Skip to content
Order Processing 10-14 days
Order Processing 10-14 days
Learning New Skills

Learning New Skills

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to work wtih the Step Team at Mark Twain Middle School. I was given the awesome task of taking a beautiful peice of artwork and translating it for a t-shirt. The drawing of the Tiger is detailed and shaded. There is so much attention to detail with this peice of art I wanted to make sure I did it justice. 

Tiger

In order to print the tiger onto a t-shirt it had to be re-created in the digital environment. I I used several different techinigques to accomplish this. I used my iPad Pro with Apple Pencil to trace and re-draw the tiger. I use the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil because it allow me to have a native drawing enviroment for creating digital drawings. 

On the iPad I used Auto Desk Graphic inorder to complete this task. Some of the features I used was brush shape, smoothing, and thickness. Another feature I have used many times is the export feature which allows me to export into several different file formats. This allows me to use the image in a different program. 

After I had completely traced and re-drawn the tiger I exported it to my computer to work in Affinity Designer. I really love using Affinity Designer, it's an easy program to use and has amazing features. 

Tiger Affinity Designer

One of the features I learned how to use was the fill tool. The nose in the original artwork is slightly shaded. I needed to be able to translate the shading into a monochromatic fill. The shirt ink is one color which means there are no options for shading.

I decided to fill in the space with pattern fill. In order to complete that task I created a crosshatch texture and used the fill tool to fill the shape with an image using the image fill tool.

I had never had to really use some of the more advance features of Affinity Designer, such as image fill before this project. After a tutorial and you tube video I knew exactly how to use the feature. I really appreciate that Affinity designer is very straight forward and easy to learn. 

Back Tiger Shirt

After learning how to use the image fill feature, I used it on the "T" on the back of the shirt to fill it with a tiger print. 

This shirt project was challenging and fun to work on. I throughougly enjoyed learning a new set of skills in producing this item. I look forward to using this on future projects. 

I was very happy to hear from the Step Team Coach that the student artist loved how their art looked on the shirt.

Previous article Spring 2017 Capsule Wardrobe Giveaway
Next article Pinterest for the Win!