Hello friends! Taylor did a really cool experiment. We’re always encouraging our Picture This Clothing artists/designers to really design the heck out of their templates with lots of bright colors, because that’s how the products look their best. The outcome is quite different from a traditional screen-printed t-shirt with just a front and center rectangle space for a design. Saying it, and getting people to understand why we say it, can be a challenge. I think Taylor’s experiment really captures such a magnificent demonstration, even if it’s a little different than expected. Enjoy! –Jaimee
As I learn more about Picture This Clothing, I have watched most of the instructional videos from their Facebook page, and I’ve read pretty much everything on the website. One note on the website product pages under the “Before You Design” section says,
“We think our stuff works best when you fill the whole coloring sheet up with lots of bold, bright color and imagination! One of the coolest features is that your design will be printed seam-to-seam and duplicated front and back – so make use of all that space!”
So basically, eliminate all the white space. 🤔
The fabric they use is super soft and stretchy! One of my favorite fabrics ever. But, when the fabric is left white, their website notes that it tends to be a bit see-through.
I have avoided leaving lots of white in all of my designs so far. But I am pretty curious to see what it looks like when printed. So, I had to conduct an experiment!
To start, I went to my local dollar store and picked up some fake flowers. Then, I printed out a template and wrote my name on it.
Once I had all my supplies gathered I started arranging the flowers.
I made sure to leave lots of white space around and between the flowers. I got them to a satisfactory spot, took a picture, and placed my order!
I got the shirt… and I absolutely LOVE IT! I think it is adorable. The flowers look better than I expected, haha.
BUT. I think I misjudged everything… because there is not very much white space on the printed shirt. It has little spots of white space, but not enough that I could truly grasp what white on a design looks like.
You don’t really notice in the template pictures I took, but anywhere that looks whiteish is more gray or pink or purple. This is definitely due to a combination of lighting in the room and my placement of the flowers, which cast shadows on the template. I didn’t realize this would result in not really white. I think the whitest parts are some of the fake flower petals!
It is super interesting to see the final print and how it deals with different designs/ colors. Under any other circumstances, I would have loved the shadowing of this shirt, but I was trying to test the outcome of WHITE!
To be honest, I almost erased everything I had written about this experiment and created a new, mostly white design. But, this is a huge learning moment! It’s as important to share “failed” learning moments as the successful ones, right?
That debate taught me a lot.
I love covering up/ pretending like mistakes don’t happen. It’s so easy to curate perfection in the world of social media.
And yet, no one is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. I want to share the actual results so that someone else can learn from them and better understand the translation from a design on paper to a printed outcome!
This experiment might have been a failure in terms of doing a “white test,” but that’s what experimenting is all about! I
’ll take advantage of this lesson. And I’ll be back.
Be sure to catch “Testing White Part 2” soon!
🥰
Taylor
Honestly, I love how the flowers turned out! Even though I understand you were going for shades of white. My least favorite part is the obvious plastic stems of the flowers, but still a very unique and cute top!