How To Make a Great T-Shirt

Hello people, you’re reading this because you want to know lots of juicy information about our t-shirt printer, how to upload files, how things will print etc. etc. and you’re in luck because this is where all the juicy information about our t-shirt printer is located. If you’re reading this because you’re looking for the lost Treasure of the Sierra Madre, then you’ve gone adrift in your searches.

I’ve divided this into two easy to digest segments, which are titled as follows:

-How to prepare and upload your artwork
-How your artwork will print

Which are all pretty self explanatory and should answer any questions you have, if they don’t, if I have omitted some incredibly useful fact then please contact me at onetonshadow@redbubble.com with your question.

HOW TO PREPARE AND UPLOAD YOUR ARTWORK

So the first thing you need to do is either download the template we provide on the ‘Upload a t-shirt’ screen in your ‘My Bubble’,

or create a new 3200×2400 pixel, transparent, RGB file in Photoshop or whatever image editing software you use.

(If you have used our template, YOU MUST DELETE THE EXPLANATORY IMAGE, otherwise it will appear on your print, there are many ways to do this but the easiest is generally ‘Select All’ (usually ctrl-a or apple-a) and then ‘delete’.)

Now you can paste, drag or place your artwork into the template, or just start to create from scratch then and there.

It is very important you have a transparent background, if you flatten the image or fill the whole background up with black or white, it will be printed, so even if you can’t see it when you preview, whatever you have on the template WILL PRINT, and this will not be a nice effect for your buyers.

So ensure that the template only contains the artwork you want printed on the t-shirt.
Here are some examples of GOOD and BAD, they will not apply to every idea and design, but the essence is important, the checkered boxes represent transparency in most editing software, this happens to be Photoshop CS3

Now this one is a little specific, but if you have artwork similar to this where a large proportion is of a certain colour and intend to place it on a shirt of the same certain colour, remember that the colour WILL print, and will leave a large rectangle around the image which will feel strange and so it’s best to remove the pure colour.

Then all you have to do is save it as a PNG file, which, as long as you have the file set to RGB, should appear in your drop down options on the saving dialogue box.

So that’s all cleared up then, now you have a fancy design placed in a 3200×2400 pixel, transparent backed, PNG file.
So head back to the upload a t-shirt screen in your redbubble account and choose the file you have saved on your computer.

And, well, ‘back of the net’.

If you happen to use Gimp, here’s a prolific RedBubble t-shirt guy who has some tips for you, thank you GregoryNo5

HOW YOUR ARTWORK WILL PRINT

Right, so we have a new printer to play around on, again it is a Direct to Garment Digital Printer, so it is still an enormous inkjet in principle but unlike most other inkjets, it has white ink.
Now prints are divided into lights and darks, for light coloured t-shirts it prints straight onto the shirt, for darks it lays down a white base first and then prints on top of that.
This printer is far superior at handling gradients and photographic-esque images than screen printing, and while it does a very impressive job of rendering blocks colours, it is best to avoid very large expanses of single colour area, particularly if those areas are white. Also remember that the image will not glow like your backlit monitor.

Some quick important rules to follow and remember:

Gradients from a colour fading out to nothing on dark tees are EXTREMELY hard to render.
Very fine type using white ink on dark tees can also be tricky.
Very large block areas of a single colour should be avoided.

It’s quite a hard thing to explain such a tangible thing so here are some pictures to look at instead:

ThickBlackOutline

Scott Robinson

Ivy Izzard

Aaron Booth

I hope this goes someway to assissting you in your t-shirt creation.

onetonshadow

Thanks for that, I actually really like the photo look on t’s…and that they come out matt looking

Does the DPI of our images matter? The blurb above says that images are printed at 200dpi, but when I open the RB t-shirt template in Photoshop, it opens as 72dpi.

Is pixel count rather than DPI the go?

Woohoo! Thanks Grant! That’s one less thing to keep me up at night :p

Darn it, I have so many pictures with large blocks of white. Come ooooonnn white ink! Angie needs a new wardrobe!

thanks for the info , I wonder , how would a fractal work, like a fractal line? or such??
are lines and line art no good for tee shirts??

Can’t you make it a little easier? I don’t know anything about photoshop or what the hell “vector art” is etc. I’ve tried three times to upload an image and it says’ please up load suitable file’ or such. It’s taken me all night just find out how to make a transparent background image.
Does it have to be those exact pixel dimensions? So I start with a canvas size in photoshop that size? BEFORE I start making my image. Because I had to resize it to make it 2400w x 3200h and it goes out of proportion. So I tried it just at 2400w and the h was well below the 3200… didn’t work.

Can you have an upload here? Where we can upload a pic and it reconfigures it to your requirements?

I don’t understand your t-shirt template either.

HELP!!!

thanks.. that is easy to understand. Greatly appreciated.

grubbanax – chequered rectangle – that’s because it’s a transparent background.

Hi Crackgerbal,
you just have to download the t-shirt template here
on RB.

mmmm i can see a tinge forming in my neck aaargh but im sure ile work it out before christmas 09 lol

Sorry, try this

what about printing on the back or both sides, is there anyway of doing this