Although many things have changed in my life throughout the years, two things have not; my love for art and passion for sports. I’ve always enjoyed drawing and painting, as well as observing others creations. There is no right or wrong when it comes to art, and I’ve never been much for rules. Art allows people to express themselves and their ideas, while enriching others everyday lives through works of architecture, furniture, packaging, advertisement etc. as well as traditional mediums like paintings and music. We all benefit in many ways from our neighbors simply being their creative selves and sharing their gifts with the world.
Sports serve a similar role of bringing deeper meaning to our lives. Number one, they encourage us to get out and exercise. This is important for anyone interesting in developing and maintaining a healthy lifestyle and the relationship between mind, soul and body; and especially us creative professionals who spend a large amount of time in a seated position in front of a computer. They also help promote the competitive spirit, teamwork, individual responsibility, determination, perseverance and a host of other beneficial traits and values. Plus, they are social events that gather people from all walks of life together for one common cause-either to pull together and win on the field or to cheer for our favorite team on the sidelines.
I am lucky to be able to enjoy both of my passions on a daily basis in my work at The Cotton Exchange, a national leader in custom-decorated sports and casual apparel here in America. I have learned much since I traded in the Chef’s hat for a Wacom Tablet (a glorified mouse) two years after studying Graphic Design in college. In my nearly two years with the company I have strengthened my skills in Illustrator, especially with regards to type. I have also been able to do some nice drawing work, create more vectors than you can shake a stick at, work with color relationships, and occasionally crack Photoshop open, all while learning the ins and outs of a large screen-printing business. It’s been rewarding to do what I love and call it work, I’m thankful every day.
All work/images copyright © 2009 Lucas Albrecht

As a designer, there is nothing more satisfying than seeing the real-world implementation of your work. From thumbnails and research all the way through roughs and revisions, design can be a grueling process sometimes. The payoff is what keeps us coming back; that moment where everything comes together and you can be relatively satisfied that there are no more additions or subtractions to make. Sometimes this point is never reached; deadlines may force you to deliver work that is not necessarily sub-par, but could certainly use more time and tweaking. (Most designers I’ve come across are notoriously perfectionist, myself included.) I can relate these moments of design bliss to more, less-exciting professions, such as manual labor. I recall one of my first summer jobs as a landscaper, in the August heat sweating my ass off. As rough as it could be, multiple times throughout the day I would look back at a freshly mowed and trimmed yard and get a nice feeling of accomplishment; a job well-done. This tangible payoff appeals to me in life. I like to see results when I work hard. It’s an enjoyable feeling.

Camp Electric is a summer music camp for young people located near Nashville, TN. They feature a variety of instructors teaching different instruments and giving lessons to the campers. It seems like a pretty sweet place, but I wouldn’t make it because they only feature real instruments. My turntable skills may be under-appreciated I fear. I was stoked when this design was ordered and was able to make it out to the print floor and snag a few samples for my portfolio, as well as that great feeling of accomplishment. People will soon be rocking out with my design on. Sweet.

During the production/printing phase there were a few minor technical issues that came up. Some of my strokes were too light and needed to be thickened up so as not to fill in with ink, or be too small to print. These are issues I always have to be aware of when designing for t-shirts. The constraints are limiting sometimes, but it becomes a fun challenge to push up against the boundaries and see what happens.

These are some works I created for SUNY Cortland at The Cotton Exchange. Just wanted to show a bit of progression from sketch to finished product. My usual process begins with some research. For this particular project I researched some football players in various positions, and then chose a few to draw from. It seems as though actual pencil and paper is disappearing from design work; I think it is crucial to be able to work away from the computer. After the sketch looks about right, Photoshop gets a call to duty. The drawings are scanned on an Epson 1250 at a high resolution so as not to lose any detail, usually 600dpi or so. Then I use my Wacom tablet to clean up the drawing; deleting stray lines and tightening others, being sure to balance thick/thin and dark/light areas. When I’m relatively satisfied with the results I save both a .psd and a .tif. The .psd in case I need to rework, and the .tif for Ai.

After I’m done in Photoshop, it’s time to crank up Illustrator (my favorite program other than Firefox) At this point I have two choices; (1) I can place the .tif, lock it on one layer, and then trace over it with the pen tool on another layer, making for a clean image but tedious work. (2) If I’ve cleaned the image in Ps well and have nice, dark lines, I can play with Illustrator’s LiveTrace feature and let it “vectorize” the image for me. The settings for each image you trace are going to be different; usually I’m after the one closest resembling my cleaned up sketch. This technique keeps the hand-drawn feel of the art, which is why we drew it by hand in the first place, right?

After that, it’s time for color and shading. I personally enjoy bright colors in my work, but for these jobs I am usually constrained by the customers needs which may or may not coincide with mine. For shadows I usually use a darker shade of whatever color the shadow is laying on, using CMYK values. The pathfinder tool is your friend during this stage! After the characters are done it’s time for the verbiage and the final art for the shirt. I have learned a lot about manipulating text at my job that I didn’t learn in design school; it has been great getting on the job experience in this area. Check out the final result below!

These are both up for sale at the SUNY Cortland Bookstore site now!  CortacaJugMerchandise

Some new stuff I did recently for The University of Arizona via The Cotton Exchange. Sweet!
All work copyright © 2009 Lucas Albrecht

These are a sample of the work I do for The Cotton Exchange, an apparel manufacturing company located in Wendell, NC. All images copyright © 2009 Lucas Albrecht