If you’ve taken a trip over to my Gallery and strolled through my T-shirt designs, you’ve probably seen some of the shirts I’ve designed for friends and family. The ones I love doing the most are the ones that I did for my nieces last Christmas. I thought that they’d get a real kick seeing themselves on a shirt, especially when incorporated into some sort of artwork. My niece Kaitlin was a fan of butterflies, so I made her a Butterfly and my niece Lydia was in love with the “Wizard of OZ” so I put her in the movie. So when I found out that my friend’s daughter Emma had a hugh crush on Zac Efron’s character “Troy” in the “High School Musical” movies, I knew what design I was going to do for her birthday gift.
Above is the final design that I did as well as a photo of said design printed on the shirt.
So you might be asking yourself, “Hey Troy, what elements went into the making of this shirt?” Good question…let me tell you.
First, I was definitely limited by what photos I could find of Zac Efron as well as by those photos I had of Emma herself. I wanted the photos of Zac to be ones taken specially for “High School Musical” and they also had to be a high enough resolution so that they could be blown up without becoming pixelated or blurry.
After cutting out the items above and working some magic on them, I began to add further elements to flesh out the design. I wanted to emulate a sketchy high school notebook doodle style so I did just that, I doodled some rough elements and scanned them in. I also used a photo of some red paint strokes I had done when designing my Website header and used it as well in this design.
So after various versions of shifting the elements around from here to there and back…only to move them once again…I was finished. As you can see from the sketches and photo above, not all the elements I started with were used in the final design. Designing is very much at times like sculpting…you add a little, remove a little, add a little more…but in the end you are definitely left with unused scraps you discard.
The most important thing however was when Emma finally opened her gift and saw the shirt for the first time. She grinned from ear to ear and proceeded to hug and kiss the shirt. It was so cute and it made the whole experience of designing the shirt well worth it, her reaction was priceless. I hope she really enjoys the shirt, cause I enjoyed designing it for her.