3 Tips To Prepare Your Artwork For Screen Printing
Graphic t-shirts are becoming more and more popular among consumers. These shirts not only serve a practical purpose, but they also allow a consumer to share their personal sense of style and humor with the world around them.
Designing and selling t-shirts can be a great way for artists to generate extra income. In order to ensure that your design transfers easily during the screen printing process, keep these simple tips in mind.
1. Use Pantone colors in your design.
If your t-shirt design features bold color patterns, you want to be sure that these colors look the same on your screen as they do on a t-shirt. In order to facilitate the color matching process, it's essential that you use Pantone colors in your design.
Pantone patented the PMS (Pantone matching system). This is a color space that is used by a variety of industries to ensure color accuracy. When you design using Pantone colors, your screen printer will be able to create an exact color match when the time to transfer the digital design to an actual t-shirt arrives.
2. Make sure all text is converted to outline form.
The last thing you want is for your screen printer to substitute your carefully designed font for a boring one because the computer used by the screen printer doesn't recognize your custom font. You can avoid this problem by taking the time to convert all of your text to outline form before sending your design to a screen printer.
By making text an outline, any computer opening your design will view the lettering as an image rather than a font. This allows your screen printer to remain true to your original design when creating your custom t-shirts.
3. Design your artwork at actual size.
It can be beneficial to determine how large you want your design to be prior to beginning the design process. Altering the size of a graphic image once it has been produced could result in distortion that makes certain elements unreadable. To avoid this problem, you should generate your t-shirt design at actual size.
Use a ruler to measure the space on a t-shirt that you want your design to occupy. Set these measurements as your design parameters when setting up your digital canvas, and you will be able to ensure consistency between your design and the final image that ends up on a t-shirt at the screen printer.
For more information and tips, contact a local t-shirt designer.