20 Tutorials For Creating T-Shirt Designs

May 20th, 2013
Tutorials

This post is a great collection tutorials, which will educate you on how to use Photoshop and illustrator to create unique t-shirt designs. It’s fairly easy to create good designs to use on t-shirts these tutorials will show you several techniques, which will turn you into a master when it comes to creating t-shirt designs.

I hope you enjoy the tutorial round-up and would love for you to share your thoughts in the comments section below or any links to any other good related tutorials we may have missed from the list.

1. How to design a t-shirt on a budget and a tight deadline

Monday morning. You’re walking into work (or in some of your cases, waking up in your undies and walking 10 feet to your desk). You pound some coffee and peruse your inbox. You have a present. One of your regulars needs a t-shirt designed for the band Vomit Whistle, but can’t spend much money. To add to the chaos, they needed it last week so your deadline is within the business day.

2. How to Create a Cute Vector Bear T-Shirt Design

One of the great things about designing with vector shapes is that any design, especially characters, can be developed out of basic shapes, giving a simple and stylized style. Let’s get busy with Adobe Illustrator and design a cute bear character and surrounding scenery in just two colours, ready for use as a cool t-shirt design.

3. How to design an impressive graphic tee in Photoshop

Here at WeGraphics we are working hard on a new project. I can’t reveal too much for the moment, but I can anticipate you that a new awesome t-shirt brand is coming to life…I’m personally designing 10 tee graphics for the first collection and the style is the WeGraphics one: strong, expressive and with a touch of dirty!

4. Super-Slick, Screen Printing Separations with Illustrator

In this tutorial, you will explore the process of taking your design from the screen to the shirt. Specifically, we’ll address one of the biggest headaches for a designer – separating your design for print. The steps in this tutorial will show you how to keep your clients looking good, and your screen-printers sane.

5. How to design a funny Monkey T-Shirt illustration

A few days ago we published a set of tee shirts mock-up templates. Today I gonna show you how to create a nice monkey illustration and how to apply it on a t-shirt of the set. We will use Photoshop tools to modify stock images and work with shadows and color contrasts. Then we will switch to Illustrator to create the vector monkey. Even if the result can appear easy to achieve, I’m sure you will learn some new tricks with this tutorial.

6. Go Media’s Rapid-Fire Illustration Technique

A great tutorial on how to create a t-shirt illustration.

7. How to design your own T-shirt using a nice typography portrait

For this tutorial you can use your own portrait, or the one I took. So, open the portrait jpg and double click the background layer to unlock it and name the layer portrait.

8. “Lady Luck” T-Shirt Illustration

Hey Go Media faithful readers! Time for a sweet new tutorial! I always feel like it’s been WAY too long since I’ve written one of these tutorials. Unfortunately, my schedule doesn’t leave much room for writing these lengthy t-shirt design tutorials. But when my good friend, client, photographer, and all-around great guy Paul Davis from Black Ace Clothing said he was ready to move forward on his “Lady Luck” t-shirt design, I KNEW I just had to document the creation of this design.

9. Design Your Own Graphic Tee in Photoshop

This tutorial is the second installment of a 2 part series on designing graphic tees in Photoshop. If you have not already checked it out, please take a look at Part 1: An In-Depth Look Into the Graphic Tee. As printing technology and methodology improve, designers are given more freedom to push the canvas – in this case a t-shirt – to its limits. Don’t feel like you have to design in your favourite Vector package, Photoshop is a powerful creative tool that can be used to great effect. In today’s tutorial I will demonstrate how you can create a composite t-shirt design from photo assets and basic drawing techniques.

10. CMYK Pattern for T-shirt Printing Using Photoshop

A great tutorial on how to an awesome pattern effect.

11. Create an iconic T-Shirt artwork

As you follow this tutorial, you’ll discover lots of tricks to help you create better art and work faster in Illustrator. You’ll learn how to improve your skills with line art, shading using flat fills and colour techniques for limited palettes (to keep printing costs down.

12. Screen-print effects

Screen printing is a tricky, messy process, but it’s the less than perfect areas that create that distinctive look. Here, regular Derek Lea reveals how to simulate silk-screened imperfections .

13. Separating Colors for Screen Printing

If you are new to screen printing, you may not know where to begin when it comes to getting artwork ready for printing. Separating images into colors is an important step. Luckily Photoshop makes this pretty easy. I am going to show you how in just a few easy steps.

14. Designing Ultra SceneXCore Apparel in Photoshop and Illustrator

Grunge effects are very popular with today’s apparel designers. This tutorial takes you through creating a t-shirt design using vector graphics.

15. Create a Custom T-Shirt Stencil Design

Create a low-cost, low-tech T-shirt using a digitally designed stencil.When low numbers or high expense prevents you from sourcing professionally screenprinted products, you can easily produce a small run of custom T-shirt designs using a good old fashioned stencil technique!

16. Create a Complete Apparel Tech Pack

You may have created stellar photo-realistic mockups and used tons of really cool colors- but none of this means ANYTHING if your screen printer can’t clearly interpret your vision!

17. 4-Color Process Separations In Photoshop

It shows you how to separate a flattened file for four color process in photoshop

18. How To: Create A T-Shirt Stitch Design

We want to take a little more time and create some higher quality posts that illustrate more of what we do and how we do it. Our goal isn’t so much to teach you how to use Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop or any other tool that we incorporate in t-shirt designing. But more to teach you little tips and tricks that can set your t-shirt designs apart. One of our more popular design tricks that we use quite often is creating the stitch look with a screen printing.

19. DIY vintage T-shirts

It’s easy to create authentic collegiate T-shirt designs using a good old-fashioned iron. In this tutorial, illustrator Derek Lea reveals how combining both applications can create stunning results.