progression

I am still incredibly new to Illustrator and Photoshop, so everytime I learn anything new, it makes a huge difference. Case in point is my profile pic. First I sketched the picture with pencil on tracing paper.

My 1st attempt at drawing the image in Illustrator:

I was playing with gradients a little, but my lines are horrible. I am NOT proficient with the pen tool. Hopefully practice really does make perfect.

My 2nd attempt in Illustrator:

I learned a little bit about mesh gradients, which I incorporated into the shoes and hair. Also, some of the line work is a little better. Maybe in 6 months I'll take another stab at it to see how far I've come.

Edited to add: I didn't export very high quality images from Illustrator, so they are pixelated. The real images are much smoother. If I get around to it, I'll export them as PNG files and post again.

Always tweaking....

I am always tweaking things I draw...always looking for ways to improve. Especially with anything I create digitally since I still have so much to learn.

I added one small thing to the shamrock from the honeymoon t-shirt, but I think it really looks better. So I made a shape that follows the edge of one leaf, but a little smaller. I filled it with a greyscale gradient, and then set the transparency to "screen" mode.

I also made a small change to the back of the shirt. I added a picture of a typical Ireland road sign and just moved some of the other images around. The road sign was made by using the live trace feature on an image from the internet. Again, a small change, but I think it really improves the overall look. Too bad I made these changes after the shirts have shipped.

T-shirt I designed

Shaun and I are going to Ireland for our honeymoon, and we had this really silly idea to make t-shirts for the trip. He had heard of someone else doing something similar, and the bartenders and locals loved it.

I designed everything in Illustrator CS2. These designs really tested my limited knowledge of the program, and I think I used every technique I know, and may have even learned a think or two in the process. Most of the images were from the web, and then I used the "live trace" and/or "live paint" features. I created the shamrock using the "blend" tool. I saved both images as a PNG file, and uploaded them to CafePress to be printed.

Front of shirt (actual size around 4 inches, located at pocket area):


Back of shirt (centered):