Colour basics that actually change a printed garment

You do not need colour theory to design a shirt. You need four practical rules about how ink behaves on fabric, and how many colours to use.

Colour advice for screens does not transfer to clothing, because a screen emits light and a shirt reflects it. A few practical rules do most of the work.

Fewer colours look more expensive

One or two ink colours on a well chosen garment reads as designed. Five reads as a print of something that was made for a screen. This is why so much good merchandise is one colour on a plain shirt.

The garment counts as a colour

It is the largest area in the finished thing, so it is a colour in the palette rather than a background behind one. A two colour design on a coloured shirt is really a three colour design.

Bright colours need a dark ground

Warm and cool

Mixing a warm colour with a cool one produces contrast, which is useful for an accent and difficult for a whole design. If it looks slightly wrong and you cannot say why, this is usually it.

When you change the garment colour here, anything that would stop being readable is adjusted and anything that already reads is left exactly as drawn.

Check it small

Look at the design at the size of a thumbnail. That is roughly how much attention it gets from across a room, and any design that survives being small survives being worn.

Ink is not backlit

A colour on a screen is light being emitted at you. The same colour on fabric is light being reflected off it, and it will always look slightly duller than it did in the editor. This is not a printing fault, and choosing colours slightly stronger than look right on screen usually lands closer to what you imagined.

Skin tones and photographs

Photographs of people are the hardest thing to print on a coloured garment, because any part of the photograph that is transparent takes on the shirt colour, and skin tones shift badly. A photograph almost always wants a white or very light garment behind it.