Original subtitles

Hey, what's up guys! Nelson here. in this chapter.

In this chapter, we're going to talk all about making merchandise from your artwork

and setting up your files for printing.

I know some of you guys might be interested in making your own merch

and opening up your own online store

and that all starts with great artwork paired with a great product.

Some examples of merchandise both online and found in artist alleys in conventions are things like

Prints, postcards, artbooks, stickers, apparel, pins, and washi tape.

Honestly, the list can go on and on

but that gives you a good idea of how much of a variety there can be

and how your work can translate to these different types of formats

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The most common and easy way for artists to start off with is to make

prints

You got to remember pixel art is small

like really small

so we have to enlarge it and making high-quality enough for printing.

I'm going to use past artwork I made to show the process of how to set up your file.

First I'm going to duplicate the Photoshop file I have and rename it as "print" for example.

Open it up and go to image image size.

You'll see the DPI is at 72

which is optimal for computer screen resolutions.

We want to increase that to 300 DPI for printing.

Just remember that the bigger the size the higher the DPI should be

and sometimes it should go up to 600 DPI.

You'll see that the pixel dimensions start to increase as well when you change the DPI.

Theoretically you can increase your pixel art to as big as Photoshop lets you.

I've increased my work up to the size of a huge billboard for a construction project once

and the conversion into printing was just fine.

Keeping the setting on "nearest neighbor"

I'm going to choose around 15 to 21 inches

this size is usually big enough for all the prints that I have.

I'm going to save it as a PNG first.

Now that we have a high-quality version of our pixel art

We can optimize it for a different print sizes.

Now there's a bunch of different sizes to choose from and I'm going to show them up on the screen right now.

These are the most common that are available online and an artist alleys.

There's a bunch of presets you can choose when you start a new canvas on Photoshop

and they're all optimized for printing at 300dpi

when you go to the print section.

Let's try the A4 size. This is most common as like a medium size print.

similar to the size of a regular sheet of paper

We're going to drag our artwork onto this new A4 canvas

and drag it to all its edges

It's also good to have the rulers on the border.

You can press Ctrl R to turn it on.

when printing anything on paper

there's always a cut line and bleed area and safe area.

The cut line is where the paper will be cut

the bleed area is usually 0.125 in and it's an area that maybe cut off

when it goes through the printer and printer scales up the drawing

so there's a risk anywhere in the bleed area that won't be included.

So it's best not to include any important details

like text on the edges of your drawing.

So you can drag out the artwork to the edges and crop it off.

It's not exactly the same size as your A4 canvas

or you can reduce the size and have white borders around it

and avoid getting your work cut off completely

just make sure the borders are equal in length and height to look consistent

So you can add a white border using the rectangular marquee tool and just have like a square white border all around.

Once you're satisfied,

you can go to File Save as.. and save it as a JPEG maximum quality or a PDF.

Or a TIFF works too usually that's

usually that's what print shops accept and they'll also tell you what kind of formats they accept as well.

Sometimes print shops or print websites also accept in RGB or CMYK.

So it really depends on each place you go to

you can easily change the color mode by going image mode

and you'll find RGB and CMYK to interchange between

Each website is a little bit different

so you may want to check in with them

and see what they want.

That's pretty much the basic foundation of how to get your pixel art ready for printing.

Let me know when you guys think!

Ever think of tabling at conventions

or selling your work online?

Do it!! do your research

See what sells! Look at designs that inspire you

if it's your first time tabling, walk around and see what other people sell

and how much they're selling it for

visit an artist you really admire and talk to them.

You might become really good friends with them in the end.

There are also a couple websites that I recommend looking into

if you want to sell your work online

places like Shopify, Squarespace, Ets are where you can make your own online store

and sell to customers where you have to keep all the physical stock yourself

and places like Redbubble and INPRNT are websites

where you can post up your artwork on their marketplace

and they can do the printing and shipping part for you.

I recommend doing your own research into each of these websites

because they all have their given takes, but that's about it.

In the next video

I'll be talking about making sticker sets and specific types of merchandise.

See you in the next one, and take care!