Glass Cloud

Smokey

Vultures

Echoes

Moonlighting

The Vintage Friend

Mussl

Admiral's Arms

Rugged Saw

Damn

Reposted with permission from www.sleepydan.com

After the inauguration at Artopia for the t shirt battle with Fur Face Boy, the Pillow Monster design has been getting great reviews. Dallas Observer sponsors this annual event as their birthday party and I was proud to have their help bringing the Pillow Monster Lightning Strike design to life in the true nature of Frankenstein! So continuing with the success of the Behind the Design column for Hide Your Arms, I decided to share the whole design process for this new character. The Pillow Monster will be involved in another design this coming year, so I am going to show how the idea began from concept, then sketching, then inking the layout, then vector the art for production of the printing.

The first step of the process is creating the concept. The Sleepy Dan branding has been so much fun to design for because there is a wide range of possible ideas that fall in line with the sleep theme. The Alarm Clock character was the beginning of the character side of the branding, reminding fans of our youthful side that used to be afraid of the dark and the possibility of things coming to life when you are unable to see them… Remember the clown doll from Poltergeist under the bed? Thanks, now I can’t even look at clowns any more!

Illustrating a complete character design for the brand, is a more complex project than people realize. But it’s the passion for the brand that keeps me going! Pencil sketching the concept takes several attempts to get the look right. Keeping in mind that the design needs to have more of a vertical layout to take advantage of the printable surface area of the shirt.

Making friends in the arts community is easy when you are giving back at the same time. Having friends with ill skills like Rico Ultraelectromagnetico to help with the character style, was the first step to the Pillow Monster. I want all my characters to have the same appearance so they are easily understood to be a Sleepy Dan character, even if the design has no displayed type.

After making several sketches, better parts of the character will be remade in the next sketch. There is a constant improvement for the problem areas, till the whole design has the perfect layout. This is the fun part of the process but usually takes the longest, so you can’t get frustrated with levels of failure. Just gotta work thru them till you find successful revisions. Ask friends for constructive criticism, you have to learn to take the good advice with the bad, create a thick skin for necessary revisions cause this is the best time to make them…

I am sharing less than half of the sketching process for this project, so you can understand there are so many versions of progression for this design you can almost look at them like a flip book! Eventually you get to a sketched layout that best suits your concept vision from the start. All parts suddenly fit perfectly into place, then you can move onto revising the smaller details thru the inking process and using Adobe Photoshop.

Inking over the sketch allows you to see a clearer design layout, while creating deeper levels of detail. Usually after the first inking designs, you are confident to almost be there. But treat this stage just like the sketching stage, revision is still easily done now that details are clear, so get some more constructive criticism from your friends that you know will not leak the secret just yet…

Making final inking revisions gives you goosebumps! You wind up staring at the design for a couple days, 30 minutes at a time to make sure there is nothing else that needs to be changed. Then you can decide how many colors you want this design to be printed with, then create color layers of detail for the character scene. Inking new layers can be done in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, I prefer to use Illustrator because it makes the color separation so much easier to manipulate and revise.

Usually I start this stage, not by looking at the color I want, rather looking at the color details I want to involve, so use crazy contrasting colors… The Pantone colors used can be revised after the levels of detail are finished. The best way to decide colors of the print is to decide shirt color first. Figure out the background color of the design, then the character colors can easily be picked knowing what shirt trends are most successful. Research shirt brands over the web, see what colors are selling best for the season. You’d be surprised what a little research can tell you!

Printing shirts for your brand in this economy means planning out the profitability of the design. The more color you print, the more the shirt will cost, and shirts just don’t sell well the closer to $30 each you get. I advise to keep even the most complex designs to a maximum of four printed colors. There is no reason for you to use more color than that, also fans will have a harder time matching up their gear to the shirt, secretly all guys love to do this…

Any printer you use, will appreciate you color separating the art before you give to them. This means separating each color, so the printer knows what colors to put on each film layer they print, which will be used to make screens for your printing. Remove the questions from the process for the printer and your project will turn out the same way you give it to them. I prefer to have a design with the darkest color as the top detail. It’s easiest for the printing process to have the color layers beneath the darkest layer, that way the bottom layer edged are covered with the darker layer, insuring there will be no offset printing problems.

Give the printer the exact Pantone colors you want used in your design, they will be mixing ink to match the Pantone colors you give them. If you don’t give them exact colors, then you are opening the possibility they will not mix the right color you want to use. For the Pillow Monster design, I had to see the shirt color to pick printing colors since there is one tonal color specified in the shirt. The print might have looked weird if the navy color was too much of a red tone rather than a blue tone…

After the Artopia event, the extra shirts were added to the Sleepy Dan web shop. Check out the Artopia event blog posting and friends links on the posting to see lots of pics of the event! Maybe we will see you at Artopia 2012?

check out Sleepy Dan:
www.sleepydan.com
www.sleepydan.bigcartel.com
www.facebook.com/sleepydanbrand
www.twitter.com/sleepydanbrand

Check out the pics below.

Using a t-square to place film straight on screen and at proper height

Taking a break while exposed screen dries.

Registering Press

Printing Tee

Checking print quality to make sure every halftone printed out

Boom!

check out Sleepy Dan:
www.sleepydan.com
www.sleepydan.bigcartel.com
www.facebook.com/sleepydanbrand
www.twitter.com/sleepydanbrand

To make sure the correct fonts get printed you will need to rasterize your text layer in Photoshop or convert your text layer to outlines in Illustrator.

For this example I will be using Photoshop CS3 & Illustrator CS3

PHOTOSHOP CS3

1.  Below is an example of text created in photoshop.  If you look at the Layers Window, you will notice that our text layer still has the “T” thumbnail meaning that the layer is still in text mode.  

2.  With the text layer still selected, right-click on the text layer to reveal a pop-up menu.  Scroll down to “Rasterize Type” and click on this option.

3.You’ll notice that the “T” thumbnail converts to a standard raster thumbnail.  and that’s it!  Your text has now been rasterized.  Since Photoshop is not a vector based program and you have just rasterized your text, remember that you should not resize your text anymore at this point.  Trying to scale your rasterized layer up will cause it to pixelate horribly.

Illustrator CS3

1.  Below we have the same setup as in our Photoshop example except in Illustrator.

2. This time, instead of right clicking on the text layer in the Layers Window, you will want to right click directly on the text itself.  Again, a pop-up window displays several options.  Scroll down to “Create Outlines” and left click.

3. Illustrator will now have converted your text layer into vector outlines.  Contrary to Photoshop, however, you can resize this text as much as you want since it is vectorized and will suffer no quality loss.

Simple enough?  Thought so.  Post any questions you may have in the comments section below.

Here are some for the week of November 28th – December 5th

Suicide Silence

Own The Night Crest

Kreator

Modern Rebellion

The Knight Rider

Only Paper

Battle Royale

Skull of Art

Chop Shop

The Gaslight Anthem

The hoodie specials continue this week, however, we’ve added a zip up option and dropped the prices even more!
Just like all our weekly specials there are no setup fees and no oversize print fees.

Contact us via email at info@alexamachine.com or call us at 214.503.0570

1. John from Captain Greedi used our 13×16 Standard Print Template to place his artwork file, a great way to make sure your artwork fits within our printing bounds.  He placed his artwork in the Your Artwork Here layer and used the Tshirt Color swatches to pick his tshirt background color of black.

To start off, we’re first gonna “hide” the Artwork Bounds layer so that it is not disturbing while we work.

Artwork placed inside our Standard Printing Template

2. Second, since John’s artwork has two total print colors, we’re going to create a duplicate layer of the artwork.  At this point, we’re also going to label each layer their respective colors.  Later on we will assign them actual pantone color codes.

Creating a duplicate layer and naming layers their respective colors.

3. Now we’ll select our first layer, in this case the Yellow/Gold layer, and using the Wand tool (with Contiguous unchecked) we’re gonna select a yellow part of the artwork.  For solid spot colors like the example designs, a tolerance of 60%-100% will generally work well to capture all the parts of the artwork that are, in this case, yellow.  If you have two colors that are pretty close, like let’s say a gold/yellow and a mustard/yellow, you’ll want to decrease the tolerance level to below 50% to make sure that photoshop doesn’t clump both colors in the same selection path.

Selecting first layer to color separate.

When selected with the wand tool set to 70%.

4.What you want to get rid of is all the color information that is not in the selection path encompassed around our yellow, so we invert the selection path (cmmnd+shft+i on mac) so that everything that isn’t yellow on our artboard is selected, and we simply hit the delete button.  What we are left with is a layer that only contains yellow color info.

5.  We’re going to repeat the process on the blue layer so that we are left with the example below.

6.  At this point, we’re basically done.  We just need to decide on a pantone color to match our ink to and name the layer that.  John did not want this artwork printed with a white base, which on a dark garment, will keep the shirt color from bleeding through the ink color.  By not printing a white base we 1)are able to make each print nice and thin, and 2)each print comes out with a “vintage” feel to it.  Many colors are not as vibrant when printed on a dark garment with no white base coat thus the “vintage” feel.  To print vibrant colors on dark garments, we have to print a white base underneath all colors.  It’s like putting a white primer on your wall before applying a new color to your wall.  Even though John did not request a white base coat, I’m going to show you how we create our white base layers.

7. We’re first going to select all the layers that make up the full artwork, in this case both our yellow and our blue layers, by holding down the shift key while selection our two layers in the layer box.  Next, we duplicate and combine our two layers into one.  Name this layer White Base, and move it down below all the other layers like in the example below.

8.  Using either the Paint Bucket tool, or layer options, we’ll color our White Base layer white.  At this point we need to decrease our white base by 2 pixels.  We do this by right clicking on the White Base layer icon and clicking on Select Pixels, creating a selection path around our White Base layer.  Next we go to Select>Modify>Contract and insert a 2 in the option box.  This will feather, or decrease the selection path by 2 pixels.  Again, we invert the selection path by typing shift+cmmnd+i and hit delete.  The reason we do this is because we have to make sure that the colors being printed on top completely cover the white area and by reducing the white base by 2 pixels we make sure there is a slight, yet unnoticeable, overlap.

9. Last thing that is left is to name our layers the appropriate pantone colors and to save our work. This artwork has finally been separated and is ready to have the films printed straight from the file.