T-Shirt Designs

After experiment with the silk screen process and using it to transfer designs onto t shirts i knew that I wanted to make a Batman top, because Batman is a massive iconic image and has alot of top designed based on batman and also because I don't have a batman top myself I thought it would be a good starting point to do a designed with a few colours.

I looked up some images on the web to use for my design an I found this picture.

I like this image because its very detailed and has a alot of detail and its a very dark and gloomy design. But to use this image with alot i would have to remove the shading and leave the outline.

This is the outline i made by importing the image into flash and removed the shading, I decided to only use the head and the shoulder because I there would be to much detail and I wanted to focus more on Batman head then having his whole body.

I decided to add colours but If i used black you wouldn't see the outline, so I looked up images of batman and noticed that he was original blue and grey so i decided to use that colour scheme to make my image look more retro.

This is the image after adding colour onto it, I really like this image with colour because the colour is very blocky and rough which works to my favor.
In order to use this design I had to make it in 3 layers, the outline, blue colour and grey colour but for when i photocopy them i need them to be a solid black so i can get a clear stencil.

Outline Layer

Grey Layer

Blue Layer

My next design I thought of doing was a spiderman design because he's another popular character that appears on t shirts. So i found this image on the web.

I like the look of the image because of the pose and the fact that isn't any shading in it makes it perfect for editing. I just have to add in the webbing into his costume. After importing it into flash like with the batman top I made this image.



Then from this image I broke it up into layers and turned them into black for photocopying purposes.

Outline layer with adding web design

Red Layer

Blue Layer

I returned to the Silkscreen workshop to complete my batman design, the process went very well and it turned out to be a very good result. Unfortunately when it was washed alot of the ink came out and the transfer had faded dramatically so i thought I could reprint the transfer over but that transfer had shrunk in the wash to i couldn't get a perfect fit and this was my end result.

As you can see the reprinted transfer has created a blurry effect, which artistically look pretty good but as a professional product i would consider it a failure as it wouldn't sell. But I released, backtracking through the process of the elephant design that I left it to dry over night before I washed it so i knew my mistake was that I didn't let it fully dry. So I decided to redo the print again onto another top.

This is my second attempt at making the batman design it turned out very well but from detail had been lost through the outline layer due to the ink drying up in the template. But the result has a good vintage look which I liked. To my discover when i came home the elephant top which had been through the wash again had faded once more like so.

This is when I discovered the fact that my mum hand washed the top the first time and did a normal wash the second hence why my batman top faded,wasn't because I didn't leave it to dry long enough it was because the ink comes off when you dont hand wash it. Ive decided that silk screening onto t shirts is a dead end for me, I can create good designs but they wash off, which defeats the point, I can used the silk screening process onto any other item that I don't intend to wash but for t shirt designs i will have to find another process which to make my tops.