This project began with an original watercolor painting of the Midtown Pizza building which was provided by the customer.
The first step was shooting a high quality photo of the painting with my camera so that I could have a reference with which to rebuild a t-shirt design and attempt to simulate a “watercolor” look that we could reproduce on a t-shirt in three colors.
The next step was to create a black and white line drawing which would serve as the "bones" of the design and would be printed in black ink.
This part was drawn by hand with a black fine-point Sharpie and then scanned and converted to a vector-based file in Adobe Illustrator.
Now that the line drawing is completed we need to create the "watercolor" element.
This was accomplished by simulating watercolor in Adobe Photoshop. I found some watercolor brushes online and loaded those into Photoshop. I then “painted” the background color using these brushes and saved a color file which is then stacked underneath the black and white line drawing. The two colors are saved as spot-colors so that we can print each color separately on the t-shirt.
Watercolor-Simulation Design
12Point Studios is very happy with the outcome of this project. Rather than printing the original painting “as-is” on the t-shirt, we decided to use the colors from Midtown Pizza’s logo and re-create a watercolor design based on those colors. What this accomplished was to create a more visually striking design that not only printed better but also tied the design into the brand of the company.
Details
Services
T-shirt Design
Client
Midtown Pizza
Elements Used
Software, Photography, Drawing
Software Used
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator