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Anyone ever get their paintings done up as tee shirts? (Original Post) GreenPartyVoter Apr 2020 OP
(only when I use the shirt for a paint rag.......) lastlib Apr 2020 #1
Not a painting, but I did get two pencil drawings of a little character Jamastiene Apr 2020 #2
Lovely, lovely work. I think you can silk screen it. My daughter and a friend learned how and did emmaverybo Apr 2020 #3
Lovely! SheltieLover Apr 2020 #4
I don't know anything about it lunatica Apr 2020 #5
I've been putting all kinds of art on tee shirts... GReedDiamond Apr 2020 #6
i did. when i started trying to make a career of art mopinko Apr 2020 #7

Jamastiene

(38,187 posts)
2. Not a painting, but I did get two pencil drawings of a little character
Thu Apr 30, 2020, 12:08 AM
Apr 2020

of mine that I call Sprite put on shirts. I had a tee shirt and a hoodie made of two of the drawings. It was tricky getting the colors just right with the color shirt I wanted (black). I had to make the white part of the paper transparent and monkey with the edges of the drawing. I think I could have done slightly better for parts of him, but all in all, I was pleased and still wear the shirt and the hoodie.

It's fun to see something you made on clothing especially.

emmaverybo

(8,144 posts)
3. Lovely, lovely work. I think you can silk screen it. My daughter and a friend learned how and did
Thu Apr 30, 2020, 12:19 AM
Apr 2020

up the friend’s art work on tees.

lunatica

(53,410 posts)
5. I don't know anything about it
Thu Apr 30, 2020, 01:35 AM
Apr 2020

Have you tried looking on YouTube?

I do know you can get them done by businesses that do that.

I think it would make a lovely greeting card. It’s classy in a very charming way.

GReedDiamond

(5,311 posts)
6. I've been putting all kinds of art on tee shirts...
Thu Apr 30, 2020, 02:46 AM
Apr 2020

...and all other kinds of garments since 1976, including costume graphics for a bunch of movies/tv shows/music videos and live stage performances.

I started as an airbrush tee artist, and developed various hand-painting techniques using hand-carved - and now laser etched - foam printing implements, plus I use silkscreen printing methods, including spot colors/CMYK 4-Color Process.

But the easiest, and most likely affordable way to transfer an original painting such as yours to a tee shirt or other garment would be to find a Direct To Garment printer.

With a high resolution (300dpi) good quality digital photo, or better yet, a 300 dpi scan of your art, you simply size the image to the dimensions you want it to be on the shirt/garment, and save it as a .png (Portable Network Graphics).

The DTG printer uses the .png file to digitally print your image directly on the garment, much like an ink jet printer prints to paper. The ink is very durable, but you will see fading after a certain number of washings.

If you don't have Photoshop or some other graphics program to convert your digital photos/scans to .png format, I think most DTG printers would be able to convert your (most likely .jpg) to .png, probably for an extra charge, hopefully no more than 10 bucks. The cost to print one shirt should be in the $15-25 range, plus the cost of the shirt, maybe another $15-25. These are only estimates, and I could be off, but maybe for one shirt you're out $30-60.

For comparison, if you went to a competent silkscreener, this type of painting would most likely be done using CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) 4-color process, where those colors are screened on top of each other, and blend together to look like a full-color image. This would cost upwards of $300-400, maybe more, to do color separations, print films, burn screens, formulate the ink and do the first strike-off. No screen printer wants to do all of those preparations and work to print just one piece, so they often require minimum quantities before they'll take the job.

Lastly, printing - by any method - art such as a watercolor painting onto a tee shirt works best on a white ground color. Dark ground colors are trickier to do, and the vibrance of the art is diminished.

mopinko

(70,077 posts)
7. i did. when i started trying to make a career of art
Thu Apr 30, 2020, 07:58 AM
Apr 2020

and had my first show, i got one of my old paintings on 100 tshirts. then there was a bit of a stir over another one of my paintings, so i did that one, too.

got stuck w most of them, tbh, but it sure is fun to bump into a friend wearing one.
one woman made a belly dancing vid wearing my shirt, and a couple of friends of mine found each other in a crowd because one was wearing my shirt.

i took out an ad for my second show on some buses. it was a looong painting, and the graphic took up the whole side of the bus. i did a couple of those, then those short ones on the back. 4 iirc.
well, the short ones came down quickly, but those long ones are a pain in the ass to scrape off, so they ran around for months!
it was so fun to bump into them.
i remember crying all the way home from my second opening, which was a bust, and seeing my bus. it really helped.

had a lot of people come up to me to say they had seen my bus. fun fun.

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