How to Create a T Shirt Design with Procreate^®

We’ve created a quick demonstration of how to create a t shirt design for screen printing using the Procreate app for iPad.

There are lots of ways to create artwork with the deceptively simple app interface, but the methods listed below are a good example for creating a straight-forward and effective t shirt design.

Table of Contents:

• Starting Tips
• Setting Up Your Canvas
• Roughing Out Your Design
• Laying Down the Linework
• Adding Colour to Your Design
• Exporting Your T Shirt Design
• Sending Your Design to a Printer

Managing Your Progress

Undo – Tap the screen with two fingers.
Redo – Tap the screen with three fingers.

It’s important to note that once you close the drawing you are working on, you cannot undo anything. This doesn’t apply to closing the app, but running it in the background on your iPad. It’s a good idea to save stages of the design as PNG files/duplicate procreate files as you go along just in case!

Create a New Canvas

First, create your canvas so that it is at the size that you would like the design printed at. Do this by tapping the Plus icon in the top right of the screen and then the New Canvas icon at the very top right (see below).

For our t shirt design, we want to create a canvas at 27cm wide x 35cm high. This is a comfortable work area that fits across most commonly requested garments and sizes. You can find out more about max screen printing areas in our resources.

We also want to set the canvas to 600dpi to get a nice high resolution. Screen printing artwork should be a minimum of 300dpi – but the higher the better!

It’s always a good idea to go bigger than you need, as it allows more room to manoeuvre in case the art does need upscaling later.

Using Brushes and Other Tools

You can select a colour from the palette tab in the top right hand corner of the screen (the dot).

Brushes are selected from the brush icon a little to the left. For roughing out the design, we like to use one of the pencil brushes.

The rubber/eraser tool is two tabs to the right of the brush tab for when you need it. For this initial draft, it’s not important for the concept to be perfection. Save that for the line work.

As mentioned before, you can tap the screen with two fingers to undo an action (and tap with three fingers to redo).

Choosing a Good Brush for Printing

An important thing to bear in mind is how well the brush you choose will lend itself to screen printing.

For example, a very textured brush may complicate your print, as it will require halftoning or additional print colours. A solid, hard edged brush will lend itself better to screen printing. Distressed brushes are also fine if they’re high contrast without midtones.

Try to avoid having any important lines or negative space that is too thin. Lines or gaps narrower than 0.5mm are in danger of getting lost or filling in.

Duplicate Your Layer

First, it’s recommended to duplicate the layer – this is pretty important incase you end up deciding colour isn’t for you. To do this, open the Layers tab, swipe the trace layer left and tap duplicate.

Now tap the Colours tab icon to close this colour menu. To fill an area with a colour, tap and drag the Colour icon / dot to the area that you would like filled with the selected colour. Then release your finger to fill the area with colour.

Block colours are your friend in screen printing. Solid punchy designs often use solid colours. Although amazing designs can be done with halftones, it’s best to have an understanding of them first before moving onto that kind of advanced level.

It’s important to be aware of the number of colours you are using for printing. The maximum number of colours we can print at Blackwater Studios are 8 colours (for standard or discharge inks) or 6 colours (for opaque inks). Our example design here will go onto a white t-shirt (so it won’t need an underbase screen) and will be thefore a four-colour print.

Now tap the Colours tab icon to close this colour menu. To fill an area with a colour, tap and drag the Colour icon / dot to the area that you would like filled with the selected colour. Then release your finger to fill the area with colour.

Block colours are your friend in screen printing. Solid punchy designs often use solid colours. Although amazing designs can be done with halftones, it’s best to have an understanding of them first before moving onto that kind of advanced level.

It’s important to be aware of the number of colours you are using for printing. The maximum number of colours we can print at Blackwater Studios are 8 colours (for standard or discharge inks) or 6 colours (for opaque inks). Our example design here will go onto a white t-shirt (so it won’t need an underbase screen) and will be thefore a four-colour print.

Export Settings

Click the Settings tab near the top left of the screen and choose the Share sub-tab. From there, select ‘PNG’ under Share Image.

From there, select Save Image.

There may be instances where it’s beneficial to save the art as a .psd (a Photoshop file, with layers intact). However, in most instances a high resolution .png file is sufficient. The quality is what’s most important.