In this video we're gonna do something fun. I'm gonna use this spinning wheel
to help me decide what I should be designing on a t-shirt. Let's go!!
Thanks for joining me on this video. My name is Juna with Detour Shirts. I've been
designing and selling t-shirts online since 2005 and I want to give you some techniques
and ideas on what to do if you're stuck designing t-shirts. So you may have run into a roadblock.
That happens all the time and you need some ideas to generate some ideas. So this is an idea
that I thought of that would be fun as well and that is to use a spinning wheel
to help you decide what to design. So i'm gonna go to spinningwheel.com
and i'll show you what i'm talking about so here i am on spinnerwheel.com you can just make your own
i went on redbubble and tried to find like what are the things that people love to buy the most
so we got space in here i got space twice um let me let me edit this uh space it is good
uh now i need another word let's try so you can see this is how it works you can just
add in different words um you know i love ramen so let's i don't think ramen is in here is it in here
no hopefully i don't put ramen in twice and then do ramen
there we go so you can see i can add all kinds of different things sushi records skeletons
a bunch of things that i know that are popular and then we're just going to let the wheels spin and
help us decide what it is i'm going to hide these results here like that and let's give it a spin
here we go this is exciting let's see what we're gonna make a t-shirt about and it is about a sloth
so slots are really good and there's tons of sloth things out there but what we're going to
do is take it one step further we're going to do a mash-up so because we don't want to make it the
same as everybody else we're going to try and mash it up with something else and be something
super original right so let's close this sloth is first second one let's spin it again
sloth and coffee those should work really well i think i can figure out something with a sloth and
coffee and this would be great this can be a good sticker it doesn't have to have any words this is
just a way for you to get your creative juices flowing and you can hit this as many times as
you want if you don't like those two to begin with hit it again i'm just gonna do it this way sloth
and coffee and of course i can do this every time i get stuck or something this is really helpful to
kind of get your brain thinking of what two things to to mash together and you already have
popular items on here hopefully you found things that are popular slots are popular coffee's
popular so we're gonna mash the two together and hopefully people who love sloths and people who
love coffee will like this design if it's designed well so i'm gonna next step is i'm gonna get a
pencil and paper and jot down some ideas on what i could do with coffee and sloth so after getting
coffee and sloth the next thing you would want to do after you get in your two words you're
going to want to draw some ideas so i took a pencil and paper i drew some ideas like this
and take those ideas they can be just really simple sketches and then pick one of those i
usually do about six of them six to nine of them and then i try and figure out which one i like the
best which layout is the best which way i want to the sloth to hold the coffee in this case or
what they are doing there's so many different ways that you can do it and you can look online
for inspiration but don't copy anybody on there actually there were a lot of sloth and coffees
so i had to think of something that i didn't see on there that's one thing you want to do so
to make yours original once you decide what you want to do you can take your design and then
do pencil and paper and draw it just a little bit better doesn't have to be perfect but bigger
and a little more detailed than your little sketch there and then bring it into affinity designer
so you don't have to use a pencil and paper you can use your tablet i just chose not to do a
tablet in this case so that i can show you how to do it on affinity designer and some techniques i
use this way but one advantage of using a tablet is it's already digital so you don't have to scan
it and trace it again so pros and cons if you are used to drawing on paper and pencil
then you might want to do this way if you're more familiar with doing the tablet then do it that way
so here we are in affinity designer you can use any program you want but i use affinity designer
there's a sale on affinity designer by the way right now if uh depending on when you watch this
video but i think it's 50 off right now so if you watching it as this videos uh live or within the
couple weeks of this video i think you'll still be on so go to affinity designer or serif.com
anyway you can use illustrator inkscape [ __ ] whatever you want so i just scanned in
my sketches so you can see this sketch right here is what i did the quick sketch like i told you
i got six designs here the sloth in the cup holding a cup you know front facing on top
of the cup i decided i i like sloths just lying on the branch i see that a lot but i
haven't seen one where he's holding up a cup like this so that's what i'm going to do i've seen a
bunch of these other ones i wanted to do something more original so this is what i did and then of
course being even more original i drew my own so this is something you're going to want to do
to make sure that yours is super original if you have some artistic talent or even if you
think you don't draw in your own style redbubble you'll see so many different styles on redbubble
if you're designing for redbubble and they love artistic work even if the simplest drawings
sell on redbubble just take a look at some really simple slots on there too so here's
just a simple version of my sloth holding a coffee cup right here so once you have your design your
drawn design it can be as detailed as you want or as simple as you want depending on how detailed
it is it could take you longer to trace it my total time doing this took me about two hours
three hours so it does take a while to do this process and again you would save some time if you
already drew it digitally on your tablet because you you would have it and then you can just export
it but what you would have to do next is to trace this so i'll show you how to do it this
is it being traced right here it's really easy all you have to do is come in here i'll zoom in
get my pen tool right here and then click on the lines right and then just drag and you may want
your stroke to be a different size so come in here hit stroke and color if you don't see a stroke you
might not have a color on here you can see this stroke doesn't have a color turn it on and you can
change the size of your stroke bigger or smaller depending on what you like in this example i'm
using 8.5 you don't want to go too thin well you don't actually need an outline sometimes
it can just be the fill right so depending on what you want you may want to outline you may not i'm
going to use outlining mine just so you can see it so that's how you do it you do this around
the whole thing and you can see i did that here already took me a little while to do that and then
after that step the next step you want to do is to fill it in so i'm just filling in the colors here
and you can see i still have the stroke right here but the color is behind it which i filled in so
real easy to do and then just pick the colors that you want so go online find out what color
a sloth is or what color you know a coffee cup is and things like that and then start playing with
colors i tried to use all kinds of browns here so you can see i got lighter and darker browns here
but you can use whatever color you want in fact if you change this to like a a different color it
actually might stand out so if you do something that's not a wood color right like let's say uh
wood's not this color but it may stand out and maybe people like it right so you could come
in here and and change the color like that and and in fact that that contrast um is really nice
too so play around with color this could take a little while just find the colors that you like
the best and then the next step that i do here is i was thinking about where to put text so we know
on t-shirt designs you want to make it a tall rectangle and so i'm thinking about putting
the sloth on the bottom and then have some text on the top here like one thing that i thought
would be fun is to play with this curve here so you see this curve that i i made with the sloth
having his butt up like that is this curve so i can play with that with the text and let me
show you what i'm talking about so right here i'm using this font and it's called watermelon
you can use whatever font you want and then this font right here is good dog plane and the reason
i'm using these fonts is because they're easy to manipulate and when you do it doesn't look too
off let me show you what i mean so i'm going to go in here click on here and hit convert
to curves and now i can ungroup these and start messing with coffee so i can put this down here
you know maybe make this bigger like this and then i can double click on it and move it to the lines
to make it the right shape so i'm going to zoom in just a little bit more so you can see what i mean
grab these points and move them there's not a real cool way easy way to do this that wave
look right that you do on kittle this is the way you would do it on affinity designer is you kind
of would grab the points and move it down and you know you can move this one too same
thing move it down so i did that with all of the letters and this is what happened when i did it
so you can see i followed that right here so this takes a little while but all you do is grab
the points and match it and i did the same thing right here and i changed the wording a little bit
this one says a little slothy i just need some coffee and i have that tall rectangle now and it
works great on white and i use some of that same lines on the coffee because we're talking about
coffee uh here so you can see kind of this is just a technique to kind of make it stand out right
so i like how it turned out i use the same colors i use the black because i use the
black outline you don't have to use a black outline and then i use this color which is
the same color as this the body color now the next thing you want to do is put it on a black t-shirt
so i change the background to black and then the letters to white just so it stands out and
so it's easy to stand out on some other colors so if i had red as the background
right here it still works with the white right and i took out the lines here on the coffee
just so it stands out better um you never know what color you're going to get on white you kind
of do but on the dark colors you don't so i took that out and then i changed the color
on the branch right just to make it stand out better on some darker colors so that's how it
looks like on black and then the nice thing oops i don't want that undo i want the background black
all right so that's what it looks like on a black t-shirt and
gray and all the other colors you can play around with the background colors right
so the next thing i wanted to do is think about stickers so since you already have some art
here you might want to think about making these stickers on redbubble when you go on redbubble
and you look at stickers you might notice that a lot of them are just pictures so think about
that when you're doing this and so just just play with it give yourself some time to think
about what you can do with this picture that you just made this custom design that you made
you can use it not only for t-shirts but use it for stickers so here's one idea that i did
just the design right i think it would do really well because it tells a story already it's a sloth
holding a coffee right everybody gets the idea he's sleepy he needs coffee coffee is gonna help
the next thing um maybe add a little bit of words so i use that coffee right here and
change the words to say i just need coffee and this could make a nice sticker as well
and by playing around with this you can get generate more and more ideas here's another
idea my last idea and this is the one i ended up doing i notice that this has a heart shape
because this is up here and this is up here and they're coming down to a point so it looks like a
heart and sometimes you find these nice things that happen just accidentally coincidentally
and so this worked and i'm gonna put this on redbubble and i'll show you what it looks like
on redbubble on stickers and things like that so here i am on redbubble i named mine sloth loves
coffeeheart and i edited it right now i think i'm gonna put cute sloth love coffee heart and here
are some tags i just found these tags on redbubble when you search for coffee or sloth you know
just real simple like that and then uh description just write the description
of what it is uh maybe it's in a heart so maybe put like this cute sloth is in a heart like that
so uh then i put it on different shirts you can see here just come in here and you can move them
around and pick the different colors it works on some colors but uh i think it will work on
all of them actually with the black outline and everything so that's a great design i put it on
stuff that works the cap didn't work that well so let me show you what i mean so it gets kind of cut
off and then when i get it too small you know maybe that works i can i can leave it but there
are some things that don't work well i don't like it on the all-over prints you can see it makes a
really good sticker though so i'm hoping that this will do well on sticker it's an original
artwork that i did it's a drawing uh this is what an artist would do and this is kind of what
redbubble would i think would promote is original art right and it's a mashup of two things so i'm
getting the sloth people and getting the coffee people to look at this stuff so
and i put a background on it you can pick any background you want to put a red background
to match the heart and let's see i put it on a bunch of things but some of them i didn't
just make sure that you put them on things that make sense and and that fit so um pick and choose
but put them on multiple don't just put it on t-shirts so you can see i have a bunch of these
it works good on the tote bag and everything aprons and when you're done just hit i have
the rights to do this and save your work and that's it you may have to do different sizes
on postcards and things just to make sure that it works on the postcards you don't want that
white outline at least i don't want that white outline on the top and the bottom i'll show you
what i mean when i go down to postcards you can see the postcards don't have it because i
saved a separate file that's the right size so have fun with this this is a great technique to do
use that spinning wheel and find two ideas and mash them together
so that is it for this video hopefully this video is very fun and educational for you you can learn
some of the techniques that i use personally again it takes a long time to do but i think the result
pays for itself because it's an original artwork two things getting mashed up so you're getting
you know in my case the people who love sloth and the people who love coffee
and putting that together so more people are interested in it that's a great way to do it
i'm also going to leave a link to the wheel if you want to use that wheel or make your own
wheel i'll leave a link in the bottom to do it hopefully this video is really helpful for you
if it was make sure to give it a thumbs up and if you're not subscribed to this channel already
hit that subscribe button right there the question of the day for this video is if you
use that wheel what are the two things that you ended up with i would love to hear it uh in the
comments leave that below and if you want to see more design videos on my channel click on these
videos right here and as always guys keep creating and keep learning i'll see you on the next one bye