Hawaiian Shirt Project
Introduction
In this project, our assigned task was to create a Hawaiian shirt featuring all the key components like the pattern, buttons label and unique shirt sections (collar, lapel, sleeves etc). The shirt could be as similar or as far away from a traditional Hawaiian shirt as we wanted, as long as it followed these guidelines.
Materials
Adobe Illustrator was the main material source used. A secondary material used was Youtube for tutorial and educational videos on Hawaiian shirts.
Creative Process
This project was assigned to us in October and being an enthusiast and lover of Halloween, I decided to draw my inspiration from there. I like ghosts and how versatile they can be, either extremely frightening like in horror movies or goofy like Casper the Friendly Ghost. For my shirt, I wanted a more pleasant ghost similar to Casper to be the main focus.
Workflow
I started the process of my Hawaiian shirt by creating my pattern. First I created the pattern on the left but decided to add more to it, thus ending with my final shirt pattern being the one on the right.
After creating my pattern, I traced out the sections of my Hawaiian shirt using a template to ensure the accuracy.
Once I traced out my shirt completely, I adjusted the line widths on various sections to create the illusion of a shadow.
I set my pattern to a Brick by Row tile with a 1/2 offset to prepare to add it to my shirt sections.
Here I added my pattern and using the tilde key, I offset it so no two panels had the pattern aligned evenly.
Using the ellipse tool, I began to make my button and added a gradient to it.
I made a copy of my original button and set its fill colour to be black. I changed its appearance to "multiply" at 40% and added a Gaussian Blur to it so that it could be used as a shadow.
After adding the shadow to the button, this was the final product. I tested it against my shirt but was not happy with the way the colours looked together with my shirt.
I experimented with various button styles and how they looked on my shirt before settling on the button with the grey gradient fill.
Using the rectangle tool, I started creating the label for my Hawaiian shirt. I wanted it to look like it had the same texture as a traditional label so using the "Texturizer" effect, I selected burlap as my texture and scaled so that the texture could be highly visible.
I added some stitching, graphics and shirt company name to my label and used the multiply effect on them so that they could blend with the label instead of looking like they were just sitting on top of it. I also decided to call the shirt company "Celebration Shirts" because they would have special shirts for all occasions and holidays.
Using the "Envelope" tool, I distorted my shirt label with an arch to follow the flow of shirt and make it more realistic.
Final Work
Conclusion
I spent a lot of time on this project experimenting with the various skills learned in class and applying them to different aspects of my shirt. I believe I got especially good at using the appearance panel and what the different effects do like "Multiply", "Screen", "Darken", "Lighten" and more. All in all, I had a fun time creating my Halloween themed Hawaiian shirt.
