What to do?

Ok I have played SL for about a week now and I think I want to open a business, And I’m not quiet sure what I “need” to get started, yah T-shirt business! I want to start a T-shirt Business. I have the name and every thing all thought out. DE-mo is what I will call the store, all I need to do is buy a little bit of land and all the other stuff like how would I sell my stuff >.< if yall could help this young entrepreneur out I would be grateful.

T-shirts are a great starting place for clothing design sales. It's where I started, in fact! Here's some starting tips.

1: Get a good set of templates to work from, like the ones Chip Midnight provides for free.

2: Learn to make a good alpha layer for your shirts, so the seams on the sleeves are well-matched. Once you have a good mask, SAVE IT as part of your template set, on a hidden layer, so you can re-use that mask!

3: Be careful not to place your designs too close to the sides of the body. The sides distort worse.

4: Make sure you work on a different layer than your actual template lines, or they will show through. You can place a set of templete gridlines above your working layer and make that layer 60% transparent, so you can see the grid but not be painting on that layer.

5: Keep the shirt base color on a different layer than the shirt texture (Use a greyscale texture layer and multiply it with the flat color layer). That allows you to change shirt color without changing anything else, like wrinkles or the shirt design.

6: Beware of the temptation to directly copy commercially available T-shirt art. While Big Dog Sportsware isn't in SL yet, they might come here, and you don't want to get sued by a big corporation for copyright violation.

Amazing post, Ceera ! It sums up the process very well.

Thanks Raindrop. I've been making clothes in SL for over a year now, and have learned a LOT from the others in these forums, like Chip Midnight and Robin Sojurner. Glad to pass it on to new people seriously trying to get a good start.