Vinyl

Designing Decal and/or T-shirts

Northwest Coast formline & Own inspiration
  • You should be comfortable around Illustrator at this point. Now use the pen tool and shapes to create a sticker or t-shirt design.
  • Create a DESIGN that uses Northwest Coast formline, but comes from your own experience, interest or place of self.
    • Your design must work in ONE or TWO colours!
    • Find an image that inspires you, then start building your shape
    • Best is to create the design from scratch, using the shape and pen tools.
    • For some inspiration and ideas, check out this site by a Native Artist who uses anime as inspiration:

Vinyl Cut Decal Instructions
  • You should be comfortable around Illustrator at this point. Now you get to create a sticker for your laptop or phone.
  • Create a DESIGN that you would like to put on your phone, laptop or a car window.
    • Your design must work in ONE colour!
    • Best is to create the design from scratch, using the tools you used
    • You can ‘live trace’ existing images and modify them.
    • Any copyrighted design needs to be modified before you can use the image.
    • The more unique your image, the better your mark.
    • The vinyl cutter only sees OUTLINES, so switch to outline view in Illustrator to see if your image ‘works’
  • Check the ‘how to’ guide for details
  • Submit your image for cutting
  • When cut, remove the unwanted parts and adhere to your object using transfer tape and a squeegee

KEY CRITERIA: Complexity of Design, quality of ‘weeding’

Vinyl Cut T-SHIRT Instructions

INTRODUCTION

Create a two-colour Vinyl design for a T-shirt you can wear. Check for available colours before you start!

BASIC REQUIREMENTS
  • Create DESIGN that you would like to put on a t-shirt.
      • You can start with existing images and add to them, or do your own.
      • When looking for images, try to find VECTOR images not BITMAPS so you do not have to rely on ‘live trace’.
      • Any copyrighted design needs to be modified before you can use the image.
  • If the colours in your design touch, create an overlapping design, to make registration more accurate
  • The more unique your image, the better your mark.
  • Images need to be converted to OUTLINES, so the Vinyl Cutter can print them,
    • Switch Illustrator to outline view to see how clean your images are
    • Use the Shape Builder tool to clean up your image
    • Outline all text so it can be cut by the plotter.
  • If using more than one colour, make sure each colour is on its own layer
  • check the ‘how to’ guide for details
  • Submit your image for cutting
  • When cut, remove the unwanted parts and heat transfer to your t-shirt
KEY CRITERIA:

Complexity of Design, quality of ‘weeding’

How to Guide & Video

For Two colour Decals (Stickers) watch this video (Essential part is after 12:00)

Gallery of Samples