This is a twist on those classic Christmas jumper designs that have become such a tradition lately. I even noticed this year that Save the Children have a Christmas Jumper Day event, it’s Friday 13th Dec.
Making the Jumper Design
To create this design, I’ve used a mask that creates the individual stitches and pixelated the underlying image so you only get one color for each stitch. The stitch pixels make up a grid of 100 stitches wide and 130 stitches tall. This fits into an area just less than 35cm by 45cm which happens to be the maximum print size for a custom T-shirt from streetshirts.co.uk. Now you save as a png with transparency so you just get the stitches printed on your t-shirt. (Or hoody or hi-vis jacket or whatever takes your fancy!)
You can also produce the standard block pattern traditional style jumper with block text by creating a pixel grid that matches the mask. This works better when you set up a grid which is 40px square with snap to grid set. To be honest just using a chunky thick text of decent size works well once it’s been pixelated and turned into stitches.
Let’s see those Christmas jumpers
That’s enough about the practicalities – for those that were interested, you’re welcome and for those that just want to see the T-shirts, let’s go.
Emphasise the stitch pattern by choosing a coordinated stitch color that is a brighter tint than the underlying T-shirt color. Then choose contrasting colors to really stand out. If you’re getting a basic T printed you can have a really huge range of colors, but Christmas T’s probably work best in Red, Green or black for high contrast and a lighter blue if you’re going for something a bit more tasteful! I know, I know, not everyone wants full powered Christmas bling.
Here’s my Vader Tee in Mock-Up style with red and black backgrounds. The pic was an original vector design of my own especially for the shirt.
For a slightly subtler shirt, maybe a snowy landscape scene or you dog playing in the snow or your favourite bauble?! Whatever takes your fancy as long as there’s not too much detail and decent contrast it’ll look good.
And why not a shirt for the Christmas Grinch. Every office needs one – they can enjoy Christmas too with this subtle Ho, Ho, No! T-Shirt. Compared to some I’ve seen I’d say this is positively subtle .
What’s the process for creating these designs?
The process for creating these is straightforward to understand and involves two basic stages. The first stage is to pixelate the image using a mosaic effect. Next use a stitch opacity mask so only the stitch outline shows through. Simple but effective.
Place the final set of stitches on a background T-Shirt color and there you have it. That’s the brief overview of the process of creating these Christmas jumper designs, if you’d like a more detailed how to then check out my blog post – “How to – Christmas Jumper T-Shirt using Illustrator & Photoshop”.
Credit, where credit’s due, gifts vectors by Vecteezy, the snowy landscape was a photo by Samuel Walker from Pexels and the T-shirt Mock up was by Max Fatfullin and heavily adjusted by me for a bit more customisation.
Till next time and remember sharing is caring, so like, pin, share and comment.