I decided to create a enter a competition brief for purple leaves which is a T-shirt company based in Germany. I found out about this because one of the designers of the company emailed me saying he liked my work and that I should enter into the next competition which was in a few weeks.
Seeing as he liked my work and was probably judging the competition, I felt like this would be a good opportunity for me to possibly win.
There are no rules to the brief, other than it can be an illustration, photograph, type or a combination to create a t-shirt graphic that will be popular and ultimately sell on their online shop. The winner gets £400 as well as £1 from every t-shirt that is sold online.
Seeing as the target audience was primarily young adults around a similar age to me, I decided to go with a design that would be relevant to the time and pick on certain trend movements at the minute.
I re-visited an old idea of mine which was a Hipster sat on a deck chair covered in tattoos.
I created this drawing originally on trace using an old photograph of my granddad as reference...
So this is the original photograph that I manipulated onto a deckchair as a fathers day card for my dad last year. I decided to use this basic outline as a starting point for my illustration.
My original sketch consisted of the outline with a different face. I didn't like the first attempt so drew a separate on to the side, I think the facial features, glasses and hair looks a lot better on this one, so this is the one I will be translating to digital.
I also experimented with different tattoo sketches across the whole body. I'll use some and probably alter others...
I started digitalising my rough sketches into neat strokes and I got the basic outline down then started to add the tattoos. I used other images as reference and tried to keep the theme traditional.
I added some brogues to the feet again using another image as reference. I then wanted to add some tone to the image so it wasn't a flat illustration so decided to use these half tone like patterned dots and different sizes to make things look darker and lighter.
I dropped the dots into the background to give the image some definition.
I then used different sized dots to add further definition to the shoes, shorts and deck chair creating a sense of light and dark tones.
Placing the image on a T-shirt
I wanted the illustration to have colour for the t-shirt, so experimented with red and blue and felt that blue worked better. I had to remove the background because I felt that the image sat better on a plain white Tee as a stand alone illustration. This was the final outcome I created...
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