Paul McClintock

For those new to the world of t-shirt designs here is a quick and simple mini-tutorial that should help you create a working design using the GNU Image Manipulation Program otherwise known as The Gimp. It is free and available for download from here.

I’ve tried to make this as simple as possible with only the absolute necessary steps, and as such it does assume some basic understanding of how to use the program, such as knowing where the menus are and how to use the tools. There are plenty of things you can do differently, but since I’m new to using the program I probably don’t know about all of them yet. This tutorial will probably be updated as I learn more about the program.

1. Create a new image, make everything in the new image dialogue look like this:

2. Paste the image into the document. Remove any bits you don’t want on the shirt… and make sure it has a checkered background, which indicates transparency. It’s best to merge all visible layers before exporting. If you have multiple transparent layers they’ll all merge nicely, but don’t flatten the image, because that would eliminate the transparency. Ideally you’ll want to end up with a single transparent layer before exporting.

3. Save as a PNG by typing the name you want as the filename. Then click the little plus sign down the bottom where it says “Select File Type (By Extension)” and then choose PNG from the list of filetypes.
Once you do that the PNG export box will pop up, make it look like this:

And that’s it. Pretty simple actually. Once uploaded, the resulting shirt should look something like this:

So there you go. If you stick to these steps, it should work fine – although if it doesn’t, please let me know by leaving a comment here.