istock Contest: Screen Yrself


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istock are running a contest called Screen Yrslef, where you design a t-shirt meeting the following requirements:

I came up with the idea for this design relatively quickly. There's a collection of photographs of Dancers by AYakovlev that I really like. I used one of these images for my Passion and focus poster design. I have been wanting to use some of the other images he has and this seemed the perfect opportunity.

A lot of the earlier designs had a cartoon feel, not that there is anything wrong with that but I wanted to follow a more serious feel for my design. The first problem I found myself with and struggled with all the way through the design was the three colours limit. I tried cutting the dancers out and then blacking them out to one colour, but felt you lost too much detail and feel of the images, so I decided to use two colours for the dancers. To get the real life coloured photographs down to two colours I first cut out the background, then darkened the image if it needed it and removed all colour (Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation>Saturation(-100) Lightness(-20)), I then increased the contrast (Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast>Contrast(+100)). The image was now ready to apply the cut out filter (Filter>Artistic>Cutout(Levels>2)).

With all my dancers now ready for the t-shirt I moved on to making my photographs for the dancers to be in. I used stock vector: Grunge Frames and Elements for the frames and paint splatters. The photos didn't feel solid enough so I added dark blue boxes behind each frame, this then made the photographs feel too fixed so I changed the angle of each frame and added the paint splatter to really rock up the image.

Let me know what you think of the T-shirt design!

Published 23.09.08