For those of our customers who like to play around in Photoshop, a good tip for prepare your artwork for silkscreening, is to reduce the amount of colours in your picture, to make it easier to print

With other types of printing, it’s fine to use photographs, the higher in resolution the better, and there are no issues with the amount of colours. But screenprints look the most effective when they’re made using flat colours with a limited palette.

Reducing the amount of colors also makes it cheaper to print, and it gives
you a better idea of what your design is going to look like once it’s been screen printed.
The key to reducing an image’s amount of colors for screen printing is the Posterize image adjustment.
Some other photo enhancing programs give these options now, as well as Photoshop, so you can play around with your photos and get some amazing results.

Bring up the image you want to use, and go to : Image > Adjustments > Posterize on the tool bar. The Posterize  filter reduces the amount of colors in your image to the number of levels you specify.
Depending on what kind of a look you are going for you can reduce the amount of colors once, or sometimes twice to get the desired look for your image. I’m sure you can even reduce it further, but I generally use 3 or 4 levels.

To posterize your image, first make sure you are on the selected layer you want to posterize.
Then, go to Image> Adjustments> Posterize…

After posterizing your image, you can either desaturate it or try varying the amount of levels
within the Posterize settings to get the desired effect. Here’s an example of a black and white picture of Paul McCartney, one of the famed members of  The Beatles. The first picture has been changed from colour to black and white, then in the second picture, the posterizing filter has been used, and you will notice the amount of tones have been reduced and simplified, which will make an outstanding screenprint for a Tee shirt:

You can see the marked difference between the two pictures, and the screenprinter will much more easily pick up the simplified colours (if in colour) and tones and your tee-shirt will be much more striking. There are many other methods of simplifying your pictures for print, this is just one of them….and just goes to prove….LESS IS MORE!

Today we’ve got some more funny tee-shirt designs…some of them are using nice fonts, and eye-striking designs, but woeful translation brings a comic twist for the Western reader. Here are a few more samples of tee-shirt artwork worn by people totally oblivious to their meaning:

Some of us had be very careful before buying tee-shirts with Asian writing on them…find out what they really say, before wearing!

Here at Customyourshirt, we love all things “T-Shirt”, and love to see what folks from other countries like to print on their tees. Some of the funniest artwork comes via cross-cultural misunderstanding, particularly between Asia and the West. It’s a matter of “if it looks good, it must be cool”. We’ve collected a few samples of what happens when people don’t understand the text of another language. Some samples are unprintable, so we’ve kept it clean. It makes us wonder what on earth our own shirts actually say, when we buy a shirt with Chinese or Japanese text

Here are just a few samples of what happens when we don’t understand a language, and go off to buy a tee-shirt. Some shirts obviously have blocks of text lifted from books or magazines, and placed artistically on the shirt, without the slightest understanding of the text meaning. …hope you enjoy these, we’ll put some more up later.

Some of our customers like to wear scary stuff on their tee-shirts, and we get some pretty amazing artwork sent in to print. But the message gets kind of lost when the artwork’s all blurry and pixelated, and our Art department often gets called in to re-draw an illustration, and put the SCARY part back in !

This is a sample of the artwork received from one customer recently:

It goes without saying that this kind of artwork presents a real challenge in preparing a new drawing for displaying on one of our great tee-shirts, and usually necessitates a couple of Panadol afterwards too!  Here is the result of our re-draw, and then a sample of what it looked like on a shirt:

Once you’ve had artwork re-created, it remains on our files for future use…in case you want us to dig it out at Halloween, to scare everybody all over again Maybe you’re an aspiring artist, and want to advertise your skills on a shirt, along with your contact details, and maybe a website  URL….our top quality polos and tees are perfect. You’ll also notice that the print sizing maximum for our style of printing is 28cm wide by 36cm high

We can’t say enough about the power of advertising on a T-shirt.  Shirts with logos are “walking billboards” Our amazing range of shirts include everything from girls & guys t-shirts, to hoodies, poloshirts, Hi-Vis shirts, kids tees, and hats, coolers and mousemats. Nothing looks as good as a whole group of company staff wearing the company emblem on a good quality tee-shirt or poloshirt.

Some recent customers have asked us to redraw their company logo, to supply their staff with shirts for customer service. Like many of us, over the years, they’d lost their original artwork, and didn’t know what text font was used in their logo. We were able to come to the rescue, and completely recreate their logo, set up a print template, and supply hundreds of shirts. An added bonus was that now their new logo is stored in our database, and accessible for all future printing needs. Here are a couple of samples of great looking company logos we’ve just done:

This logo for Redland Bay Fishing Club was redrawn from a tiny sample sent to us in different colours. The club wanted it to really stand out, so it was printed just in red, and looks really effective. Here’s the sample shirt:

Here’s the small coloured logo we used to recreate the logo:

Another very effective logo just in one colour is the Atari Logo:

Printed on a black T-shirt. So you see, walking billboards have got to be some of the most inexpensive and effective advertising you can use for your company. We hope you will allow us to assist you in growing your business.

Last blog, we talked about the importance of pixels, and the use of high resolution pictures for printing. For those of us who are asking “Well what is a pixel anyway?” it means “picture element”, which is a literal description of what goes together to make a picture. Every picture is made up of tiny square blocks of colour, which go together to make up the whole….invisible to the naked eye, until you zoom into the picture and look up really close. The more pixels that are packed into a picture, the clearer the picture will be.

If you look at a picture which has a very low count of pixels, you will see the block structures more clearly, and the picture will be blurred and distorted. The edges become very jagged, which makes it impossible to print a nice clear image onto a T-shirt. Below is a sample of the colour blocks of pixels up close:

From looking at this arrangement of colour blocks, it’s impossible to imaging that when zoomed out, it’s actually a picture. Underneath we have a sample of a picture that has been redrawn in Illustrator for a customer’s t-shirt, which is now so packed with pixels, it could be printed onto virtually anything!

Poor resolution affects every aspect of the picture..especially text. Often we receive artwork to print which has text included. Sometimes the actual photograph can be touched up in Photoshop enough to be printed onto a shirt, but the text is another story. Blocky, pixelated text will either need to be redrawn, or replaced in the relevant font. The problem with retyping the text, is often the difficulty in finding some obscure font that has been used, and is not on our system. Unless the customer knows the name of the font, it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. If the picture has been taken from a website, then it will be impossible to know the font name. Trolling through thousands of fonts in an internet font library is time consuming, and often non-productive.

Another result of pixelation we mentioned, is that all around the edge of the artwork will be jagged. Sometimes, if the picture is basically printable, we can draw a line right around the artwork to straighten out that jagged pixel line. Adobe Illustrator has a “pen” tool which is used to draw a vector line around the image, which turns the edge into a very high quality product, packed with pixels, and also preventing colour inside the picture from “bleeding” outside the print zone. Here is an example of this method:

Here is the artwork displayed on a sample proof T-Shirt:

Here is what problem-text looks like when it’s presented to us:

As you can see, it’s not a pretty sight. We at Customyourshirt always endeavour to deliver quality printing, on good quality shirts to our customers, but we can only work with what you send us. Now with more and more people buying high-megapixel digital cameras, more of us are learning the importance of high resolution. Those photographs that we view down at the local Camera Club exhibition, or art gallery have been shot with the highest possible pixel count, and then usually enhanced even more later in a photo editing program. If a photographer takes a picture that doesn’t make the grade, he simply deletes it, as he knows it’s not worth the time and effort to make a passable picture out of a dud!

So keep snapping those photographs customers, and creating those amazing artworks, and send them in to us for printing and advertising your products on our wide range of t-shirts and other products, and always keep your pixel quality in mind.

Our job here at Customyourshirt is to transform your artwork from a pixel-based photograph or drawing into a high quality graphic printed onto your choice of t-shirt, polo shirt, singlet, hoodie etc. We have many different types of  quality shirts available in our online store, with a wide range of colours and sizes.

If the original artwork you send in is nice and clear, your shirt print is going to look fantastic.  If it’s pixelated or fuzzy, often we can re-create your picture or logo and give it new life. This week a customer wanted a full print size drawing of a Transformer on his t-shirt, in white, on a black shirt, with the black background of the picture deleted. Underneath we have a close-up snapshot of a piece of the artwork, showing the fuzziness and unclear lines of the drawing:

As you can see, a blurred picture is an artist’s nightmare! But with great persistence, and a thick pair of glasses, the final drawing was made in Adobe Illustrator, and saved as a vector file, enabling the artwork to be printed at any size on just about anything. Unfortunately, for a T-shirt print, we are restricted to 28cm wide, by 36cm high. Here we have a copy of the finished drawing, and then a picture of what our “Transformed” t-shirt looked like:

Here’s the sample t-shirt:

Most of the artwork we receive for printing on t-shirts are in the format of a  JPG. JPG’s are fine if they’re high quality, and print well. However, often customers send artwork with text already on their picture. The more times a JPG is opened, the more it breaks down, pixel-wise, and text becomes very blurry.  If possible it’s best to just send your artwork without the text, and let our graphic art department know what text you’d like to have printed on your shirt. That way, the text will come up crisp and clear. Here’s a sample of  what lines look like when they become pixelated . Pixels are small square blocks of colour, and as the picture breaks down, the square blocks become more visible, and the text or artwork, hard to view:

See what we mean?  In this case, it’s probably better for you to arrange for our art department to re-draw your graphics for a small extra fee, and in case of text, to re-type it.  You will also notice that as well as the image being pixelated, the white background has become mottled and discoloured.  Normally with a high resolution graphic, we remove the background, letting just the t-shirt background show through. But on a low resolution picture like this, the background can not be removed, and makes for a very scruffy design.

To a T-shirt printer, a graphic artist or a photographer, pixels is what it’s all about. There’s nothing like a good high resolution piece of artwork or photograph to make a t-shirt zing!  If you have a message to get across, or your buddy wants his current girlfriend displayed across his chest, there’s nothing worse than having to stand two inches away from his shirt to get the message!

Thus, the same old problem seems to crop up over and over again when you might see a really cool picture or quote on the Web, and think “I’ll just pull that off the Web,  get it printed on my shirt, and I’ll be the coolest dude around!”….This is where the frustration comes in for the artist or printer, as while your design looks great on the Web, you’re going to need a magnifying glass to see it on your shirt. Pictures for the Web are intentionally kept small in resolution, so they will load and come up quickly when you open a webpage.  By comparison, a good quality piece of artwork would take so long to open, you’d lose interest and go to another site….but that’s the kind of picture which we love to print…one that’s bulging with pixels!

Here’s a sample of a picture recently received from a customer, and what it looks like on a scaled sample of one of our shirts:

As you can see, the artwork looks more like a button to push. After contacting the customer, we received a high resolution picture which we were able to print at our full print size of 28cm wide, which saved the day (and the customer’s pride!):

I’m sure many of you remember the joy of getting a brand new sketch book when you were young…the potential was endless for creating a masterpiece on the clean blank page. Today there are so many more ways you can create and display your ideas and artwork….from the humble sketchbook, to web pages, cups, mousemats, coolers, aprons, caps, and the amazing template afforded by the front and back of a T-shirt. The potential is endless, for advertising your company, announcing your wedding, breakup, birthday, displaying your loved ones’ photos….the only limitations are the laws of decency, and the maximum print size for your shirt!

In the next few  postings we’ve included a few examples of  customers’ creations and ideas, and how they will appear  printed onto a shirt.

And this is how this artwork appeared on the t-shirt, printed at 22cm wide: