AI Art Generation for Print on Demand Products - One Best Thing

As I have been exploring AI Art Generation, I have been seeing examples of people who are using it to create images to put on both personal and commercial products like t-shirts and mugs. I was curious how that would work, so recently I decided to explore the process.

So, this all began with an idea - I wanted a long sleeved holiday t-shirt with a vintage style logo that said "Merry and Bright." I played around trying to draw a design in Procreate and other apps, but my skills just couldn't produce the style of design that I was imagining.

So I went into Ideogram, and started using AI for generating a variety of images with text. I loved many of the styles, but found as I looked at them closer, there were wonky elements in both the lettering and decoration. When I finally found a design that I thought would work, I remixed it quite a few times until I got an image that was fairly clean (bottom right).

Once that was done, I wanted to clean up the image a bit. (If I knew Photoshop, I'm sure that would have been my best option!) Instead, I used an upscaling website called Bigjpg to make the image larger and smooth out some of the jagged pixels. Then I pulled it into Procreate and cleaned up some of the weird spots in the lettering and the decoration. Finally, I added some texture to the lettering, and made the design transparent. (If you have suggestions for an easier workflow, I'd love for you to share them in the comments!) I honestly wasn't sure what I was doing, so I kept playing with the design until I thought the design looked ok.

I used a store on Amazon to print the image on a shirt. It was not too expensive (about $20 US) and had the color of shirt that I wanted. It took about 3 weeks to arrive. I wasn't sure what to expect, but was very pleased with the way the design transferred onto the shirt. The shirt fabric was actually a bit heavier than expected. I ordered a medium - next time I would go with a large size. Overall the experiment was a success!

I think AI Art offers great opportunities for teachers and other people who have creative ideas to make their own custom products. I have used the Zazzle website in the past to make mugs and water bottles as gifts, and sites like this offer a vast variety of products for your designs. However, if you are using AI to generate products for commercial use, you need to check carefully in the terms of usage in the generator to see if it is allowed.

CALL TO ACTION: Do you have any ideas of products that you could create with AI Art? I'd love for you to share your thoughts in the comments.

One Best Thing:

This post is a part of my One Best Thing Project "AI Art for Inspiration, Creativity, and Learning." I am collecting my AI Art project ideas and resources at this website:

https://sites.google.com/view/creativeapptitude/ai-art