For the longest time, we couldn’t get Louis to draw/color at home.  I don’t know why, it just wasn’t his forte.  I guess we could have pushed it more…but I felt like every time we were trying to get him to color, he would somehow find a way to make me do the work instead.  His creativity was more in a “lets make something” or “lets act something out” kind of way.  And that’s fine with me!  But coloring and drawing is good too.

I think having a year of school under his belt has changed that.  And as of late, he’s really been into drawing and writing more.  He now has his own sketchpad and a set of markers and he’ll sit next to me, drawing lots of cute things, while I work on handlettering.

We set him up with a blank sheet of paper and a marker and let him do his thing one night.  We told him we’d be making a tee, but other than that we let him draw whatever he wanted.

Watching him concentrate on things like this is one of my favorite things to do.  He gets so serious.  Like his drawing is the most important thing that he’s ever set out to do.  I adore it.

Lou’s art this time around was of three monsters.  He didn’t go into much detail about who they were or what they did (like he usually does) but I think it was a pretty cute drawing.

You can scan the page if you want, but I chose to just snap a picture of it with my iPhone.  Sometimes it’s just quicker this way.  Honestly, my scanner is a pain in the butt to get working (and I’m lazy) so this is the choice I’m going to make 99% of the time.

I had to fiddle with the image just a little bit in Photoshop.  Not much, though.  Having him use a marker made it so the lines were thick-ish and bold enough that not much had to be done.  I thickened them up a bit in places and then it was ready to rock.

If you need help with this step, I highly recommend heading over to the Photoshop tutorial [HERE].  It’s a quick and dirty way to make your line drawings into vectors.

The final step is up to you.  The actual “getting the image onto a tshirt” part, that is.

I used a heat transfer vinyl that I cut with my Silhouette machine.  I earned extra bonus points from Louis because the vinyl is actually glow-in-the-dark.  He thinks anything that glows is super awesome.  And so do I!

You could also do what so many awesome people out there do and trace/paint the drawing, using freezer paper as a stencil.  Seriously, so many people use it.  Dana-Made-It has a pretty quick and easy tutorial [HERE] for that process.

Throw that shirt on your little bundle of sweetness as soon as you can!  It will be their instant favorite thing to wear.  I promise.

Louis obviously had his on and ate spaghetti before I could take pictures.  I really need to learn that pictures should happen *before* he gets to wear things.  Not after.  Maybe one day I’ll figure out my timing. Ha.

I’m toying with the idea of offering to do this for others.  If you have a drawing that your child would LOVE to have printed on a tee but you’d rather have someone else do the actual printing part…then I can be your girl!  Just email me (katy@handmadeescapade.com) and I’ll hook you up!

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