Not All Shirts Are Created Equal...

and selecting the right printer can make a WORLD of difference!

I received both of the new tests today and boy am I glad I'm shopping around for good printers. Both of these new company's printers has some great vibrant colors, and pretty expected transparency issues but it is a lot more reasonable than the previous batch to work with. Here you can see a comparison of the latest tests with the previous ones (more details in the last update here.)

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The breakdown:

The shirts with the single character prints were early tests before I came up with the big sheets to test out a bunch of things at once.

So in the first image (showing all the shirts at once), the navy dragon and grey raptor on the far left are from RedBubble. This was the original company I was using for the past few years to sell my work through and what I wanted to get away from to increase the quality and my profits while keeping the same retail price for my customers: win-win! But the dragon on a navy shirt came out yucky (as you can see in better detail at the bottom image compared to the new navy shirt).

The light gray raptor and steel blue dragon singles at the top are from a local company. I adored how the dragon came out with its sharp details and the pocket transparencies came out better than any other shirt! You can see a closeup of both of these in a previous status update here. However the color of the shirt seems to influences the designs a tad too much- making the raptor more washed out and the dragon much bluer than usual. I think these will be simple tweaks to make and ultimately will be the most likely company I go with to fulfill Etsy orders, assuming I can color correct.

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So now let's compare the latest three companies I've tried out.


The test pattern on the left (also the left shirt on the raptor closeups) is the company from the last Patreon update. Obviously the pocket transparency is scary with harsh smeared white, the image is stretched out, it's super shiny and plastic looking/feeling, and apparently wasn't pre-treated right because the ink flaked off in places. It's a big disappointing nope.

The test shirt on the right (middle one of the raptor closeups and bottom left on the dragon closeups) I'm so impressed with the colors and details! Just gotta get that pocket looking better... so I placed another order to test the limitations of how their printers work with transparency and I also decided to get them in both black and navy to test their darker range work. Unfortunately the underbase tends to bleed slighty around most of the edges, which looks okay in photos and at a distance because it helps the design stand out a bit, but it also outlines the shadows. If I printed the perfect color for the bleed to match the shirt, I think it would look great.

The navy one has easily the best raptor detail (closeup on the right)... and on a dark shirt no less! Because dark images on a dark shirt don't contrast well, the dragon is surprisingly well printed too (top right of the dragon closeups, compared to RedBubble's navy print on the left). Their natural transparency handling with the pocket is totally workable, has a bit of strange aillising in the form of tiny white dots as you can see a closeup of, but the only thing stopping me from using them immediately is that their shirt color options are less than half of what the other printers have made available- they don't have that nice steel blue color. Navy, bright turquoise, light blue, and royal blue (slightly purple) are the only ones they have anywhere close.

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What I'm finding through my results that I will likely have to color-correct and create special files for each individual shirt offered to counter different issues on light, dark, and color shirts... which is very time consuming and expensive when I have over 30 shirt colors to work with. So if I do end up going that route, I will probably limit the available shirt colors for each design. Printing on white is easy and ready to go no problem. I can start selling and fulfilling white shirt orders immediately. But white isn't popular. I personally don't like white and in fact own almost nothing that is white. I actually had some other shirts tested in white from yet another and boy do they look amazing but the shirts were cheap and they don't offer any other shirt colors.

So next I'm going to take a trip up to Denver and visit that local shop again and get some more tests done, bringing all my various prints along to help them understand what I'm after and hopefully get some help on how best to tweak the design. I'll report back when I have more shirts in hand!