fun-t-shirts – Grim up North Heath

I set up an Etsy shop to sell t shirts some time ago, but I don’t think I’ve given it enough attention. I’ve certainly not blogged about it. There’s a lot of stuff to learn, designing the shirts is the least of it.

My initial idea for designs was to use old patent images from guitars, jet engines and other tech. It took a while to find how to remove background from the pictures so that the prints didn’t have a huge area of white. This would look crap and my t shirts wouldn’t sell.

I found Inkscape to be the easiest app for this. Luckily there’s YouTube videos that show how to do this; the first one I found was in Spanish, which I don’t know (apart from una cerveza, por favor) which confused me, but then I found the same woman’s English version. Hurrah!

There’s a list of peripherals needed for the Etsy shop. I used Canva to design a logo, which I can put in the back of the neck of the t shirts. Then a banner; this had to wait until I’d made some t shirt designs to populate the banner with and learned how to make mock-ups. Again, Canva was the app for that.

Logo for the online shop. I tried to keep it simple and functional.

I spent a chunk of today changing up the logo to make a rotating gif. I’d done this sort of thing with a beer logo so this was a bit easier than it might have been¹. Still took me a couple of hours because I’m only about 100 hours into my Blender learning.

Spinning beer logo, complete with shiny edges.

I took some colour advice from Mrs S and we decided a green background would be good.

Then I uploaded it to Etsy, only to discover that the logo won’t be animated. Bums. Still, I had a decent purple still image instead, which I’ve used for the shop logo.

I had searched for print-on-demand providers, these are companies who will print t-shirts for you as and when they are ordered. I signed up to Gelato, who seemed fine. Other POD suppliers are available and have a different range of items that can be ordered. Not just T-shirts, but sweatshirts, romper suits, hoodies, wall art, mugs, hats and other stuff.

I may do a post on how to get from design to t-shirt and into Etsy, but I may have stretched your patience already. Anyway, the link to the shop is below, and I will do a post about the design of some of the t-shirts.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/HeathWayPrints?ref=seller-platform-mcnav

I followed a tutorial by Polyfjord, which laid out the steps very nicely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zthvZvw-yJE ↩︎

Tag: fun-t-shirts

Etsy shop