How to print your own t-shirts?
First thing is: you need to know how to prepare your design for t-shirt printing.
Then you need to decide what printing method you want to print.
Actually you should think about this while designing your design.
As you may want to silkscreen your design or you may want to use vinyl transfer printing or you may just want to make a simple colour transfer print or a detailed Direct to garment (DTG) print.
If you choose to silkscreen your design, you can tackle it two ways.
1: Use spot colours in your design
If you create your design with minimal colours you can use spot colour printing or vinyl tshirt printing. for example you use only Red/Grey/Yellow
cool sports t-shirt printed with spot colours..
2: Design in full colour and print using the CMYK method..
(imagine your personal printer at home you use to print your documents, with only 4 colours you can make over a million shades…)
How-ever IF your going to print your design on a dark colour T-shirt, you will need to print using CMYK(W) white – you need a white under base.. check out this cool video on DTG t shirt printing, it shows how a white unde base is printed first, then colour ontop.
again think about your printer at home: if you put a black piece of paper through the printer and printed anything with colour it would not come out…
Same goes with Silkscreening / t shirt printing onto dark garments, you need a white under base..
Direct to garment tshirt print / silkscreen t-shirt print
Preparing your design: When you design, decide if you want spot colour or full colour…
If your designing in a vector program, make sure you use CMYK colours.
The Best vector program to use is Adobe illustrator
Same goes for any other program you use, make sure your design is in CMYK colours.
Question> how to setup CMYK?> here is some videos…
If you design in RGB colours the print will not look the same as when printed.
RGB colours are for screen usage only, you can print RGB colours.
Make your design ‘SET to SIZE’
You can’t get an image off the net and expect it to be print ready for a t-shirt printing company. NO..
and image off the net will be in RGB, will be small and not set to size and if you do print it , it will come out pixelated..
You need to print High quality image to get a high quality print….
The Best thing to do is hire a professional tshirt designer, contact Guy Tasker at tshirtdesigner.co.za
