Introduction: The goal of the Hawaiian project below was to create a usable T-shirt design. To do that, I would create buttons, an illustrator pattern, shadows and realistic placement of cloth based off of real shirts.
Materials: For this project, I use the Adobe Illustrator program on my Macintosh, and a single reference photo of a real Hawaiian T.
Creative Process: I wanted to make something that I have never seen on a Hawaiian Shirt before. At the same time, I wanted something equally mundane and playfully meaningless like any good Hawaiian shirt pattern, containing an item with no context to its poorly spaced smattering of itself across the fabric, stopping at the edges of each seam with no regard for continuity. I turned from my computer to my dad, the living stereotype of tourism attire, and asked him for a noun. He announced “Carrot!” and the rest is history.
Production Methods/Workflow: It was a bit of a challenge to have each and every panel of cloth a separate overlapping object, all kept track of and organized in layers. But the effort was worth it as I could separate each carrot pattern, pivot the left and right sleeves, and make each piece of cloth look uniquely cut from the same original carrot cloth, much like real Hawaiian shirts.
The button was the hardest thing for me, attempting to mimic shadows in holes of a small button. I played with the Outer Shadow style appearance but settled on a radius circle with a blue center and dark exterior. Some circles I added an orange circle for consistency of what’s being depicted behind each button hole. I’m not too happy with the muddy brown result of the black shadow against the blue and orange but they were so small that it wasn’t a big concern.
Final Work: I learned a lot about managing a large mass of layers and being able to employ those digital organizational techniques into this and future projects. The main thing I would do differently, were I to do this again, is find a way to remove the hard lines between each piece of cloth. I think next time I’d create a rivet or crease of sorts instead of a hard cartoonish edge.
