T-Shirt Basics
by Pat Reynolds

(Click on any image for a larger view)
Reprinted with permission from Airbrush Action (February 2000)

I will start this article with a statement. "If you want to be a successful T-shirt artist, you must have good lettering skills."

It’s the one ultimate truth, and you can’t get around it. Of course, in order to produce good lettering, your basic airbrushing skills must be in place. That means, if you can’t pull nice, smooth, straight and curved lines with your airbrush; if you can’t do dagger stroke lines backwards, forwards, up, and down with consistent ease; or if you can’t model areas or fade color tones, you need to go back to the basics and learn these skills, because they are necessary for good lettering and, ultimately, good overall airbrushing.

T-shirt airbrushing started with simple lettering designs and, to this day, it’s still the backbone of the business. Lettering in one form or another plays a part in nearly every design that goes out the door of a West Coast Airbrush Shop. So, when I review portfolios of prospective airbrush artist employees, the first thing I scrutinize is their lettering.

I find that in many, many cases, T-shirt airbrush artists are far better with custom designs (portraits, exotic animals, etc.) than they are with the basics. The problem with this is, when 80% of your learning and skill is focused on a part of your portfolio that only constitutes 20% of your sales, something (like your income) is going to suffer.

I guess I’ve made my point, so let’s get started on the right track. In this installment of "T-Shirt Basics" my partner Pat Reynolds and I will offer a few lettering styles that have served us well over the years and a few other tips you may want to incorporate.

One of the most common mistakes made in lettering is the lack of consistency in a lettering style. The result is that each letter seem to contradict the one before and after it. The lettering style you choose must be used throughout, at least when you’re working on a single word. In addition to the same style, the lettering needs to be consistent in spacing, size, slant and line quality. All of these are basic fundamentals of good lettering, even if you are just writing with a pencil on paper—airbrushing letters is no exception.

When you’re practicing your lettering, try to learn a style by proceeding through the letter the same way each time, starting and stopping a stroke, adding accent strokes, etc., always maintaining the same order. This also will help with your consistency.

Begin lettering with single stroke print. It may not be very aesthetically pleasing, but believe it or not, it’s not all that easy. It requires a great deal of practice to master single stroke print—what I call "plain" on my lettering display. Try using nothing more than straight and curved lines joined at particular junctions to form letters. Practice straight lines up and down and left to right. Do circles and the letter "C" forward and backwards about 10,000 times. After awhile, single stroke print will be a natural part your repertoire of lettering styles.

Once you have single stroke print under your belt, those skills will lead to many other, more complicated styles of lettering. Building your skills, one on top the other, is the way to learn lettering.

Once you develop your menu of lettering styles, you can mix and match them to create great designs. I’ve known quite a few very successful airbrush T-shirt painters who are not great artists. What they do have is great lettering skills. Even though their drawing talent may not be as good as their other talents, adding lettering to the drawn design makes all of the difference.

In 25 years of airbrushing T-shirts, I have noticed that customers do not seem to scrutinize my artwork as much as they do my lettering. I think it’s because everyone can write. Many of my customers are women—most have very nice handwriting, so they know instinctively what lettering should look like.

On the other side is the artwork itself. Most customers are not artists. I’ve heard customers say about a million times, "I can’t draw a straight line." I’m sure they can’t. So if you, as an airbrush artist, can draw even halfway decently, the customer most likely will think your drawing skills are fantastic. The point I’m making is that not everybody can draw, but everybody can write. This is why your lettering skills are so important to your success.

At our shops, we have a display of our lettering styles from which our customer can choose, along with different color combinations and shading. Our customers can take an active role in designing their shirt. This may be a display idea to incorporate into your shop.

I hope that you’ll save these lettering style photos and keep them close by for reference as you paint shirts for your customers.

In my monthly column "T-Shirt Basics," I am somewhat limited in what I can show you. For lettering, however, you have another great resource to refer to, and that is the Airbrush Action Getaway lettering videos "Beginning Lettering" and "Advanced Lettering" by my partner Pat Reynolds. Pat is surely one of the best T-shirt lettering artists, and checking out these two videos will be well worth the effort.

Look for West Coast Airbrush partners Terry Hill and Tom Davison in the next installment of "T-Shirt Basics." Both will continue this series and offer some more great tips and lettering styles that have added to their success. So, till next time: "Just do it!"

ABOUT THE ARTIST

In his 25 years of airbrushing, Pat has been involved in every facet of the airbrush world. He has won several awards in the paint division of the World of Wheels car shows, and been involved with the T-shirt industry, first as T-shirt artist for shops in Louisiana and Florida, then as shop owner, hiring other artists.

Pat works in the Airbrush Action "Getaway" program, and teaches around the world and he is known in the industry for his help in promoting education of the art of airbrush.

Look for more cool lettering styles in his Airbrush Action video. Check out Pat's "Painting On Vinyl" video series at www.patreynolds.com.