Matt Simner

I’m relatively new to Illustrator and wanted to take advantage of the templates facility so after a few iterations I now have a template that works for me.

I’ll assume that anyone reading this is at least familiar with the main options windows and how to work with Stroke/fill colours etc – if not just post a comment and I’ll try and help.

If you’re looking for a Photoshop template then maybe try this one

I know a lot of people use Illustrator to create T-shirt designs then copy and paste their finished image into Photoshop to do the save to .png and upload to Redbubble. I found very early on that although you get warnings about memory and untold slowness when you do ‘Save for Web’ – that’s the way to go to avoid having to leave Illustrator.

OK – so what’s in the template?

1. The artboard is set to the standard 2400px X 3200px that we all know and love
2. There’s a ‘design’ layer – ready to accommodate your actual design
3. Beneath that there’s a ‘Background’ layer with a compound shape (in the shape) of a T-shirt. This is primarily so you can try out different background colours for your design before you upload. I originally just had a rectangle in the shape of the artboard, but this is intended to match the view (approximately) you’ll get within Redbubble.
4. There’s also swatches for all the different shirt colours (available separately as a Swatch Exchange file) that appear at the bottom of the swatches window. If you hover over each you’ll notice they’re called ‘RB ….’ just to make it a bit more obvious.

Using the template

1. First of all Download it from my site and extract to your illustrator program path\Cool Extras\Templates (on windows – c:\program files\adobe\Adobe Illustrator…
2. In Illustrator go File—> New From Template… and choose your saved Redbubble T-Shirt Template.
3. Complete your design in the ‘Design’ layer (or any layer above ‘Background’)
4. To see different backgrounds simply select the ‘T-Background’ group in the layers window (click the circle) this should select all the paths in the ‘T-Shirt’ shape.
5. Go to the Tools window and make sure the Stroke colour is set to black and click the Fill colour to bring that to the foreground.
6. Now just click away on your RB shirt swatches and preview your design set against all the glorious RB colours.

Once you’re happy then make the ‘T-Background’ group invisible (so you have a transparent background) and do the following to make the design ready for Redbubble:

1. Click File—> Save for Web… (you’ll get a message about ‘how the world’s going to end’) – be brave and click ‘Yes’ to continue – if you’re running illustrator OK you’ve probably got plenty of memory.
2. In the ‘preset’ on the right hand side make sure you’ve selected ‘PNG-24’, and that ‘transparency’ is set.
3. In the tabs underneath that click ‘Image Size’ and leave all the settings and tick ‘Clip to artboard’. Your image size will now go down to 2400 X 3200.
4. Save, upload and put your feet up :)

I’m sure there’s a neater way to achieve the ‘fillable’ T-Shirt shape without having to select multiple paths (maybe a transparent image) – so if anyone’s got any tips then I’d be more than happy to hear them.

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