Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How-To,
and today I'm going to show you how to set up and simplify your artwork if you're going
to be using it for screen printing. Alright, let's get started. [Music]
So, the idea here is to get all of your colors and your fonts and everything like that to be
completely simplified, and the colors should butt up against each other. So,
to do that, we're going to be expanding all the effects, outlining all the fonts, and then
dividing everything with the Pathfinder and then uniting each color. Now, if you have gradients,
you're going to want to change those to just a solid color. You can actually print gradients,
but it's a pretty advanced technique, and I'm not going to show it in this video. So,
this video is really more for just solid colors. Alright, so I've got my design open here in
Illustrator, and I'll start out with the exact size that I want it to be on the shirt. For a
horizontal, sort of almost square design like this, I would do about 11 to 12 inches across,
and I make my artboard - this out here - 15 inches. So, I can hit Shift + O. That'll get
me to my Artboard tool right here, and I want it to be 15 inches right here,
and then however long it needs to be to hold the art. I'll hit V to get back.
Now, I want to go over what my design is made of here. I can toggle back and forth,
hitting Command + Y or Control + Y, to see what I have. Since this is black, I know this
is live text, and to simplify this, I'll need to outline that text. Next, I have this sunset,
and here you can see that it's not as wide, and that's because this is an appearance. So, when
I open my Appearance panel, and I use my group selection to select this piece, you can see it's
all been built here. I've got a fill, a stroke, and then two other strokes underneath it that are
a little bit bigger, and that's why you can see them right here. So, I'll need to expand this all
the way out. You'll notice too that the colors don't continue down here, and that is because,
if I use my V tool, the selection tool, this has been put in a clipping mask, and we'll need to get
rid of that too to prepare it for screen print. Now, something to know about colors. All of my
colors, they're just regular process colors, and when I simplify this, I'll need to change those to
spot colors for screen print. Usually, your screen print company will have a set number of colors,
and you can pick from their color list, and those will generally be spot colors.
Now, first we'll save a copy of the artwork because it's a good idea to keep two copies, the
expanded version, and then the one that's really easy to make changes on. I'll put "exp" at the
end for ‘expanded.’ So, I'm going to open up my Swatches panel, and all these panels, by the way,
if you're not seeing them, they are right under here under Window. So, Swatches is right here.
I'm going to change my view to a List view, and we'll pull this out.
All my colors are in the Swatches panel, but I want them to be global spot colors. So I'm
going to come down here and with everything selected, I'm going to create a new color group.
We're going to choose Convert Process to Global and include swatches for tints,
and we'll say okay. And now we've got this color group, and you'll notice it has a little
triangle next to it, and that means it's a global color. I'm going to double-click it,
and I'll need to change all of these to spot colors, and I'll also rename them.
You'll notice that I have two whites, and actually for this white design,
I'm going to get rid of those eventually, so maybe I'll just leave them for now. Okay,
so now my colors are set up the way I want them to. I want to mention that this is a lot of colors
for a t-shirt design. I do generally think it's a bit overkill to have this many colors.
A lot of companies can only do six maximum, anyway. Now, normally in a T-shirt design,
you're going to want to have a fair bit of shirt show through. So, I'm putting this on a white
shirt. We're not actually going to print any white on here, so this part will be the shirt color,
that little section in here. All these outlines will be the shirt show through,
basically using the shirt color as one of your colors. So, this design actually will only have
five colors printed. And the reason I like to have shirt show through in my designs is because you
don't want a big block of thick ink on your shirt. It's just considered kind of ugly, and it doesn't
feel too comfortable for whoever's going to wear it. Okay, so we're all set up. I'm going to hit
V to get to my selection tool and select the whole thing. And then I'm going to expand this.
We'll come up to Object > Expand Appearance. And then I'll come back up here to Object > Expand.
It'll ask me if I want to do Object, Fill, and Stroke. And we'll say okay.
And then I'm just going to do that a couple more times to make sure I have everything.
Sometimes Illustrator will deselect parts of your art, so you won't actually have everything
selected. So, it's a good idea to just deselect and select everything again and make sure you
only have fills here, no strokes. That's one big part of the process, is making sure everything
is a fill. The next step is to break everything apart. We've got a lot of overlapping colors here.
We've got white overlapping this white. We've got some of the reds here overlapping, and we
don't want that. So, with everything selected, go to your Pathfinder window and choose the Divide
Pathfinder. And now, all these pieces, even though they look like they're overlapping, so if I use my
group selection tool, this one right up here, and click and drag a piece, you can see that it's all
broken up. I'm going to undo to put those back. And so now we want to take all the pieces that are
the same color and unite them so they'll be one shape. And that is the goal. We want each color
to butt up exactly against another color. So, I'll start with dark gray. Using my group selection
tool, I'll select something that's dark gray. And then I'm going to go to Select > Same Fill Color
and come down here to Pathfinder and unite it with the first shape mode.
And then I'll hide it with Command + 3 or Control + 3. So, now dark gray is out of our way. Next,
I'll choose the light red. And I've actually got keyboard shortcuts set up for this. I
use Shift + Command + F to do Select > Same Fill Color. If you want to set up a keyboard
shortcut for this, you can go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts and menu commands. And then select and
same and fill color, click in here, and then type the keyboard shortcut you want.
Try to find one that's not being used by something else if you are using that often.
Okay, so I'm going to Select Same Fill Color, so I'll hit Shift + Command + F, Select Same Fill
Color, and then I'll come over here to Pathfinder, go to my first shape mode, Unite, and then hide it
with Command + 3 or Control + 3. And I'll go ahead and do that with all of the rest of the colors,
and this white color I don't want, I'm just going to hit Delete.
The blue color I do, though, so I'll Pathfinder Unite it and hide it.
And now if we hit Command + Y or Control + Y, we can see what's left. We've got
the shape of that mask, we've got a bunch of paths that are no fill and no stroke,
but I don't need any of this. I've got all the colors that I'm going to be using already united
and hidden. So I can use my group selection and draw a box around everything. We can see that it's
a mix of probably these two whites and no-fill and no-stroke paths. So I'm just going to hit Delete
on my keyboard and get rid of all that. I'll hit Command + Y or Control + Y to get back. And
then I'm going to go to Object > Show All. That's Option + Command + 3 or Alt + Control + 3 on a PC.
Okay, so now we have all of our pieces. Now you'll notice if we zoom in really close here, I have
this little tiny piece of blue, and I don't really like things like this in my art. So I'm just going
to use my group selection to select it and delete it. It just makes it look a little cleaner if you
get rid of those tiny pieces, if removing them doesn't hurt the look of the artwork.
Now when you're handing off a file, it's a good idea to clean up your Swatches. So
I'm going to come over here to the flyout and choose Select All Unused. And this looks good,
I'll delete swatches and say yes, so the only ones that are left are the ones in our artwork.
Now I want to show you something cool about Global Colors. If I double click the dark gray and let's
say I just want to change this to maybe a darker green, I can change my swatch, say okay, and it'll
update automatically everywhere it exists in your artwork. And that is the really nice thing about
Global Colors. Now if you give this to a screen printing company, they should be able to work
with this file perfectly. But if you're working at home and you're finding it hard to line up,
you know, the blue exactly next to the gray, you can add a spread to this. You'll be adding a very
thin outline to some of these shapes so that when you print, you don't have to get the registration
exactly right. I'm going to select all the blue pieces, I don't need this one though, so I'm
going to hold Shift and deselect it. So now I've got all of these little blue pieces. I'm going
to send them to the back with Shift + Command + Left Bracket, that's Shift + Control + Left
Bracket on a PC. We can also go to Object > Arrange > Send to Back right here. With
the light blue pieces I've selected, I'm going to add a 1.1 Point Offset Path. So to do that,
I'll come up here to Effect > Path > Offset Path. And I'm going to add a 1.1 Point path here. And if
you just enter 1.1 point and you're already set up in inches, it'll automatically switch to inches,
which is just fine. I'm going to leave my joins at Miter and my Miter Limit at 4. We'll click
Preview. This is such a tiny little offset that's not going to show up very well when we're this
zoomed out. But I'll say okay, and then I'll hit Z and zoom in really close here. And now you can
see what's going on with that. If I select this gray and I change my opacity to 50, that little
blue spread underneath, it's going underneath the gray. So when you're printing these two colors,
you have less of a chance of getting something like this, where you don't get them exactly
lined up and there's a white line between them. And you can see here we've got the same thing
going on around each of these blue pieces. Let me put this back at 100 percent. Now since we added
an appearance, we will need to expand this. So I'm going to go up to Object > Expand Appearance,
and now you can see it goes all the way out to the edge there. We'll go ahead and we'll
Pathfinder > Unite this again, and then we'll have some cleanup to do because we're getting
the effect we want right here, but we don't want these pieces to go below this bottom edge here.
So to fix these, I'll hit A on my keyboard, I'll deselect everything, and then I'll get
right on that edge and just pull it up, and then I'll come over here and do the same thing.
The miters did a strange thing here, so I'm going to use my Pencil Tool by hitting N on my keyboard.
That is right over here in your tool panel. And the way the Pencil Tool works is you have
to start going on one part of the line and then continue and end up going the same direction.
So we can't go backward like this. We have to go this way and then go down like this.
And somehow we managed to get a little tiny line here. I'm trying to check what that is.
Okay, I'm going to just pull this down to get rid of that. And I'll hit Shift+M,
which is my Shape Builder, and hold Option or Alt so I can just delete that piece. And now
I've brought back my blue, which I hid a minute ago, and now I'm just deleting some points so
this lines up a little better over here. If we hit Command+Y or Control+Y, we have an overlap
right here where the two colors will be able to register a little better. So that's how Spread
works. When I used to work at a t-shirt company, we didn't use Spread or Overlap at all with our
colors because our printers are really, really good with their registration, but we did use Choke
for a white base, and I'll show you that next. Okay, so then we'll save this and it's ready to
go to a screen printer. Or, if you do your screen printing yourself, you're ready to make screens.
Okay, I'm going to close this one now. I'm going to show you the same design on a black shirt. This
one has an extra step because when you print light colors on black shirts, you need a layer of white
under all your colors. So that can be called like a white underlay or a white base. When
you're setting that up, you'll want to go through the exact same process. Select your art only. I'm
going to lock my background. I'll select my art only, I'm going to expand really quick, and then
I'll divide everything. I'll get all my colors the way they should be by uniting each one. Oops.
And then I'll delete all the other stuff in there. Now, I'm not going to go through the process
of setting these up as spot colors, but I want to show you how the white base works.
The first step is to select your artwork, copy it, and then hide it. And then paste behind with
Command + B or Ctrl + B. So I have this version of the artwork, which is exactly the same as the one
I hid, and they're right in the exact same place. So now I'm going to unite this whole design by
going to my pathfinder and doing the first shape mode. And it changed it all to red. I think it
kind of goes off the top color or something like that. But I'm going to change everything to white
for the white underlay, and for the choke, we're going to offset the path at a negative number.
We'll go to Effect > Path > Offset Path, and we're going to offset it at minus 0.5 points,
and that comes to 0.0069 inches. For the joins, we want this to be rounded, and then I'll say okay.
When we zoom in, you can see the choke that's happened.
And now we need to expand this, so Shift + Command + E or Shift + Control + E. And then
Command + E or Control + E. And honestly, this little line here is not a good thing
to have in here. I'm just going to fix it by clicking on this point with my A tool,
dragging it down, and then doing the same over on the other side.
And the reason it's like that is because those two are not butting perfectly,
and that's not a good thing. I'll go ahead and select those two pieces and then unite them.
Okay, so we have our white underlay, and now I can bring back the top piece with
Option + Command + 3 or Alt + Control + 3. Now, this one's a group, and if I click and drag,
you can see that white underlay underneath it. I'm going to go ahead and knock the
opacity down to 50%. And then when we get right on the edge of things,
you can see that white base underneath our 50% one. So when we're using the screens,
if we don't get it lined perfectly on that white base, we're still good. At least we
have that much give before it starts showing the underlay. Let me put that back up at 100.
So those are all the steps that I used to go through when I worked at a t-shirt company
to simplify my designs for screen print. All right, I hope this video was helpful
for you. If you have questions or comments still, please leave those in the Comments section below,
and I'll see you next week with another graphic design video. Thank you!!