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Do you have STRIPER FEVER? Sublimation and direct giclee printing allows for full color imprinting of these Striped Bass on several items. Click on this image above to see how one publisher has done this on many items you can purchase.

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Illustrator & Photoshop easy software tutorials

How to, Secrets - Digital art lessons

April 16, 2005.... Recently I received questions about using my stock images in a screen printing assignment, namely printing t-shirts using spot color. The desired image for this translation is my digital painting of the Striped Bass (W_003):

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The request was "how do I convert your full color image to line art, six individual colors that I can screen print on any color shirt with opaque ink and capture much of the impact of the original drawing?" The images and captions below explain my process for this conversion. The balance of the instruction is contained in PDF TU_005.

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The online tutorials I sell as PDF files are far more detailed and elaborate.

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The original image from my clip art collection is on a transparent layer at a higher resolution then this process needs. I convert it to 100 dpi at about 16 inches wide, a good size and resolution for t-shirt imprinting. I then place a solid color in the background and I flatten the image. It is important to select a background color that is NOT in the actual image.

Then, using the CONTRAST settings I increase the contrast making sure that I achieve a black color at the darkest levels and a white at the highest levels. This guarantees a powerful image for dark shirts and other backgrounds. I then convert the image to an INDEX mode limiting it to seven colors. The red color will be discarded leaving me with six actual new colors for spot color printing.

Here's a close up of the result. You can see here that the image is now composed of six separate colors which can be extracted as color separations.

Here's just one of the spot colors after extraction.

The balance of the instruction is contained in PDF TU_005.

The finished vector image of this assignment can be seen HERE.