Heavy Metal Shirt Design Your goal when designing a Heavy Metal, Goth or Punk Shirt is to make it look awesome.
Take for Example my Smoking Skull Designs.
Its a Penciled Skull with a Broken Top. The teeth are sharpened and it has a joint sticking out of its mouth. There are also flames in the eye sockets.
Sounds like a straight forward design, right.
It is, that's the point.
Where it gets interesting and more artistic, is with the variations you can make with a single design.
I have versions of the skull where the flames are different colors, with smoke coming off the joint, with smoke coming out of the nose cavity, with neon colors, one with a chrome effect, and ones with lighting effects.
The desire is to make the Design look cool for everyone.
Here are some tips for good Heavy Metal Shirt Design.
1. Design for Black. Most Designs for Metal and Goth are going to be best on black shirts. Use PNG files with a clear background. Use a Removable black background for testing out the design. Any dark spots in your design can usually be erased to let the shirt's black complete the design.
2. Use dark themes like Skulls, Zombie faces, Blood, rotting flesh and other nasty horror movie themes. Also sinister looking symbols you craft can also look good.
3. Text should fit the music. For Industrial music; for example, use harsh, rough looking text. For Gothic / Black Metal archaic text looks best. Handwriting and fantasy fonts look very good. Just don't get too carried away with the decoration. I love Black Metal, but the band name logos can be almost unreadable.
4. Don't be afraid to go minimal. Metal is about looking brutal and evil, not throwing every little thing into the design.
5. Don't be afraid to leave a few "mistakes" on purpose. Good Metal Shirts; especially the older ones, have little mistakes that help give them personality. For Example, I have an artistic design called Campfire stories. I left a slight white edge around the top to give it a distinct look.
6. Use fire if it will work in the design. Fire and explosions are a good standby for Metal Design.
7. For doing Band Photos use old warehouses, forest scenes, broken down houses and the like. Anything that would look good in a Horror Movie would work for a Band Photo. They also look good for videos, by the way.
8. Never get rid of anything. A good tip for anything artistic. I have a few Designs that Are a bit strange, or just didn't work for me. I still cleaned them up and put Shirts in my shop with them. Why? I hear you ask. If you don't like them, why use them anyway?
Simple. Someone else might like them. It might look silly to you, someone else might think its the best shirt ever.
In summation the best designs for Heavy Metal are Dark and Brooding. Listen to the music and let it inspire the paths your imagination take.
Watch Horror movies that go along with the type of Metal you're working with and let those inspire you.
There is no end to the cool designs you can create if you just let your dark side shine through.
