Hawaiian Shirt- Intro to Digital Media
Introduction
This project required that we design an original and unique Hawaiian shirt, down to the small details. We had to create the shirt, and then afterwards create a design which would serve to become the pattern on the shirt. The project also required us to create realistic looking buttons, as well as an original Aloha label.
Materials:
Adobe Illustrator was used in the creation of this shirt design. The inspiration for the pattern design came from a previous personal gouache illustration, and the fabric image used for the label was sourced from the internet.
Creative Process:
I initially sketched out a few ideas for a pattern design, but felt unsatisfied with most of them. This past October (2021), I participated in something called Inktober, during which each day of October artists create some form of art that is inspired by a prompt from a list; either the official Inktober list or some other list. I followed a list from instagram user and artist @magsmunroe, and day 3 had 'Tattoo' as the prompt. Since I have wanted a tattoo of a toad, I took this opportunity to illustrate a potential future tattoo for myself. Considering this and my interest in toads and frogs, I decided to use this illustration as my design for the Hawaiian shirt.
On the left is my sketches of potential shirt designs. On the right is some of the tag sketches and company name ideas.
My gouache illustration of a toad holding star flowers.
Workflow:
By tracing along a shirt template (set to not visible in this screen capture), I created each panel of this shirt; the order in which this was done was starting with the panel that would be most behind (the dark blue panel), until getting to the one most forward (the left collar-red. Currently selected in the layers panel). By using different colours and setting the opacity to multiply, it was easier to trace along the template while also being able to see the perviously created panels to be aware of overlapping lines.
I made any necessary adjustments to ensure corners lined up properly and panels were in the correct position. I returned the opacity to normal. I used the width tool to change the stroke weight in certain areas; thinner in some and thicker in others to imitate where light and shadow would be.
After using the pen tool to trace my original illustration, I began to colour in the necessary components. I used the live paint tool to fill in the solid light blue, and on different layers began to do the details. This screenshot demonstrates the use of the brush tool (Art brush- Dry Brush #4) in the "yellow splotches" layer to achieve the desired appearance. The same brush was used for the blue splotches.
Once I was satisfied with the details of my design, I selected all of the components and used the pattern function (Object> Pattern> Make) to create the pattern. I selected the Tile Type to be 'Brick by Column', and selected the '3/4' option for Brick Offset. I selected the Copies to be '5 x 5'. Satisfied with the pattern, I clicked 'Done' at the top of the page and it was saved to my swatches panel.
To apply the pattern, for each individual shirt panel I selected it and using the Appearance panel: duplicated the fill, selected the pattern to use as the top fill, and chose my desired colour to use for the bottom fill, which serves as the background colour to use behind the pattern. I ultimately chose a pale green-yellow to use as that background fill.
Once this was done, I used the Rotate tool to select the pattern of each panel (selection tool; select the pattern Fill in Appearance panel). While keeping the tilde key (~) pressed, I rotated the pattern as desired as well as offsetting it vertically and horizontally to achieve a more natural look.
To achieve some dimensional effects, a few things were done. This screenshot captures the creation of shadow to indicate a lift of the collar components and show that there is some light being cast on the shirt. These shadows were achieved by using the Pen tool to create a shape that followed the contours of the collar pieces which was then slightly offset as if light was coming from the top right. Using the Appearance panel, the opacity was set to Multiply and a Gaussian Blur effect (fx option) was applied.
Creating the button involved first using the Ellipse Tool to create the large circle, and then four small ones within it. Using the Shape Builder Tool, those four small circles were 'punched out' to create holes. This shape was then duplicated, changed to a grey colour, and offset to take on the appearance of a shadow. The same effects were applied to it as described above for the collar shadows.
A gradient was applied to the button, in which varying colour shades were used to create a three dimensional effect; the goal was the appearance of radial hilite and shadow.
The material of the Aloha tag was sourced from and internet search of "Linen".
In creating the icon for the Aloha tag design, I used the Star Tool to create the shape, then used the Direct Selection tool to alter it to not be a perfect star. I duplicated the shape to create three stars. I maintained the colour scheme of the toad, which was yellow, blue, red. Using the appearance panel, the Opacity was set to Multiply to allow the linen fabric to show through, and the effect (fx) of 'Rough Pastels' was added for its stylistic qualities. The company name was chosen to directly represent the icon. The Opacity of the text was also set to Multiply.
With the button design completed as well as the Aloha tag, I just had to place them. The tag was placed centred in the back shirt panel, below the collar.
The buttons were placed evenly spaced apart along the front of the shirt, where they would be on a real shirt.
This is the final work. The individual components of the shirt (pattern design, button, tag) were neatly displayed in a row below the caption containing title of shirt and creator name (mine). The title "First Date Offering" was chosen because I can picture a toad holding a flower bouquet nervously showing up for a date wanting to impress them.
Conclusion:
This project really proved to me the importance of checking videos for instructions on how to do specific things, whether the videos were from the Professor or available on Youtube. The incorporation of so many methods in one assignment (such as using the rotation tool, width tool, pattern maker, etc) was at times overwhelming but led to the creation of something that felt satisfying. The main issue I faced with this project was technical difficulties that resulted in Illustrator running extremely slow, which was frustrating. It did mean that I could not do as many extra details as i wanted to, and also meant that I spent a ridiculous amount of time on this project, but it was ultimately worth it. In the future I would be more mindful of the complexity of the design used to create the pattern because of how complicated the graphic became once turned into a pattern, even though I do love the details of the toad. Since I had those technical difficulties, one tip I can share is that if anyone has a similar experience that they make the extra components (button and tag) on separate files, and then bring them over to the shirt file at the end. This saves time as you will not have to experience the lag that would be present in the shirt file.
