Digital t-shirt design

Hello everyone,

so I have been carrying on with my assignment from last week, the digital shoe design, and I have now created a clipping mask using onto a t-shirt for the last part of my assignment. When creating my t-shirt design I was mainly focusing on using a clipping mask and applying this to the front of a t-shirt with text.

I started off by getting my image of a t-shirt. to do this I searched it up on the internet and then went to the tool bar and selected for the images that it showed me to be larger then 2MP. I did this so that my image would be good enough quality to use for my design and meaning that it wasn't pixelated.

Once I had saved the image that I wanted, I went into illustrator and placed the image into the program. I used the placing tool by going into file and selecting place, this puts the image into your art board at a background image.

Next I created a new layer that I would start to create my clipping mask on and then I would put it over the top of the t-shirt, I turned the layer with the t-shirt on it so you couldn't see it so it was easier to create the clipping mask. I wanted to create the image that I would then use to make my clipping mask. I chose to create a image using lots of different star shapes. I created these stars using the shape tool and then filled them in using the swatches. To layer the stars I placed them over the top of each other and then changed there opacity so that you could they were translucent and yo could see the background stars through them . 

Once I had inserted all the stars I wanted and altered their opacity, I then arranged them in the way I wanted. This did not need to be in an exact shape, it just needed to be big enough for the text to fit over the top. I layered the stars so that they fully covered the area so there was no white space. 

As all the stars were separate objects I needed to group them before being able to make the clipping mask. To do this I selected all the stars and then went to object and selected group. This means that all the stars are now part of one object, making it able to be used as a clipping mask. 

Next I needed to add the text. I chose to use the word star as it fitted with the image I had created, I decided to use a bold font so that you could see as much of the image as posible when I made it into a clipping mask. 

Now I have scaled up the text so that it fits the t-shirt and fits over my image. After I have decided on the size of the text I layered the text over my grouped image making sure that the text was arranged so it was on top otherwise thw clipping mask would have been the wrong way around. Now I had the arranged the text how I wanted it, I selected both the text and the image and went into object and went down to clipping mask and selected create. 

Once I had made this into a clipping mask it looked like this. Next I had to turn the layer with the t-shirt picture on it so you could see it and then reposition the clipping mask so it sat where I wanted it to on the t-shirt. 

This is how my finished t-shirt design turned out like. I really like hoe this looks because I like that I was able to create the image that I used in the clipping mask. To improve this I think I would maybe make the stars in the image smaller or the size of the text bigger so that you could see the stars in the clipping mask better, making what it was of clearer.  

I hope you have enjoyed looking at my work and thank you for reading.

Amy xxx