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