Leonardo Ai T-Shirt Design Tutorial | Best FREE Midjourney Alternative for Print on Demand

one of the best free mid-journey Alternatives out there is Leonardo Ai and they've got a really nice easy to use interface the results look amazing and best of all you can even use the free Graphics that you've generated for commercial purposes so that's why in this video I'm going to show you how to use Leonardo to create t-shirt designs for print on demand first of all to get signed up to Leonardo you can follow the link in the description it will bring you to this homepage and then you can click on get instant access right here and enter your name and email address it might take a few days for you to get whitelisted you also get an email with a few tips that will help you speed up the process and once you've entered the details and pressed Count Me In and you will also be prompted to join their Discord server which also helps with getting whitelist faster if you've already got an account all you have to do here is Click yes I'm whitelisted and it should launch the Leonardo app and now I'm just going to give you a quick overview because when you first join Leonardo and open this tool um it is a bit overwhelming but I think compared to Mid Journey this is actually a lot easier to use once you get used to it and the interface looks a lot nicer in my opinion so on the home page what you can see right here is a few different models that you can use which essentially presets styles that the models are built with but that's not too important we're mainly going to be using the same exact model for print on demand T-shirt graphics and then you get this feed right here which is essentially the community feed you can see over here as well but it's also displayed on the home page you see what's trending right now so what is currently getting a lot of likes and this changes on a daily basis you always see some new graphics as you hover over them you've got these hard symbols which I recommend you look through this and you actually hat a few of the graphics and images that you like the style of and think could work well for your application whether it is t-shirt design posters or something else and that's what I've done and it's going to save me time in the future when I'm looking for a specific style and you can also change this up here to New for example to see the newest creations with Leonardo to get sort of more variety and not necessarily what's the most popular stuff and you can also click on top which has some of the most liked pictures ever on here so that's it in terms of the home screen and the Community Feed and next up we've got the personal feed so if we click into this you can see your Generations that you've created in the past and you can also click on liked feed up here which is what I just mentioned before if you like an image you can find it in here where you can easily copy the prompts which I'm going to show you in a minute right here which is one of the the easiest way to create graphics for the Leonardo is finding some other images that you like the style of and using the remix function to use the same prompt or change the same prompt around to fit your Niche one more thing that's important to note is that up here on the left hand corner top left hand corner you tokens so it says 105 for me you get 150 tokens every day and as you can see it resets in seven hours this is the free amount that you get you don't have to pay for it usually it's about one or two tokens per image depending on your settings so that is a lot of images per day for free there's no way of doing that with mid Journey so this is definitely a good benefit if you want to save some money or maybe you've ran out of your mid-uni credits or your speed credits and you want to generate some stuff for free so just jump into Leonardo it's a good alternative if you do run out of tokens or credits and you want to get more you can also upgrade right here but you don't have to that's the good thing with mid-journey you kind of have to have a paid plan because the free version first of all is very very limited in terms of how much you can generate and it doesn't have a commercial license which Leonardo has even on free plans you can also find that information in case you don't trust me in the FAQ section right here so click on that the menu then click on FAQ right here and it says can I use the images generated on this platform for commercial purposes yes you can this applies to images created by free users two that's the important part right here which I'm guessing a lot of people might be wondering so nothing to worry about and we can sell your designs as print unmanned products even if you're not paying for a Leonardo subscription [Music] now let's go ahead and have a look at the actual image generator which is where all the magic happens that you can find over here under user tools AI image generation click on that and then this page right here will open up at the top is where you enter your prompt so here there's a like an example bit that says a sticker cartoon fluffy ragdoll cat typically I found that Leonardo takes some longer more descriptive prompts than mid-journey currently and mid Journey you can type in something very simple and get amazing results Leonardo Ash so far not found that to be the case I haven't been using it for ages by the way I do prefer mid-journey overall in terms of the quality but I did still want to make a video about this because it is a great free alternative so um here you can select different models I've been using Leonardo diffusion for t-shirt design graphics and then we've now got a new feature on Leonardo I think this has only been added recently called Alchemy and this is in beta it gives you more detailed graphics and it might work for say posters for example but for t-shirt design it's not ideal and it also costs you more tokens right here so I typically turn this feature off you can also select how many images you generate with one prompt so I typically leave this at three and then you can select the image Dimensions as well as the aspect ratio so for t-shirts sticking to one to one square or three to two something like that is typically best and I like to also either select a thousand by 700 pixels or a thousand by a thousand right here those tend to work best for my purposes in terms of t-shirt design but you can mess around with these settings and see what works best for you and depending on what you choose right here you will get a different amount of tokens displayed on the right hand side that it will cost you to generate this new prompt so if I type in something very simple right here like a sticker of a cute dog and then hit generate it's going to load those images right here and once they're done it will erase 4 tokens from my stack right here so there we go that middle result looks okay the other ones didn't turn out too great but this is actually not the most effective way to create Graphics as I mentioned earlier using remix is a really cool function that I have in Leonardo which you can do with your favorite images for example so let's click on this Arrow right here to go back to the home screen and click back on personal feed here is where we see the lagged images and let's say we want to create a graphic in this sort of style right here of this cat click on it you get a bunch of information in terms of what the The Prompt was like and the settings what model was used and then you can click remix over here to instantly copy that prompt into your AI image generator with the same settings in terms of the model so we've got Leonardo diffusion selected right here but watch out Alchemy is still selected by default which is a bit annoying so turn that off we don't want to use alchemy Here and Now out you could just generate an image with these exact settings I don't like the pixel dimensions as much so I'm going to go back to square thousand by thousand so hit generate and you will get a variation of that image that we just saw with the cat I'm in the same sort of style or what I would recommend is going into the prompt and editing it so here we've got to the part that defines the animal and you could put something else in here like raccoon and that way we can customize the prompt and get different results with the same sort of style applied once the images have generated you get quite a few options if you hover over it right here that Leonardo has for you so there's different types of upscalers we've got a smooth One upscale image alternate so you've got tons of options you can even remove the background although I don't think it's that accurate we've got another crisp upscaler unzoom and download image now I would typically just download the images here and vectorize them afterwards which I'm show you in a minute I wouldn't really use these upscaters because I believe they yeah they do cost extra tokens and we can save those tokens and increase the quality elsewhere with a vectorizer or a different free upscaler but scrolling through this if you want some more prompts um I think this one looks quite good you can click on the plus symbol over here to reveal the entire prompt in your personal feed essentially or a new image generator and as you can see this is one I used that got quite good results for vehicles so we've got a motorbike here and we've got a jet ski and I'm going to leave this prompt and ask the first one in the description down below so you can copy and paste them if you want the helicopter didn't turn out too great so as you can see it's not always going to work well sometimes I feel like mid Journey would give you better results but nevertheless some of these look amazing like this motorbike really really cool color scheme as well and nice of sunset shapes in the background right here for this car as well if we click on load more previous generations you get sent back to the personal feed which is currently set to light but if I click on your Generations scroll down and show you a few more Graphics here we've got some other stars that turned out quite well some mounting Graphics right here in sort of a polygon style and here's that prompt if you're interested these Graphics look quite cool but are probably going to be hard to remove the background from and I didn't really like this lion but again a bit more challenging to use on a T-shirt and this style although it looks nice I think is a bit too detailed and once again removing the white background on these would be very very difficult next up we need to vectorize our Graphics now if you have some very photographic images that you've generated with Leonardo then upscaling is better than vectorizing in that case but since this is a tissue design tutorial I would recommend using vectorizer.ai which is currently in beta and free whilst and beta all you have to do here is just drag and drop your file into this website and it will quickly process this image and turn it into a vector that essentially makes it really really high quality extremely smooth and we can increase the size to whatever we want without losing quality so if you zoom in right here you can see the difference on the right hand side we've got a very smooth edge the left hand side we've got a pixelated image that is the power of a vector it is a path and not a pixel image vectorizer is great it's a really cool website but if you have tens or hundreds of Graphics that you want to vectorize then it is very time consuming because you can only do one image at a time there is an alternative though called my designs in case you didn't know they have a bulk vectorizer now it's the same vectorizer that I'm showing here it's just that you can use it in bulk with my designs for free and I made a separate video about that process if you want to save yourself some time it will be linked in the cards next up you need to click on download right here and then it will bring up a lot of different settings I usually like to change this to stack shapes on top of each other right here I think the default is the other option and then we can just click on download right here moving on now we need to do two things first of all remove the background from our images and there's many different ways to do this you can do it in Adobe Illustrator in Photoshop in photopia there's many different free options as well and I actually made a separate video covering three of those three options to remove the background from the image so check that out in case you're not using Adobe Illustrator which is what I'm going to be using in today's tutorial because it is my design tool of choice and the second step after removing the background is creating a t-shirt design with that graphic so adding some text some elements to sort of bring the design to life because only uploading plain AI Graphics to t-shirts is not necessarily going to get you as many sales as also adding in some text and creating more sort of fully fleshed out design so with illustrator what you can do to open up your vector file that we just downloaded is head to file and then click on place over here then find the vector on your device and click Place once you've got it selected then you'll see this funky symbol right here so just click and drag and that will then place your vector on the artboard by the way my artboard Dimensions right here are 4 500 pixels in width and 5400 pixels in height which is ideal for t-shirt design prints I'm using illustrator because I just really like it and it edits vectors but if you want a free alternative for Vector editing and there's a program called inkscape which you can actually download for free I'm not very familiar with it so I can't use it for tutorials unfortunately but if you don't want to pay for illustrator go check that out and now the cool thing is because this is a vector we can actually zoom in right here and edit the individual Parts very easily so we can change colors this way you can adjust the curves or the paths with these anchor points right here if you've got the direct selection tool selected also you can just click on the background hit delete and there we go it's gone now this is a very easy graphic to remove the background from to be fair sometimes you'll have to spend a bit longer to sort of refine the edges so now that we've got this graphic ready we want to add some phrases or a phrase I should say for this tutorial that multiple to make us a more funny more appealing to customers so there's a common sort of popular phrase with animals and it's going to be raccoons are my spirit animal is what I want to add to this design so first step is selecting the type tool you can also press t on your keyboard click anywhere on the app board and I'm going to just increase the size right here of this text the font I'm using right here is called minoria regular which I think is from creative Fabrica so if you want to use the same font I will also leave a link to that in the description it's a really nice distressed font that's bold and it has a bit of a fun feel to it so let's start off with raccoons up here and then drag this down click on the text layer hold down alt to copy this down and let's put my and then once again favorite animal I think that's how I want to lay out the text in terms of the order my masterpiece obviously this is not done I want to make some adjustments to this we need a bit more space for the text in fact so with the raccoons pad I think it would be nice to have a bit of an arch right here to round this off along the top and also I want to actually match the orange it's always a good idea to match your font colors to parts of your design to make it look more coherent and you do that by having the text selected and then clicking I on your keyboard to bring up the eyedropper tool and now you can sample any color so let's hover over this orange and select that next up I'm going to go to object envelope distort make with warp and it will open up right here with the warp options I'm going to use ARC for this example and I think we want to settle at around 40 for the bend hit okay and now we've got this text so nicely custom Mars right here along the top I also like to see how the ears right here are behind the text I like to have them in front of the text and slightly hide the text to give it some depth so if you want to bring your graphic to the front just select it hold down control shift and then the closing square bracket on your keyboard to bring that to the front and I think that looks quite nice let's actually Center this up here horizontally Line to Center as well as with the text we'll do the same and there we go that's the first part of our layout done down here are my I think that's okay for now in fact this is currently set to Black and as you can see the raccoon color is sort of a very dark blue so once again what we're going to do is match or sample the the color of the raccoon instead of using black and for this down here spirit animal if we pull this out to the edge I think this word is too small I want that to be bigger and more in Focus because spirit animal raccoons that's of the most important part of our design so let's first of all sample the color once again and actually change the font to something more condensed that we can make bigger so let's try darkest Saturday right here another creative fabric font and as you can see we can now make this quite a bit bigger it's going to take up more space and stand out a bit more as well because it's a different kind of font so think that looks quite good now just to fill out some of this space around here because it does look a bit empty and a bit plain and first of all if you've got a gap right here next to text what I like to do quite often is just add some Stars you've got the star tool over here just select that zoom in draw out a star while holding on alt and shift kind of like this and then you can duplicate that over once again click on drag while holding on alt and shift to duplicate now I've got two stars that we can once again copy over to the other side and now let's group all of these stars with Ctrl g once you've got them all selected sample the orange from a raccoon because I think that looks a lot nicer her for the stars and now we can Center these right here as well as our text at the bottom line to artboard and Center both of these so there we go that's sorted kind of the spacing or the empty space next to our my and now we've got a bit of sort of empty areas right here you don't have to necessarily fill that out but I think we could do some nice effect right here by adding some lines that sort of come out of the raccoon's head which sounds stupid but yeah it can create a nice effect so we're going to use the pen tool in this case which you can access by clicking p on your keyboard as well we'll start by drawing out a straight line to the sort of bottom left right here kind of like this and my settings for this line right here by the way I've only got a stroke color selected no fill and the stroke settings uh set to dashed line the dash is 135 pixels and the Gap is 90 pixels and I've also enabled round caps which I think makes for a nice affect the weight of the stroke is 40 pixels by the way you can mess around with these settings and adjust them how you like but I think and that line Looks quite good and now we can go back to the pen tool and actually just draw out some more lines that sort of curve around this raccoon so I always click and drag this out click again and then you can hold down control and click on the artboard to deselect so we can sort of draw a new line go around the edge in this case I actually didn't do too well because the raccoon comes out a bit further here I would have moved it to the left I think a bit so we want to follow the line of the raccoon with our pen tool let's do the next one this one can start aiming up a little bit like so and the next one even further so that looks quite cool you can always use the direct selection tool to adjust some of these anchor points as well and now we can very easily select all of these lines hold down alt to copy them over shifts to keep them in line and then once they're over here we'll use the reflection tool which you can access by hitting o on your keyboard and then we'll just click and drag then hold down shift and there we go we can sort of reflect this all the way around which looks really really cool now if we move this in a tiny bit so there we go I think that looks quite a lot nicer now I would usually go about uh sort of alternating the colorsy a bit because there's a lot of orange and not as much black so select a few of these lines we need to go to object expand expand these shapes and then we can sample the same color so there we go that looks quite nice now and it has made for a more sort of fleshed Out t-shirt design that is going to make people laugh with the sentence and more likely to be purchased than just a random raccoon graphic which there's many many off so yeah I hope this has given you some ideas some inspiration for your own designs and let me know if you've got any questions in the comments down below if you're looking for some more AI tools to help boost your print-on-demand sales make sure to check out this video next

Channel: Philip Anders

Views: 126,032

Keywords: merch by amazon, print on demand, mba, t-shirt business, t-shirt, design, tutorial, increase sales, teepublic, redbubble, graphic designer, zazzle, etsy, teespring, spreadshirt, amazon merch on demand, amazon merch, merch on demand, on demand, tier 10, teir 10, tier 25, low tier, passive income

Id: AJcMXmaB56k

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023