CMYK

Okay, I'll continue discussing the leprechaun illustration a little more. As I've mentioned, I want to start getting shirts printed by some of the online one-a-day t-shirt shops, like RIPT, Woot, or Threadless. While some of them are capable of elaborate direct-to-garment printing, others employ traditional screens, limiting the number of colors that can be used. Of course, if one understands how to utilize CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black), a fairly wide range of colors can be produced. It looks like the classic comic book color. All I did was separate the art into four separate channels and then transform each channel into a half-tone bitmap. Once they were realigned, I brought back the original ink art because the image looked too vague. A couple of tweaks later and voila! A new shirt design. One thing to note: if this is printed, it needs to be on a white shirt or have a white base to print over as any color will greatly affect the look of the image. Some companies can manage 5 screens, others cannot.

I do hope you enjoy the design and I will surely let everyone know if and when the shirt is made available.

A little early

It's the middle of November, but all the stores and theme parks have been celebrating Christmas for over two weeks now. Think of how Thanksgiving must feel. I decided to give Christmas a taste of its own medicine by jumping ahead to St. Patrick's Day. Actually, I drew this thing about ten years ago, but after painting the Frankenstein image, I wanted to try painting this one. It's all Photoshop.

Here is the original line drawing, for comparison.

RIPT submissions!

Hello. Those of you who can scroll down an inch or two may recognize these two images and wonder why I'm posting them again. It's because I made a couple of adjustments to incorporate halftone dots in order to make the screen printing process a little easier and wanted to show them to you. The Devil Girl was pretty simple; just convert image into a bit map and choose the halftone option. I did have to bring back my black lines, which made it more complicated, but manageable. With the Dinosaur, I had to apply the halftone, then select the dots themselves and paint them in. If there is an easier way to do that, I'd be happy to hear it, but this worked well enough. I submitted both images to RIPTapparel.com today. I'll let you know if they are accepted and when you can make a purchase.