Digital T-shirt Printing

Creating Unique Automotive T-shirt Pictures
By Anthony Palmieri

A low cost digital camera coupled with some imagination can open the door for you to create unique picture clothing with images of your family and pets all the way to your special autos and motorcycles. For a few years now the home user could use special iron-on transfer paper to print a picture on a home printer then iron it on to clothing. It looks great initially, however, it tends to be stiff, and after a few washes fades. High end T-shirt printing was expensive, and restricted to large companies that were making many many of the same T-shirt. As with most technologies, as they evolve they improve and become less expensive.

The most common technique for printing onto fabrics was silk screening, which is an expensive processes that is not cost effective for an individual looking to create only one or two shirts. A process called sublimation has gained more popularity and is available through many of the on-line development houses. Sublimation uses special inks called sublimation ink. This ink is used to print your photograph on a special transfer paper, and that along with heat, and pressure transfers the image to a variety of materials such as cotton and polyester (T-shirts ), metals, plastics, ceramics, and special high temperature plastics such as Plexiglas, Mylar or melamine. Sublimation ink is unique where it has the ability to convert from a solid to a gas without going through a liquid form moving into the fibers of the fabric. This conversion and ink transfer process creates a crisp color with a highly defined image that is very durable.

Now that you the individual, have all this capability available, what can you do with it? The basic starting point is to take a digital picture and send it as is to one of these houses to create a standard photo shirt. Lets go beyond the standard picture and create custom pieces of art for yourself that you can proudly wear.

Software packages like Adobe Photoshop have many capabilities that allow you to customize your pictures. The question often asked is well what should I do? The intent of this article is to give you a few ideas to spark your creativity and see what fits your personality. Our focus at www.PalmieriConcepts.com has been on automotive art, so we will use automobiles for examples, although these ideas can be applied to family portraits, pictures of your loving pets, and even landscapes. You can exchange the word "car" for dog, cat, boat, girlfriend, etc.