Today we thought we would give you a little glimpse into the process of getting from a drawing to a shirt-ready design. It’s a question we get from time to time. Since all of our designs pretty much start off as drawings/sketches, there’s a bit of work involved.

I couldn’t really explain our design process even if I tried because it’s always different for each of us. We do usually come up with a few loose ideas for themes/designs and divvy them up. As with any creative process, having some direction helps but sometimes ideas are just born spontaneously and you roll with them. Drawings are sketched out in pencil first and then inked. Solid black lines are a hell of a lot easier to work with on the computer than pencil lines, and are essential when creating an image for silkscreening. I’ll use one of our older designs, Siamese Geisha, as an example.

This is an inked drawing scanned in and ready to be digitally modified/edited. (Crywolf Tip: A cheap solution if you don’t have a scanner is to just take a photo of your drawing with a digital camera). Depending on the design, sometimes we draw them in sections and assemble them digitally. Doing so will allow you to play around with composition. In this case, I drew the geisha head fairly big and ended up having to draw the other parts on separate sheets of paper and scanning them in separately.

At this stage we do some adjustments in Photoshop and Illustrator, smoothing out the lines and maybe even erasing or adding to the drawing if something isn’t working to our liking and we end up with something that is usually pretty close to the final design. This part of the process usually takes longer than it took to do the actual drawing. We collaborate on our designs throughout different stages so what we start out with isn’t always what we end up with. That’s about it! Once a design is finalized it’s easy to play around with colour combinations and test out different options.

The above would have been a 10 colour silkscreen which we would have been insane to print, I was just playin! After colour is added, the file gets separated into layers and ready to print onto acetate. Then we coat the screen, expose the images (which is a whole other process) and then we print your favorite shirt in the world!