The Custom Screen Printing Process, Part 1: Drawing

In the first part of this series, we're going to look at where the screen printing process begins - with drawing.  It all starts with a drawing.  Everything.  There is nothing in this world that didn't begin as a drawing.  Screenprinting custom t-shirts is no different.  Ok.  Maybe it actually starts with an idea.  But drawing is what gives an idea form, guides its creation. 

Drawing is my primary discipline.  It's a subject that I will expound on ad infinitum if I had the space, but we're here today to talk about drawing as it relates to the screen printing process, so I'll try to keep it brief. 

The idea for this image came from discussions between my brother and I.  Eventually, the discussion led to him describing an image to me: "a guy sitting a chair watching TV in the dark, but he's all tangled up in these cables like they've grown over him, one of them is a feeding tube."  The security camera was my idea, but that came later. 

With the idea and a direction to go in, I started sketching.  Eventually I wound up with the following drawing in my sketchbook:

Now ordinarily I tend to work out an image traditionally, but at this point in time  I happened to be creatively stuck, so I went ahead and imported my sketch to Adobe Photoshop, and exported it so I could continue to draw on my Kindle Tablet with the Autodesk Sketchbook App (which, by the way, is amazing).  With Autodesk I was able to intuitively redraw and rework parts of the image until I was satisfied with the design and composition, as well as try out different color schemes with relative ease until I was satisfied with the design.  The finished drawing looked like this:

In part 2 of this series we'll take a look at what happens to the artwork once it's done - how is processed for screenprinting?  Tune in next week.