Sunday 3 November 2013

The Manual T-shirt Design


My new t-shirt is inspired by and pays homage to both the car workshop manual and the BJJ instructional book.

It is available from my store here.

I created the diagram using Adobe Illustrator and based it on an old photograph I took several years ago of my former instructor Eddie Kone and Royler Gracie...


When Royler visited the academy, I took dozens of studio lit photographs of him and Eddie. One of them was used on the cover of Combat Magazine.


The benefit of using these photographs was several-fold. Firstly, quite a few of them were perfectly composed for the dummy book cover look of my tee design. Second, I own all the copyright to the photographs and finally, I have the photographs in super high resolution (I used a Canon 3D camera at the time which I think is a full frame sensor, hence very nice big resolution).

Having a clean big photograph meant I could trace over it with ease. But the finished linework looked wrong. As you can see from the image below, I had to shorten Eddie's leg quite considerably. My guess is that the photograph was taken using a wide-ish angle hence the distortion. In a photo, this seems more than ok, but when viewed as a flat piece of line-art, it looks weird.


Once I had the line art, it was a simple matter of making up some reasonably coherent copy and placing them around the diagram.




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