Hey everybody this is Matt with Mikey Designs in silkscreen and I have a quick
tutorial for you today and that tutorial is how to take black-and-white clip art
that either your client has sent you or you found on the web that you want to
use to create some sort of custom t-shirt design for your client and
there's a few steps that you have to take in order to make that happen to
take clipart and to turn it into a piece of screen printed artwork and so let's
start off with this image here what I did is I I just did search for black and
white clipart that's free and since it's Halloween season we'll do something a
little Halloween themed and so here's the piece of art that I want to use
let's say my client wants to use this art and they want to put it on a t-shirt
they want it 10 inches wide and this is what they sent you and if we take a look
at this file here I'm just gonna go ahead and bring it over to photoshop as
you can see that it's a PNG file with the transparent background so the first
thing I would do is I'm just going to go ahead and flatten this image and since
we know what we do know that this is free clipart at least we think this is
just for demonstration purposes so didn't really matter something to get
rid of that real quick now here we are we've got our artwork we flattened it
the next thing I would do is go and turn it to grayscale and the reason for that
is when we save it as a grayscale we're gonna go to save it as a grayscale TIFF
you can bring it into a program such as illustrator and it will allow you to
designate it as any spot color and output it so now that it's we flattened
our image and it's in grayscale what I want to do is make sure that this black
here and this white is truly black-and-white so I'm going to take go
to levels I hit command L or you can go to image adjustments and levels and I'm
gonna take this black selector tool and I'm gonna select what should be 100%
black I'm gonna take the white selector and select what should be 100% white and
I'm gonna hit OK now as I was saying a little earlier I'm going to image size
right here command option I or control for PC users and my client wants the
image 10 inches wide and we're gonna raise it up to 10 inches wide by 300 dpi
you always want to work with 300 dpi at full size and we're gonna hit OK now as
you see when we zoom in you'll notice there's more greyscale shades of gray
here going on and there's also something that happens when you do res up clip art
that that's fairly low res I mean this wasn't high-res by any means you details
such as this here we'll start to get a little bit of jaggedness to it and
that's just one of the effects of rising an image up so we're gonna help this out
by going in here and hitting command I'll bring it up err levels again and
we're gonna take some of these 80 and 70% black and some of these 20 and 30%
grayscale tones here and we're just gonna really kind of compress this now
I'm just bringing this in a little bit more I'm trying to get rid of as much as
the gray as possible so now it's looking pretty good now that we've got this far
I always would recommend to save it as a TIFF TIFF is really great quality image
to work with and when you bring it into a program like illustrator which you'll
see here in a moment you'll be able to change the image to whatever color you
feel like so we're gonna go ahead and say that save this as a tiff and we're
going to include our gray color profile here so we're going to save that and
we're gonna go over to illustrator and we're going to create a new document my
film size is 13 by 19 so we're just gonna hit OK and we're gonna place the
artwork on our artboard and let's see not sure where I saved it so let's go
back and take a look let's save this to the desktop okay and we're gonna bring
this in command shift P we're gonna go to our desktop
there's our artwork I'm gonna bring it in now technically you could just go
ahead and print this just like it is here
and you shouldn't have any problems should have a pre you know be a pretty
clean looking image but let's say your client wants to see what this looks like
in red or blue or whatever so now you're able to take this TIFF and change it to
whatever color you would like and so you could you know take a look and see how
it would appear as different colors what I like to do I'm gonna back up here
a few steps until it's black again what I like to do is take an extra step
further and I like to do an image trace and so once I hit in this trace you'll
notice that these edges are now a lot cleaner I'm gonna hit undo and go back
to its original form you see how it's kind of you zoom in it in on it and you
can see that it we've still got a little bit of greyscale going on here and it
looks jagged so when you do to an image trace the image trace really cleans it
up a lot so I'm pretty happy with this depending
on your image you could go here to your your palette and adjust to kind of
fine-tune it a little bit but for sake of this demonstration I'm happy with
this and next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to hit expand now we've got
ourselves an actual piece of vector artwork okay and we'll be able to scale
this up and down to any size and it won't lose its detail or its definition
it will continue to look great even at ten foot tall one of the things
I like to do next is let's say my client wants to see how this is going to look
on a t-shirt and they want this t-shirt to be black with an orange print just
give me one second here and bring it up with my little t-shirt proof templates
here so I'm gonna put this t-shirt in the middle here and I'm gonna make it
black and I'm gonna send it behind the art now you take a look at this and you
can see that you know obviously you've got white here and you can't just change
it to orange so you're gonna want to go ahead and select this white and then go
to select the same and fill color so that will select all the white and you
can just go ahead and delete that you can't see the artwork right now for this
one you know it's black t-shirts black so now we can change this to whatever
color we want and we'll get a accurate representation of how this is going to
print so now I can send this to my client and they're happy with how it
looks and we're able to portray how this is gonna print on the shirt and we also
have a very clean piece of artwork to work with now that we were past the
proofing part I'm gonna turn this back to black and
make it ten inches wide like we told her customer it's gonna be and now when we
go to print you know you can select this and make sure it's black now when we go
to print and we do our separations it's gonna come out it's black only I'm gonna
back it up a few more steps here let me go ahead and get rid of that and I'm
gonna bring this file back in kind of like I was telling you a little earlier
let's see a desktop there we go like I was telling you a little earlier you can
take this and change with it being a tiff you can change what is black here
to whatever color you want but let's say they want to see how it looks with the
orange when you go to drag it over the black t-shirt you still got your white
box and there's a lot no way to really get rid of it so that's why I really
recommend doing the image trace and just turning it into vector artwork I'd
rather have vector artwork too to work within a pixel image any day so I hope
this has helped screen printers out there even though this is somewhat of a
kind of entry-level tutorial I think this will help some of you guys out
there that are in the advanced stages and maybe this will help you be able to
get your artwork process a little quicker thanks for stopping by and
subscribe to my youtube channel for more awesome videos just like this and we'll
see you later