Issue 27: Jan 2003
Features
- | Foreword
- | Tip of the day
- | Welcome to MagiC Mac 10
- | Do Atari Systems Need USB?
- | AEX: Tangerine Dream Machine Version 2!
- | Max-A-Flex
- | The Ultima II Survival Kit
- | T-shirt Design with Atari
- | The ABBUC programming contest
Review
- | Marijuana Mail
M@ilbox
News
| T-shirt Design with Atari T-shirt designs are produced with screen-printing. How to make a screen-print graphic is shown in my little workshop here. Basic understanding of a vector graphic program will be useful. For screen-print you better not use thin lines or dots, because they will get lost in the small resolution, I had the idea to vectorize the picture I want to use. This has the advantage that we increase the vector graphic size without getting "pixel steps". By the way, vectorized motifs look extremely cool. Preparation for vectorization I chose as a motif a picture of Rosa Luxemburg. I scanned the picture from a book cover and and loaded it in TIF format into the graphic program Chagall to prepare for the vectorization. First I softened the picture to get rid of the raster (the picture was converted to little dots for the printing process). The next step is to get rid of all gray areas by increasing the contrast very high. Do so by moving the button Kontrast to the right and incease the button "Helligkeit" (Lights) a bit as well, or change the gradation curves. The result looks almost like a real black and white graphic. Nice. Now we can change it to a real bitmap which consists only of black or white pixels. I use the "Apple to Pear" menu of Chagall and increase the picture by factor 2. This way I receive more information for the vectorization. I save the black and white picure as Image *.IMG just by typing the extension IMG. Chagall will save it in IMG format. The vectorization After finishing with Chagall I start Avant Vektor Pro, a vectorization and vector editing software. I load the freshly-produced *.IMG picture and choose "Bold and round" (Grob und Rund) as a vectorization parameter. Just test vectorization with different parameters for best results. It should not become too bold, but there shouldn't be to many redundant dots/points. After the automatic vectorization comes the manual work. The vector graphic looks "rough". Lines have to be opimized, to make it look cool. That's hard manual labour and real detailed work. Unnessesary points are deleted and the splines have to be corrected afterwards. The little crosses have to be moved to do that. I created the highlights in the hair completely to make the graphic look "quieter" and more "sovereign". The smoothened vector graphic looks now like pop art. Because the graphic has to be printed in white on a black shirt we have the problem that all black areas of the image will become invisible. To get an impression of how the graphic will look on a T-shirt I put a black T-shirt shaped object in the background. We see only the face and the highlights in the hair. I have to make the hair visible by doubling the hair curves, which describes the outline of the hair. Curved text path Now I have the head I complete it with a quotation from Rosa Luxemburg. To achieve a fitting picture is a real art. I have choosen to let the text run above and below in a semi-ellipse around the face. I do so by taking sections from a slightly flattened circle. I chose the font "Antiqua" because the resulting style suits the 20th century, the time when Rosa Luxemburg became famous. By setting the text on the circle above you have only to metion that the circle piece has to be selected. I do the type work in a second window from which I copy the finished type to the main graphic. Setting the under text into the circle bow I have to change the direction first by choosing [R] (direction function) and clicking on the end of the path. The empty path end becomes a black point. In the text menu I now have to increase the space between the letters to avoid them sticking together. To fit the type into the graphic, I make the hair highlight thinner and move the higher hair curve around the "i" dot. At the left side I open the hairline to make space for the writing. Many hours and steps not shown here later I am satisfied with the design. Et voilą. Preperation for the film setting Now I have to prepare the graphic for printing. Because the graphic will be printed in white print, everything which will be seen on the black background in white has to be inverted to black. The output is prepared in Calamus SL. I get the size of a T-shirt first to make the graphic the right size. I select the button "propotional resize" before I size the graphic to the right width. Having done so I decrease the height of the document to the space actually used. The export Usually one saves the document and the used fonts on a disk. In my case all fonts were converted to vector paths in Avant Vektor Pro, only the CDK document itself was needed. Smaller documents can be saved on a floppy disk. When working on bigger projects you better call the Calamus service center first. Those can be found here: http://www.calamus.net/de/contact/index.html or http://www.calamus.net, then "Kontakt", then "Belichter" and ZIP Area (PLZ-Bereich). Ask the service center first which media they can read and how they have to be formatted. It is important to tell the imagesetter operator that it is a screen-printing exposure, because the motif has to be on the film "right" and not mirrored like for offset printing. The print There are two ways to have the motif printed. You can take the film to a service center which does the print, or you print it youself. In your local community center there may be non-commercial print shops where someone can help the first time. In such places you have only to pay for the material, but you have to buy the plain T-shirt before you go there. That is real fun and can become a new hobby. When I worked as a graphic designer in a company and had to vectorize logos, I secretly installed an Atari emulator on my work computer and did the vectorization with Avant Vektor Pro. Afterwards I converted the resulting CVG with Arabesque to EPS which can be colored with Illustrator or Freehand on Mac or PC. This article was originally published in German by st-computer magazine, April 2002, and is reproduced in English with kind permission.
Useful links
BRINCKEN.COM / GRAFIK & WEBDESIGN http://www.brincken.com Calamus http://www.calamus.net
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