[Badly]

We are sarting a new Tattoo inspried/aggressive T-Shirt line. All our artwork is hand drawn on paper by a tattoo artist who does not know how to use Adobe Illustrator.

Do the drawings need to be entirely redrawn in Illustrator?....or can we just scan them into an Illustrator file to provide to a screen printing company? If so, what kind of scanner do we need to use? We are making jumbo and all-over print style designs and shirts.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[danarkett]

yes, it needs to be scanned and re-drawn in Illustrator or photoshop (depends on the artwork).

if the artwork is simple (meaning the artwork has solid line art WITHOUT gradient and WITHOUT very fine details).... re-draw it in Illlustrator.

if the artwork is little bit fancy (meaning the artwork has some color mixings, has gradiations of color, has lots of fine details, etc)....i'd recommend re-drawing it in Photoshop.

printers will charge artwork setups and touchups fees if your artwork is not printer ready (meaning NOT color separated, NOT the right size when submitted).

 

[CoopersDesignCo]

Depends on if the designs are more than 1 color or not. If they are one color, they can be scanned in, changed to grayscale, and then saved as a bitmap with haltones and screen angles that will work with your printer. If you need help, let me know.

Sent from my DROID3 using T-Shirt Forums

 

[Badly]

yes, it needs to be scanned and re-drawn in Illustrator or photoshop (depends on the artwork).

if the artwork is simple (meaning the artwork has solid line art WITHOUT gradient and WITHOUT very fine details).... re-draw it in Illlustrator.

if the artwork is little bit fancy (meaning the artwork has some color mixings, has gradiations of color, has lots of fine details, etc)....i'd recommend re-drawing it in Photoshop.

printers will charge artwork setups and touchups fees if your artwork is not printer ready (meaning NOT color separated, NOT the right size when submitted).

Really? I was told the exact opposite by a couple other designers? If it was more detailed (Affliction-like) than Illustrator should be used and less detailed, photoshop should be used..

Advise?

 

[CoopersDesignCo]

Photoshop would be needed to add gradients and color mixings effectively for your separations. Illustrator is a vector program, and isn't as effective at creating the aforementioned and is better suited for clean line drawings and spot colors. That's not to say that you can't use Illustrator for those things, but we are speaking in the simplest way to get your hand drawn graphics into a digital format.

 

[kimura-mma]

It depends on the type of details in the artwork. As Danny said, solid line art is best for Illustrator. Gradations and shading would be better in Photoshop.

Chances are, you will get a lot of different opinions on this because there are several ways to re-draw the artwork. And everyone chooses the best way for them based on their artistic skill set and knowledge of the programs.

Your best bet is to find an experienced print shop and discuss with them the best way to set up the artwork. Because in the end, they are the ones printing it.

 

[danarkett]

Really? I was told the exact opposite by a couple other designers? If it was more detailed (Affliction-like) than Illustrator should be used and less detailed, photoshop should be used..

Advise?

the general truth is..... either one works for any kind of design. it's just that one software offers an easier technique than the other software...and....may give a better result than the other.

in "Affliction" kind of design.... i would use Photoshop because of those textures and halftones.....gradients and mixing different colors.

for the "TAPOUT" artwork....pretty simple line art... i would use Illustrator because I like how easy to make line curbs, line shapes, etc. with this software.

 

[ordenta]

Tattoo,

My friend and I are in the same situation you are in. He is a tattoo artist and artist working at a tattoo shop and selling his art/drawings online. Esentially the advice these guys have given you is pretty much spot on. We use both photoshop and illustrator. He uses photoshop for all his fancy paintings/gradients etc. I use illustrator to vectorize his traditional pen and ink drawings which is what illustrator is really best for, especially if you need to make the image a larger size than it was drawn. While I can vectorize his drawings with no problems, sometimes it just doesn't work out right. So that's where photoshop comes in. Illustrator can do some amazing stuff, but there are things photoshop can do better. However, I have gotten pretty good with it and can make his watercolor paintings & pencil sketches look pretty darn good. For the most part we scan his art on normal 8.5x11 scanners. For his large drawings, our local kinkos/fedex center actually has large flatbed scanners. They only charge a few dollars and scan them to our thumb drive for us. It would make sense to go to adobe's website and download a free month trial for photoshop and illustrator to see what they can do and decide if you should buy them or pay someone to help you with the work. The programs aren't cheap, but you will spend more money paying someone to do the work for you. Hope this helps and good luck!

 

[Deathtricity]

One way that has not been mentioned yet, (and I do this with some of my simple one color designs) Draw them in the largest size that will be printed, and Ink them on the paper (no pencil). Put them in photoshop and just erase the stray lines or little dots that are not wanted. (when scanning into the computer just scan it in sections and put it back together in Photoshop. Its a long process but if you cant vector it works and way cheaper then paying for someone to vector. if its two colors or more just draw them full size again and color them. All the printers I have can seperate colors from any jpeg file I have given them. You can Always scale down a piece of art. This is something that held me back alot when starting my designs was thinking everything had to be vector (or in illustrator) I have great designs that sell well that are hand drawn and scanned into photoshop cleaned up and I use them for my screen printing and they have crisp lines. I know most screen printers here will always recommend vector art BUT they can do it with artwork thats as large or larger then the print size.
This is how I do my simple designs but i don't screen print for a living. I just print my own shirts but I am able to live off of it.

 

[ProSeparatorNJ]

Really? I was told the exact opposite by a couple other designers? If it was more detailed (Affliction-like) than Illustrator should be used and less detailed, photoshop should be used..

Advise?

Photoshop is the first stop for scanned art. In Photoshop you would cleanup any unwanted pencil marks and smudges etc. You could stop right there, separate the art and output. Or, you could bring it into Illustrator and vectorize it. Vectorizing it might give it a slightly different look. A lot of people bring it into Illustrator because they are not comfortable in Photoshop. I tend to only go to Illustrator with scanned art because I may want to see what it would look like vectorized. But it's totally unnecessary for processing the art and separating it. Photoshop does it all.