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I am more of an airbrush artist than a big shirt printer but I do need some guidance. I have been asked to airbrush a design for someone's company convention. Not a big problem however he may be looking to mass produce them (possibly several thousand). He has checkedinto the possibility of screen printing and he was told the design is too complex to effectively screen print. I told him heat transfer may be an option. Do you all know of a way to take an existing t-shirt, somehow get the design into a computer file so that I could use heat transfer methods? Or is there some other way?
you could airbrush the design on a flat material... and scan it into a computer... then clean it up in illustrator/photoshop... Illustrator and photoshop have airbrush brushes also... you could do the design in these programs... Im not an airbrush artist if you couldnt tell...lol
Dear Carl- Our business is 60% airbrush, 35% dtg, and 5% dye sub and iron ons. Of course, we too would love to replicate special airbrush designs, and have done all of the above with mostly sad results. It is really, really, really hard to duplicate the subtleties of the brush or even the colors. That said, we have found that we must create with the brush, bearing in mind the intension, method, and limitations of the duplication. In other words, if the duplication method will not not bear the reproduction of the over sprays, then your design must be tighter, with the brush much closer to the surface. If you can not do this, then the method of reproduction must change. This is very hard to do and requires experience that loops from end product to brush to end product until the two match.
For jobs of 30 or so we will photograph the brushwork, define the tonal range in say photoshop, and print the design weakly so that it can be finished with a brush in 1/4 the usual time. But after 30 or so this gets so tedious that no amount of money can make it worth your sanity.
We have also just sold the design and said go ahead and make as many as you want. We have done this several times and never seen a duplication of the artwork although a good effort was made by the customers to try to do so.
We have also used a digital airbrush in painter and that worked quite well. That combo is painter, a wacom tablet, the stylus as brush, and 3 months to figure out how to do it.
So good luck, give it a try, but do not obsess. The nature of the art is one of 's any how.
The camera sees everything, including the texture of the fabric, the highlights of the weave which our eye dismisses, and micro flare from the paint which the eye also dismisses. All of these are really hard to correct in editing software. If I really want to work at it, cross polarized lighting helps a great deal, but there is a real gain in contrast. Airbrushing on a big sheet of water color paper helps. Color is another issue, and all we go for is pleasant interpretation of the original which sometimes strays quite a bit, but usually we still think it's nice enough and will accept it if those colors still speak the same artistic message.
So, again I wandered too much. Do what we do, take the best photo you can, clean up the whites, or just make the backround go away, and print DTG ( we own a old t-jet ). You only need to do one to see if it will work. If not, try again, then decide if its worth it. If you can farm this out to 'any old contactdtg.com' and get the results you need from one print, 500 will be no problem, but you can not know without trying, and no one can tell any different. I guess I should also say that screen printing can replicate an airbrush design in black and white and you've certainly seen it in the 'scarface' and mobsta shirts. good luck, sorry for digressing into something that has amused me for years.
We actually were developing a system for an airbrusher to create and design then it would regenerate it using a spaying system. We didnt get alot of interest and we put the project on the back shelf. If this is a large enough project we could look to do it again.
If they're doing several thousand of the same design, and on white shirts, airbrush the design on paper, & find yourself a reputable 4-color process printer. Usually, when someone says "it can't be done," it really means "I don't want to do it." there are plenty of good process printers out there, and if the design is really detailed, look around until you find someone who can print at 85 line. If they know what they're doing, they'll also know how to get the original scanned & into a format they can work with.
Method for replicating an airbrush design? 
Re: Method for replicating an airbrush design? 
