Custom T-Shirts in 30 Minutes with the xTool Apparel Printer! | Full Tutorial + AI Design Tips

we just made these two t-shirts from design to print and press in under 30 minutes using the X Tool apparel printer and we'll show you how we did it right now what is up and welcome back you like to do it build it or make it so do we and we have new videos each week our Jamberee is right around the corner so this week we'll be making some merch or some t-shirts for the Jamberee using our X tool apparel printer if you're not familiar with our Jambburye it's going to be an action-packed weekend full of hands-on make and take workshops we'll be using all of our fun tools we'll be using our paints our lasers our printers the apparel printer so come and join us every hour there will be a new session we'll rotate through and make something at each station very hands-on expect to get in there and get your hands dirty all the details will be in a link below step one we need to make our t-shirt designs so we already have our flyer our ticket and all of the other stuff that goes along with it design we did it with a like a color explosion and I thought it would be fun to start with Exol's Creative Space and use some of their AI capabilities and see what it comes up with maybe make it easy on oursel we already know we want to throw the fox in there we know we want to throw some paint explosion in there maybe a laser logo something so let's start in XTools Creative Space and see what it gives us the Xtool apparel printer is going to use XTools Creative Space and this is the main opening page so we're going to start a new project and down here in the bottom left is the AI make and I think it would be fun let's see just let's just see what it gives us and I definitely think you should drive with this AI because AI loves to mess with me and give me nightmare fuel i've seen some of your work so there's so many different fun things in here it really kind of I didn't realize it had so many options and it's a nice way to um organize your thoughts so this is vector engraving so for laser cutting these are great AI images for doing laser uh projects this is 3D engraving so if you want to do the 3D engraving like you can do with some of our other machines yes then it goes into things like logo and you can see there's different types of logos those are good shirts yeah but I this I don't really think we're getting uh the theme of the jamboree out of any of these like diving eagles i'm not really where we're at flying high text graphics classic quote coloring book flying high that bear over there on the right is flying high monochrome so this would be all black and white type images and that's certainly not what I'm looking for cuz I'm I'm going ink explosion here cutaway i think this is cool greeting card colorful sticker uh and I thought about using this one uh maybe we can come back to it but I know what I'm looking for and I'm thinking we're somewhere over in uh is it this area or I think back in the logo section so here is some typography two of my favorites as I've played with this is the handmade poster i love this one and the floral text i've loved this one and I really did the split monogram look at that right there and um when I show you some of my history I'll show you some stuff that we did with that one very cool colorful printing 70s art doodle i haven't really done much with this yeah that's what I was thinking too and look they have foxes on them so that's funny they're speaking to me and the screen printing oh look at that so I think we are going to start back here in logo we're just going to dial it back on some of these and I gonna do let's see the creative logo now we're gonna add your pattern description so this is what I'm going to put in i wrote it down so I had to think it through a little bit we're going to do a colorful realistic ink cloud with line drawn box profile in front of realistic no in front of ink cloud oh right colorful realistic ink cloud with line drawn fox profile in front just period that's it yep and then I think this should say obviously K&NG jamboree well you got a secret separate text area yes oh nice so it's going to give us the pattern give us the text and then center text or under text i guess under because I want the fox in the center do I need to say that up here colorful realistic ink cloud with line drawn fox profile maybe should say in the centered i'll just say in front with text underneath see what it gives you and then I'm going to do four of them now it is because I'm doing four of them i do have to use my credits i've got a bunch of credits and I bought a whole pack for like I don't remember 20 or $30 for like a,000 credits so yeah they're super affordable i'm going to use 20 of 24 of them to generate four images that's like six credits an image that's not bad this is showing you some stuff I worked on before the history but we're going to we're going to do this live and see what it's giving us hey I'm kind of impressed with how well it did the ink cloud the ink cloud looks good but the fox isn't really where I want him to be and he's colored this one an outline wonder if I said um Oh I like that ink cloud that was a good ink cloud right what What am I gonna How do I keep the ink cloud how could I change the wording for the fox with line drawn with fox silhouette line art fox with line art fox profile in front i'm going to generate it again give me essentially the same thing i like the other ink clouds better the first round of ink clouds they look great the the ink clouds look great let's go through some other things that I did i did try some others creative logo i felt it was getting me closest i guess it ignored colorful and this one he's I mean he's the nighttime fox he's pretty cool now this is floral text i showed you this before i love these i just love the way this looks than I know probably just you know I'm a female and this really speaks to me but I think a fun little K&G jamboree t-shirt with the flowers on there they're all colorful uh I really I really like the way that looks this is another creative logo you can see your history so you can see what I put in before under text and I thought that was funny it really did no I don't want to add it ah it's trying to add it i clicked on it so it's going to add it to my canvas well I should have left it because I think the cloud the cloud is kind of funny i mean it's literally taking what I'm asking clouds i did some of the doodle art oh that's trippy yeah and it tried to put the cloud in there that was not what I needed the deta visions his mind is foggy right he's really He's really thinking about it visual arts this is the sticker version those are kind of cute cutesy yes they're cute and he does he gave me the fox profile and the and the ink cloud but wasn't really Kelly keep putting his head in the clouds here's another sticker version and these are cute right yeah that's not bad i mean look at that it AI generated those i think it did a great job that guy's missing his eyes but this guy's cute look at that these are for some other things I did but I will Oh scroll down here uh the split monogram oh yeah look at that yeah I did a bunch of different versions of those step two time to prepare our print it's been about four or five days since we had this guy running so we're going to need to do a couple of cleanings and a little bit of maintenance before we get going right i thought it would be great to just kind of show you exactly what we do when we get ready to print using the apparel printer once it powers on it automatically runs a cleaning process that takes about 1 minute and when it's complete with that you'll see it run a test print and here since ours has sat for a few days we're going to do a second cleaning process and just double check that the white ink looks good the color ink looks great step three we're going to set all of our print options i thought I would show you in Creative Space the different option settings that you can choose from so that you can see some of the cool features that it has including the mockups well we had fun creating some AI logos garrett created a logo in Photoshop that really added all the features and components that we wanted to kind of represent our brand so I have that loaded here and I wanted to show you what's next for apparel printing from here truly I can just say print but I want to show you some of the features over here so if I go into the the adjust features I can show you some of the different alternatives or options that you have for printing so it defaults to eight pass or 720 by 1200 this is how detailed and um how many ink droplets are put down so how much color is really in your print and so you can go a little bit lower you can go a little bit higher but so far eight has been great for everything that I've done there's white ink fill so you can choose whether you want to put ink over the whole image or only the object fill which is what we're doing it's only going to add ink behind where white ink behind where our color ink objects are so we'll leave that setting i'm not really that familiar with feather percent here but it does give you a little how to how to make the pattern fade so the higher the feather value the better the transition is between each line of the printed image so you can see here the individual let me go back you can see the lines or how it really transitions really well between those colors so of course because we have this ink splatter we definitely want to keep feather at 100% that's the default value white ink reduction this is like I said it'll print the ink first and then it'll add the white in the back you can bring your white ink in a little bit just to make sure that it doesn't bleed over the colored inks but zero will work well for us well I'll show you um we'll do a 0.5 here's a little tip that I found with this software it won't let you just put put 0.5 in there but you can put five arrow over and then put the point and now it'll let you do 0.5 that's a little extool creative space trick for you yeah we'll leave it at birectional color ink 100% white ink defaults to 75% i personally like to keep it at 100% because I have so much color here and I know I have some white which you can't see yet but I'm going to show you uh I'm going to leave the white ink at 100% and then you always want to leave mirror printing on because you do need to print it upside down where it'll print the color first then white then you add the glue so it goes on the It goes on the transfer film face down yes on the transfer film face down that's what mirror printing does and you'll see that in the next screen when I click print but now what I really want to show you is one of the coolest little features here the mockups so Excel gives you different types of t-shirt mockups and what your logo will look like and how it will fit on different types of t-shirts you can see it on a model and you can adjust your print here i'm going to put it on his shirt and maybe I need it just a little bit bigger i can expand it and say "Okay that looks a little bit nicer on his shirt." But again you really can't see all of the logo but what you can't see is that there's a white fox in there so I can change the color of his t-shirt to a black t-shirt and now you can see the white fox isn't that cool and then uh you can change it to really any color cuz I had done it on some like a navy blue shirt and what it would look like what other color shirts should we offer uh you can just test all of those things out now I also consider doing this with a little like pocket or breast logo and then the full logo on the back of the shirt these mockups or these flatlays up here in the upper left corner you can see this little icon here is showing you that there's multiple versions or multiple images in there so here I can change this to the back of the t-shirt and now we're looking at the back of the shirt i can change the size from large extra large small because the logo that we have might not might be too big for a small shirt so I might need to adjust that a little bit for maybe a small shirt if I were doing the back or the I'm going to put this back to the front and then I can also change the color of the shirt so I'm going to put it back on the black shirt and another great feature of this is I can turn around and download the mockup so all of the mockups that I do whether I'm using the model or I'm just using the flatlays I can export them with my logo on them and use it in my marketing or add it to my Shopify store i'll have the image and the mockup right there that was going to be my next question so if I can download those mockups can I use them to advertise my products yes yes you can and then there's there's a bunch more so for the t-shirts if you hit expand you'll see different models i liked this version right here where you added the model and she's got uh her little jacket on and you can see the K&G now I do need to change the color of her shirt again so that you can really see the Fox logo just peeking at us from her over shirt and yeah it's a little too big for her shirt because she's probably wearing a size small and then apply the scaling so when I say okay I've shrunk I've changed the size of my logo a couple of times i can click apply scaling and it will automatically change i don't know if you could see it back there it actually changed the size of the image on my artboard and I can go right from here and say print current design i can download it as I stated let me show you a couple of other things before we leave out of here uh you can do the hoodies and sweaters give you a little gist of all the different models are for that one and then of course some fun bags and some merch so I did uh and you can change the color of these as well so here's the little tote bag and I can change the color to black you can uh tilt it a little and now I have a great mockup design of what our logo would look like on a tote bag so I've already applied the scaling for the other shirt i had it at 10.5 on the t-shirt for the girl with the jean jacket you can see that it adjusted the width to 9.416 for a smaller size shirt so that's something to think about i can't just print a hundred of these i do need to think about uh different logo sizes for differentiz shirts step four time to print all of our settings are set our ink levels are set now it's time to send it to the printer from here we're going to click print and just like if you were using this with your laser it is going to give you a quick preview and because we left mirror on you can now see that this is backwards so KN&NG is actually printed backwards and this is how it's going to print so that it lays the ink the white and then applies the glue one of the cons with this machine is that you do have to use the proprietary films and inks and I can see in the future it could be a challenge for me if I run out of film I'm going to want to have it tomorrow because most likely I've got a rush job and you'll have to order it and wait for it to come in so I think we've already got two on hand and when this one runs out I'll go ahead and order the next one and have it ready to go but what's great about that is while we are talking it's done the print and it's already applied the glue and it's moved it into the baking step five time for the old print and press our image looks great we're ready to go we have a t-shirt the only prep you really need to do is make sure that you lint roll any t-shirt before pressing you really don't want to have any kind of lint or cat hair in our case between the t-shirt and the transfer and then I do a quick prep-press i put it on the bed lay it down just to make sure there's no wrinkles in there all right slide it back we're going to print these at or press these at 3:15 for 15 seconds so 15 second pre-press oh I don't need a full pre-press no you don't couple of tips for t-shirts if you have never done t-shirts before go ahead and do this little quick fold here from side to side so you know exactly where the center is and then really you're just going to put like three or four fingers there garrett does like three fingers i do like four you got tiny hands and then just line it up it's really just kind of eyeballing this center crease that he put in there not down the whole image just a little bit at the top maybe a little bit at the bottom and make sure it's set it's just a 15second press in that 15 seconds we could tell you that you could print on anything canvas cotton polyester denim leather and now while we did in a previous video tell you that DTF you typically only want to do this on soft goods you can DTF on wood and metals we've done that before and it looks great a cold peel so I'm going to set that aside for a second and our second print should be done i'll grab that and prepress this hot off the presses we got our second one ready to go this is good because you know what we didn't actually show you this does have this color bar along the side you do need to cut that off because it does have glue and everything on it and it will press right to your t-shirt if you don't cut that off just give it a trim yeah nothing special just cut it with some scissors straight down the side again I'm just looking for the center of this image just to give me a nice eyeball yeah pinch the top pinch the bottom 3 to 4 inches from the top mhm i usually make sure that the this the ribbing on the top of your shirt is off of my base plate there so that it even it presses nice and flat and even and this one's just about ready to come off yeah I just do a little shake sometimes while it's doing it next piece and you can Ready yep all right let's keep a little eye on it these got little pieces i got to babysit some of these little paint pieces a little bit all right we'll set this one aside and now we do a second press just to make sure when you pulled up that transfer sheet if anything might have come with it or unstuck this will just make sure everything sticks back down we're going to cover it with a little teflon sheet this time another 15 seconds and I will sometimes Yes while that's printing for the second press I go ahead and do this and cool it you kind of know when it's cool enough because when I'm cool down fairly quick it starts to peel you can see kind of already starting to come off a little bit there you go this one's done already all right I'll lay this one down yeah it's already coming off just by shaking it mhm shake around give it a little jiggle give it a little wiggle i don't want you to burn yourself you're all up under there i enjoy the heat it's been normal live so my my pros are that I don't need to know any RIP software i just load my image set it to the size that I want i really like that I can see what it looks like on um what do you call that model or a mockup before I do it because there are so many times I go too big in my I have my logo from armpit to armpit on my shirts that's kid it happens a lot so it's good to see it on something before I print it and then I really enjoy that once it goes to the printer I don't have to touch it again till it drops out of the bottom ready to press right that is my biggest pro i've done the DTF i've done the shaking of the glue and putting it in the in the heater and I love that I can just hit print and then I don't touch it again till it comes out the bottom ready to go ready to be pressed and that is it and I love that now I know there are some folks that are frustrated that you have to use um proprietary oh put it right down yes let me do this again right no just do it so I know that folks are a little frustrated that you have to use proprietary inks and proprietary film but if I can just load that image and hit print and watch it track all the way through because it has the holes on the side I am all for it it's just a set and forget kind of thing and it is comparably priced so that's a good thing too you can line them up you can batch them out i could say "Print 10 of these and walk away come back and I have a stack of 10 at the bottom." Mhm that uh that is great i'm loving it so far I am really loving this printer i'm excited to do more i originally thought we should do these t-shirts to me somewhere around 25 to 50 is where you would leave DTF and go to screen printing but something like this ink crowd here with all these colors I am not sure that you could you could pull this off with a screen print it would probably be like 15 screens custom color inks yeah it's really going to add to the cost yeah I don't think it would be uh Yeah I was going to say worth the cost to go to go to screen printing all right happy with these two down 98 to go we could batch them up and we got plenty of time to work on these pieces well you saw how fast these two went and now once everything's loaded I can just hit print again from here i can even say how many I want to print so I'm about out of time i got 98 shirts to go make you got something to do and then we will see you on Sunday where we'll uh talk about how we did it built it made it and then we'll see you on Tuesday for Test Cut Tuesday big thanks to all of our patrons we love you guys that is the best way to support this channel join us over on Patreon for some after shows extra content free files early access to the Jamberee tickets yes Jamberee one more thing Jamberee tickets go on sale for everyone April 1st so go grab yours it's going to be a whole fun weekend you're going to build your own goodie bag every station you go to you're going to make something build your own goodie bag