If you want to make your own screen printed tee shirts at home you will need to create some kind of artwork for printing. There are many different methods and different software applications that can be used to make artwork for screenprinting. The most popular graphic programs used are Illustrator, Corel Draw and Photoshop. Of course each artist may use any program to create art and if you don’t have a lot of money to buy software, you can use free downloads.

Most professional artwork created for screen printing tee shirts is in vector format. Vector art is one of two forms of art used by computers, with the other form being bitmap art. Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygons, which are all based on mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics. Bitmap graphics is the representation of images as an array of pixels, as it is typically used for the representation of photographic images. Bitmap or “raster” art is identified as art with file names ending in .GIF, .BMP, .JPEG, .JPG, and .PCX. Vector art, on the other hand, ends in .EPS.

Check out my personal list of free graphic software downloads. This is a list of free downloads. You can find a brief description of each program and go to the developers download webpage. Please feel free to suggest free downloads to add to the list by contacting us or leaving a comment on this blog post.

Thanks for reading! Learn how to screen print with Catspit Productions, LLC!