# T-Shirt Design Workshop 02: Using Photoshop, Illustrator, and Hand-Drawing Techniques - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/t-shirt-design-workshop-02-using-photoshop-illustrator-and-hand-drawing-techniques/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Solid intro · Rated 7 /10 # T-Shirt Design Workshop 02: Using Photoshop, Illustrator, and Hand-Drawing Techniques By Gareth B. Davies · Updated August 2026 Ray Dombroski Intermediate · 152 min A mixed-media t-shirt workflow that pushes past the computer screen, then proves its methods against three real printers. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Ft-shirt-design-workshop-02-using-photoshop-illustrator-and-hand-drawing-techniques%2F97063549) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. ## A Real Project, Followed Start to Finish This workshop's structure is its strongest asset. Rather than teaching techniques in isolation, it follows one design, a "South Shore" surf brand built around a Bronco pickup sketch, from a Pinterest mood board all the way to three finished, printed shirts. The early lessons cover tool selection (marker paper, prismacolor pencils, a Pantone solid coated guide, a 27-inch iMac and Adobe Creative Cloud) and inspiration gathering, where reference images get pinned, dragged into Illustrator, and sorted by composition versus technique. From there the course moves into thumbnail sketching, then into Illustrator to build the actual pill-shaped lockup using overlapping circles, a connecting rectangle, and the Pathfinder merge tool so type can follow the resulting path cleanly. The middle stretch is where the course earns its "hand-drawing techniques" subtitle. A pencil sketch gets scanned, refined in Photoshop using channel selections, printed back out at letter size, and redrawn by hand with a 0.38mm Muji pen and PC935 prismacolor pencils to blend tight computer lettering into loose, textured linework at the bottom of the design. A watercolor pencil section shows how to dip the pencil in water or brush water over dry pencil lines for organic color effects, and a later lesson walks through building a custom Photoshop brush from that watercolor texture to paint multiple colorways quickly. This back-and-forth between paper and screen is demonstrated with enough specific keystrokes and menu paths (Command+Shift+C to copy merged, Select > Modify > Contract to choke an underbase by two pixels) that a viewer can actually follow along rather than just watch. ## Where the Course Delivers and Where It Thins Out The production-oriented back half is unusually practical for a design course. It covers sizing a graphic against a comparable printed garment rather than guessing, picking Pantone colors from a physical swatch book, and building underbases for both black and colored fabric using color range selections and layer contraction. Two bonus lessons on generating index and halftone color separations without extra software add real value for anyone who might end up doing production work for a screen printer, though the instructor is upfront that designers who never touch separations can skip them. The final act, submitting the same file to Zazzle, Spreadshirt, and Jakprints and then unboxing the results, is a genuinely useful bit of honesty rare in project-based courses. The shirts come back with real problems: an oversized print with no way to specify dimensions, a print that shrank because the vendor ignored the file's native size, and one from a service with a proper template that nailed both size and color. Framing these as lessons in how to communicate specs to a printer, rather than editing them out, gives the course credibility. The gap is instructional depth for newcomers. Illustrator's type-on-a-path quirks, offset paths, and Pathfinder operations are used fluently but explained briefly, and Photoshop channel work is assumed knowledge more than it is taught from the ground up. Anyone without intermediate comfort in both programs will lose the thread during the shape-building and separation lessons. As a workflow tour for people who already know their tools, though, it holds together well and ends with a rare thing in a design course: proof that the methods produce shirts that actually work. The standout The hand-to-digital-to-hand loop in the middle lessons, where a scanned pencil sketch is refined in Photoshop, printed out again, and redrawn with pen and prismacolor pencil to blend tight clean lettering into loose hand-drawn texture. ## What you will learn - · How to build a research board in Illustrator from Pinterest inspiration and organize it by composition versus technique - · How to construct a symmetrical pill-shaped path in Illustrator using circles, rectangles, and the Pathfinder merge tool, then set type on that path - · How to shuttle a design between paper and screen: scanning pencil sketches, refining them in Photoshop, printing them back out, and hand-finishing with pen and watercolor pencil - · How to build a custom watercolor brush in Photoshop and paint colorways with it - · How to size artwork correctly using a reference garment and unresampled image sizing, then spec Pantone colors and underbases for screen printing - · How to prep and submit the same design to three different print services (Zazzle, Spreadshirt, Jakprints) and troubleshoot what came back wrong Best for: Designers who already know their way around Illustrator and Photoshop and want to loosen up their process by mixing analog drawing back into a digital t-shirt design pipeline. Skip it if: Total beginners to Illustrator or Photoshop, since the course assumes fluency with tools like Pathfinder, offset paths, and channels and never explains them from scratch. Helpful Examples Engaging Teacher Clarity of Instruction Organization of Lessons [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Ft-shirt-design-workshop-02-using-photoshop-illustrator-and-hand-drawing-techniques%2F97063549)