Preamble to a GIMP Tutorial: Mock-up Tees with GIMP.

I could never be considered a design guy. I was always behind a keyboard banging code not pixels or paths around.

Life likes to throw challenges at you just by the simple decisions you make along the way. I decided to give up on my IT job, due to mental illness issues, and pursue a more artistic route. It’s not “outta” the blue. I can talk loads about my mother’s side and the artists that have come out of that branch of the family.

I decided that I like T-Shirts so much I would go in the business of doing my own and, why not, get some extra cash out of the whole ordeal. Being on benefits really doesn’t help went you want to start a business. T-Shirts by the quantity are not that cheap. Fabric paint is not hard to get at, if you are doing a couple of them. If you go mass production, crap, no price/quantity balance at all!!!

Had no problem at all on getting very good at doing vector based images to cut stencils from with Inkscape. Even got quite good at handing the scalpel-like knife that I used to cut stencils with. But wasn’t about to produce a lot of stock, just to show a big number under the stock of a T-Shirt.

So I decided that I needed to get the old computer some millage and began searching the web for tutorial on making mock-up Tees to show off my stencilling prowess.

Being the Open Source lover that I am, GIMP was the only route. No mega bucks for a Photoshop license, actually, not even a average computer to run it on. This is where I got my first challenge: The only GIMP Tutorial on Tee Mock-Ups was on a abandoned domain. Some time ago still active with many GIMP knowledge, but now gone into the Parked Afterlife of some domains that get underfunded.

None the less, Photoshop tutorials were by the dozen and free Mock-up kits are quite abundant if you use the “Dark Side” of digital editing. Ok, so I had to learn the hard way and then do my best to get it on GIMP. I downloaded whatever I could get my hands on of free kits and video tutorials during a whole day. Processed that Information for the next 3 days and got stuck.

GIMP can open .psd files. That does not mean it will render them as the original ones!!!!

Still don’t know how, but I got one of those .psd files to, somehow, render in a manner it was useable. With that one I was able to do my “T-Shirt First Run”. But I didn’t give up on getting it done by my own hand and skill. So more browsing, searching and downloading video podcasts from “Meet the GIMP”, got me busy in the investigation mode for a day or two.

Finally, today, I was able to reproduce what I’ve saw on a kit that i downloaded and had to investigate at a friend’s house (She’s the Photoshop person, I’m just a very bad amateur). I shouted EUREKA, some 20 times to myself and got the wife to inspect my work. She was all compliments.

So, looks like the community has given me some stuff to chew on and I got it assembled in a nice package I can reproduce and even share.

My next post will be with a very detailed tutorial of how one can make nice Mock-ups of Tees in GIMP, not only to impress your friends, but could even get you some cash in your pockets.

Till then, let’s keep sucking the Juice peepz.

Cheers.
Gus