At some point in the evolution of this site I added the art I created for the purpose of selling it on t-shirts (small aside – here is the real purpose I create art). Anyway, this is not so straightforward as you can imagine and I have learned a lot and made many changes on my journey. This post documents my approaches in case you are interested in how it works or it can help you if you have similar ideas.

In the past, I tried selling my artwork on t-shirts – the finished and complete product. And as much as the process has been simplified by dropshipping, I wanted to retain control of the fulfilment process as much as possible, as well as the sourcing and processing of the final products.

That meant finding a local supplier that could process orders fast and on an adhoc basis and that I could then ship to customers with a personalised message and packaging. It meant finding a supplier of quality t-shirts because not just any t-shirt will do. They also had to be sustainable. All a very big set of requirements.

I then decided to move to just digital products.

So creating the artwork is what continues and I get pleasure from and I then make it available for download from the site. Considering there are so many options out there for people to upload designs and have them printed on any different object of their choice, I thought I would leave this choice to the customer. Here are some I am aware of to get you started:

• Spreadshirt
• Printful
• VistaPrint

I still get to make my art available, I just don’t have the headache of fulfilment and only have to make sure my art is printable, i.e. make artwork that is of sufficiently high quality available. Here is the process I now follow below:

How I create and make artwork ready

• I use Paper by WeTransfer for rough and quick sketches which is prefect for early ideation. However, I found out early on that designs exported from Paper are not of sufficiently high quality for printing from. So I moved to Procreate for this reason.
• Other than exporting in sufficiently high quality, I also moved to Procreate for final artwork because it has far greater capabilities.
• I then export from Procreate once designs are complete, using the process described here: From Procreate to Print: Tips For Creating Print Ready Artwork – Mindzai Apparel. Mindzai are a company specialising in print work from designs and after doing a lot of homework, I felt this approach made most sense.
• NOTE: Final artwork is delivered as a PNG file, not PDF as advised in the above article (although PNG is suggested as an alternative). That’s because Procreate does not export PDF files with a transparent background as I wanted – explained here. But rest assured, my PNG’s are of the highest quality and more than sufficient for printing on t-shirts, mugs, etc.

How you can access artwork

• Some art I will sell and how that is handled from a payment and download perspective is explained here in detail: Paid Content Block – WordPress.com Support.
  • When viewing the product images in the posts where I sell my art, the visitor/buyer will see an image (the artwork) with a watermark and examples of it on a t-shirt and mug without any watermarks. That’s because the former could be downloaded and used without payment if the watermark doesn’t exist. On t-shirt and mug it doesn’t matter because they are of lesser quality and not standalone designs. I use Canva to apply watermarks and create the product images.
  • As soon as a design is purchased, the high quality design can be downloaded without a watermark and used as desired.
• For art that I don’t sell, I simply make the artwork available to download and make clear in the post how to do that.

That’s the entire process in a nutshell, simple.