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Turning your cover art into a shirt: what prints well

A good cover is already half of a good shirt. It is a picture fans recognise, and it belongs to a song they love. But a square on a phone screen and a print on a chest are different jobs. The print is bigger, the background is fabric, and the colours sit on cotton instead of glowing out of glass. Here is what changes, and how to adapt a cover so it prints well. Specs checked on 20 October 2026.

The print file

Print on demand services such as Printful print shirts direct to garment: an inkjet printer sprays ink into the fabric. Printful publishes a print file guide:

Two useful facts come out of this. First, a cover made at 3000 by 3000 has more than enough pixels for a chest print, since a square print rarely goes wider than about 12 inches. A Soundae cover is made at 1024 by 1024 and its 3000 by 3000 release file is that picture enlarged, so on a full width print it is softer than a photograph shot at 3000 pixels: keep the print a little smaller, soften the edges, and check a proof. Second, the shape of the print matters as much as the pixels.

The square problem

A full square cover printed edge to edge on a shirt looks like a sticker: a hard rectangle of ink stuck on cotton. It works for some covers, especially photographic ones with a strong frame. For most, one of these works better:

Dark shirts and light shirts

On a white shirt, ink prints straight onto the fabric and colours stay close to the screen. On any other colour, Printful says, the printer lays down a white base first, then the colour on top. That has three effects:

  1. Dark areas of the cover can disappear into the shirt. Very dark covers often look best on black shirts, where the dark parts simply become the shirt.
  2. Pale glows and haze can look chalky. Check a proof.
  3. Semi-transparent pixels can show white speckles. Solid tones print cleaner.

Covers with one colour flooding the frame tend to print well, because the shirt can be matched to that colour and the picture blends in.

Words on the shirt

A cover with no text is easier to turn into a shirt, because the picture stands alone. The song title, the artist name or a line from the lyrics can then go somewhere else: small under the picture, or on the back. A lyric that fans quote back to you is often the best text a shirt can carry. Our guide to text on cover art covers why clean, wordless pictures are worth keeping anyway.

Rights before you sell

Selling shirts is a different use from releasing music. Check that you can do it:

On Soundae you may publish, sell and license what you make on every plan, including the free one, so a cover you made there can go on a shirt.

Shirts in the Soundae Merch store

Soundae has its own Merch store. From a cover you kept, Design yours puts the picture on the front of a shirt, where you can move it, resize it, cut it to a shape, soften its edges and match the shirt colour to it. The song title goes on the back. Switch a design on and fans can buy it from your creator page, and you earn a royalty on each sale, at a percentage set for your account and shown on Your merch with your sales and payouts. Buyers check out through Stripe, signed in or not.

Before you print