Get advice to help you create your t-shirt graphics. Discuss t-shirt design software, special effect techniques, or other topics related to creating a t-shirt design on your computer. If you'd rather hire a graphic designer to do the work for you, please post in our Referrals and Recommendations section here.
I need some help with creating the popular faded/grunged/distressed print. I've created my own textures in photoshop, brought them into illustrator, live traced them, make them the color of the shirt and overlayed them on top of the design. This worked fine and i had some shirts printed. However, this is not the effect i really want. Creating shirts this way gives me hard edges, not what i want. I want to sill see some of the design. For example, some of the design is more apparent while some parts are "faded" and maybe some parts aren't printed at all. I dont think its possible to achieve this in illustrator. If it is please tell me. Can I create the art in illustrator, bring it back to photoshop, use the distress with the soft edges, and submit the file as a jpeg?
The trick i use is. I print the image out on a lazer printer (for some reason it works better) and then i crumble it up into a ball. and then flaten it out and scan it back into the comp. It gives it a nice effect and you have some control over how crazy you want it. Hope it helps it always seems to do ok by me.
sounds like a good idea, but do i get hard edges or soft edges. do i use photoshop and create jpegs or use illustrator. do you have an example or a shirt you've done like this.
With printing it out and scaning it in, i feel it gives you a more natural effect than a filter, and it depends on how much you do to the print out (if you really destroy it ) its harder edges. It more natural when burnt onto a screen. Rather than a vector with real hard lines and no transition.
I would agree. My trashed designs turn out great just using photoshop.
What if i took distress overlay into illustrator, laid if over the artwork, and set it to about 70%, then took a different distress screen and put that at about 30%. would that give me some opaque parts, transparent parts, and some faint parts of the artwork? id like to avoid the halftone look
I agree that the laser printing helps with grunge/distressing. It also helps if you use an old printer since it will give you more random spots. You can still take it into illustrator if you want. I usually just convert my raster/distressed art to bitmap in photoshop at 100% and then place it in illustrator and submit to the printer in eps format. It's just easier for me this way. You can easily resize and change colors of the placed bitmaps within illustrator. Don't layer different distressed effects in illustrator though. Get it how you want it in photoshop first so that you have your print color all in one layer. Im pretty sure the bitmap/eps files are a lot smaller too... so easier to send to the printer than a raster tif, psd, or pdf.
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I just printed out design, crumpled it, scanned in and printed on velum. Looks like it will work great! Anxious to get it screen printed -- Thanks for the tip Jamas.
I agree that the laser printing helps with grunge/distressing. It also helps if you use an old printer since it will give you more random spots. You can still take it into illustrator if you want. I usually just convert my raster/distressed art to bitmap in photoshop at 100% and then place it in illustrator and submit to the printer in eps format. It's just easier for me this way. You can easily resize and change colors of the placed bitmaps within illustrator. Don't layer different distressed effects in illustrator though. Get it how you want it in photoshop first so that you have your print color all in one layer. Im pretty sure the bitmap/eps files are a lot smaller too... so easier to send to the printer than a raster tif, psd, or pdf.
Does this method leave you with soft edges when you get your shirt printed or are there halftones where the edges fade. what ive seen on some shirts looks like the paint of the art is just barely touched on some parts of the shirt(sort of like it is in the cracks of the fabric) and i dont see how these minute details can pass through a screen. i asked our printer and he said they have to "pass" over a design a few times so im thinking these faded parts are created by only "passing" over the screen once or twice and then using a different screen with distressed overlay to fill in solid bits but still leave the other faded sections. Does this make sense?
Yes it did leave me with soft edges. And it looks like the paint has barely touched on some parts. Any soft edges or gray values can only be printed using halftones. Thats just how screenprinting works. They don't necessarily need to be huge obvious circles like you may be thinking of. I'm a graphic designer so I just set files up as if I were printing on paper and If I were screen printing a poster this is what I would do. I'm sure there are some specific t-shirt printing tricks but I think overall the same rules should apply as with paper printing.
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Distressing/Grunge/Fade Shirt Artwork 
