.
- 4October 16th, 2009 6:02 am
This article is a great starting resource for sure.
jacob bannon of converge does some amazing t-shirt artwork. check out his site: http://www.jacobbannon.com/ he sells most of his stuff through his record lable deathwish inc.
- 5October 16th, 2009 6:06 am
This rocks!
My friend does screen printing and we’ve been recently talking about possibly opening a T-Shirt design business.
This should help with a lot of what we were talking about :)
- 6October 16th, 2009 6:18 am
Cool stuff! thanks!
- 7October 16th, 2009 6:29 am
What a great roundup!!! I’ve recently starting doing more t-shirt design and I can’t wait to dig in to more of these articles. For me, the 4th one from the top (Super-Slick Screen-Printing Separations with Illustrator) was REALLY helpful!
By the way, you forgot about Shirt.Woot! derbies (shirt.woot.com/derby/) for places you can submit your artwork and get paid!
- 8October 16th, 2009 6:34 am
Wow! Thanx. I can remember I requested for some T-shirt design from you guys. Nice to see these come out.
- 9October 16th, 2009 7:00 am
this new thing you do on round ups, telling what techniques are covered, is awesome!!! thanks for the posts!!
- 10October 16th, 2009 7:01 am
Thanks for the list of resources, I can never remember them when I’m looking for them.
- 11October 16th, 2009 7:17 am
The article about “CMYK Process Printing for the Emerging T-Shirt Designer” points to another article.
(SM) Thanks, it is fixed now.
- 12October 16th, 2009 10:56 am
Does anyone know how to actually know how to start selling T-Shirts online?
Say.. I start with 10 T-shirt designs..Is it easier to mass produce T-shirts or create T-Shirts as the order comes in?
- 13October 16th, 2009 11:26 am
Nice roundup. Although i miss Emptees.com as a source of inspiration…
- 14October 16th, 2009 12:18 pm
Mike, your question is kind of vague. If you’ve already printed the shirts, you can setup a webpage with a shopping cart and start publicizing it. Or, use Printfection, Zazzle, or Cafepress to print on demand.
Good luck!
Below are my examples of a Printfection site and also a site for shirts I printed:
http://www.murchadaoutfitters.com – Viking, Celtic, Spartan, Roman, and more t-shirts
http://www.scotlandshirt.com – the ultimate Scotland shirt - 15October 16th, 2009 12:58 pm
This is exactly what i’ve been looking for. Thanks SM!
- 16October 16th, 2009 1:00 pm
@Mike
It’s going to be more expensive to make them as they’re ordered. It’s always cheaper to mass produce t-shirts because of screen printing costs. Call up a screen printer and ask them how much it costs for to do 1 shirt compared to 101 shirts.
- 17October 16th, 2009 1:29 pm
Thanks for the AMAZING list of tutorials!
- 18October 16th, 2009 11:43 pm
This is great! just got home and this was on my RSS. Earlier today a client asked me to do a t-shirt mock-up and this will be a big help! Smashing Mag to rescue again!
- 19October 17th, 2009 3:51 am
And don’t forget the cool t-shirts featured on Justice’s video “Dance”! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49esza4eiK4
- 20October 18th, 2009 12:56 am
Glad you all like it guys.
@Mike: The more you get printed, the cheaper each ‘unit’ will cost – although if you’re just starting out it would probably be best going a long the lines of printed on demand with Cafepress etc. Or alternatively you could look at screen-printing the shirts yourself? It’s quite expensive to get set-up but if you’re t-shirts are well designed and are of good quality you’ll make your money back in no time ;)
@Oliver: Great song and a great video, I forgot about that!
- 21October 18th, 2009 9:48 pm
What a great post!!
When designing a t-shirt…what size and dpi sould i use?? - 22October 18th, 2009 11:31 pm
May I suggest also Monsieur Poulet (for Mister Chicken) http://www.monsieurpoulet.com/home.html?lang=en – the french shop for fairtrade teeshirts. Also in France, the well known Agnes B brand currently runs a teeshirt contest : http://jeu.agnesb.fr/ (soRRRy, only foRR fRRench speackinGGe)
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- 24October 19th, 2009 12:19 pm
The best is the first. Balance is something most artists struggle with and J3’s tutorial helps explain some of that. Thanks for the links guys!!
- 25October 20th, 2009 1:08 am
Great collection of resources for would-be designers. At Indigo we get a large number of novice designers each month and this post would be a great starting place for many who want to get into professional t-shirt printing.
- 26October 20th, 2009 3:28 am
ummmm some thing new and awesome. I stopped all my official work and started my t-shirt tutorial. My boss saw the posting and demanded me the link to buy one…..lol
- 27October 20th, 2009 4:09 am
I found these other great t-shirt designs the other day. Quality of the designs are great got myself couple of them, and the coolest thing was that they deliver them in a pizza box.
- 28October 21st, 2009 4:34 pm
@Murray
I use inknburn for my t-shirt printing. they seem to be the only direct to garment printer around here (California, USA). VERY High quality compared to just screen printing. - 29October 22nd, 2009 11:15 am
This is an astonishingly awesome selection of good material for designers and enthusiasts. Excellent post
- 30October 23rd, 2009 11:40 am
A lot of these tutorials are incorrect for screen printing. You should be separating your colors in the channels palette ( for screen printing ) not in layers in photoshop. Esp if you are mass producing shirts via screen printing. In Illustrator you be using spot colors in your swatches palette. Take it from someone in the buiz for nine years, and not the web kiddies. And of course most don’t talk about balancing art as in how big should it be, compared to sizes of shirt, wrap around, etc. you kids are getting too spoiled with DTG . Talk to the people at http://www.screenprinters.net for the real deal.
- 31November 2nd, 2009 9:36 am
This is an absolutely brilliant resource, many thanks!
I’ve been teaching myself how to bring the ideas that pour from my cranium to reality for some months now, and I’ll be at the stage of starting a website within a fortnight.
One question I had though, I’ve done all my designs on Photoshop and they’re all around A3 in size, and this is a nightmare when it comes to submitting to any of the above sites using their templates. Is there an easy way to re-size/drag and drop that I’m missing??
Many thanks folks!
- 32February 2nd, 2010 12:32 pm
be sure to check out http://www.badashellclothing.com we got alot of cool graphic tee shirts done by professional Artists. Come Check out our on going tee shirt design contest.
- 33March 17th, 2010 6:50 am
Thanks again for featuring the Go Media templates in your post. Just to keep the comments up to date I gotta tell you that we launched http://shirtmockup.com/ today! It’s a super-fast flash app that simplifies the mockup process without compromising realism.
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I love t-shirt design. Thanks for the great post, especially those resources.