If you’re a Mac owner and love to do Photoshop, then Pixelmator is a great and less expensive alternative. There is one flat fee for Pixelmator and then you own it!
In this tutorial I will show you how to use the effect called Line Dye and then we’ll incorporate it into a design with Printful, a print on demand service, that prints on products like backpacks, phone cases, mugs, or anything your little heart desires! So, lets get started.
The first step is to start with an image. A black & white line drawing works best, so I recommend either using your own drawing or using a drawing out of an adult coloring book. If you do use a design from a coloring book, be mindful of copy rights.
So, here is the drawing I’m starting with. Just a simple line drawing that I did in about 10 minutes. I added a little space around the image by increasing the canvas size and bucket filling it with the same color as the background.
The first thing I’m going to do is in the effects browser, under “other” choose
“Mandala” and drag it to my drawing.
It’s best just to play around with it to see what design you like the best. I do have a little shading around the image, but I’m going to leave it and see if it adds to the effect.
Now, in the effects browser, under “other” find Line Dye and drag it onto your artwork. This is the default colors of this effect. Doesn’t look like much at this point!
Next, BACK BOTTOM COLOR, make this lighter or darker, change the color, and you will find that this changes the original color and the way the lines look.
Repeat with LINE TOP COLOR, and LINE BOTTOM COLOR and see how they interact. A good idea is to have an old school color wheel (seen below) to see what colors are opposites, split complimentary or analogous, because having opposite colors will make them stand out more, split complimentary will have three colors that work together and analogous is a softer more monotone design.
So, here is an image of my (almost) final product and it shows the colors I used in each of the four settings. Also, the amount slider will make the lines thinner or fatter. I had a few flaws like the little dots, and do get rid of shading around the image that I mentioned in the start of this tutorial because it created a line around the image it that I had to remove with cut and fill and the dots I cleaned up with the clone tool, but that’s a whole other tutorial.
At the beginning of this article I mentioned print on demand. I’m now going to make my image 7000 pixel and save this file as a .JPG file. Here’s a link for Printful, and this should open in a new window.
Printful will ask if you want to print for yourself or for your online store. So let’s choose ” for yourself”. the next screen is “Choose a product you want to print on” Choose what ever you want, but for this tutorial I’m choosing the iphoneX Case under accessories.
On the left, you will see a prompt to upload file. Click this and hit upload, upload your creation, and “choose”.
Like magic, your awesome design is superimposed on a mug, phone case, tee shirt or whatever! Here’s mine-
Next, Printful will ask what size, once you’ve chosen that you can proceed by clicking “next” at the bottom of the page. This will bring you to the pricing and ordering page. This original, self designed phone case is only $10.95 plus shipping. Not bad.
You can find my design on Etsy for $15.50 Plus Shipping and Handling.
Thanks for reading my tutorial. I hope I didn’t leave anything out. I am not an “expert” with Pixelmator, but I do like to experiment with it and find new things to do with it. So, that being said, have fun and create!
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Learn More about Pixelmator here: Learning Pixelmator by Packt Publishing