For the final project in my Retail Markets class, we were assigned to do a screen printed T-shirt, and packaging for the client of Young Blood Gallery and Boutique here in Atlanta (Note: The gallery was not actually involved in the project, it was named as a fictitious client).I had a couple different ideas, but none of them seemed right for the market. My mind kept drifting back to this vectorized bunny doodle (above) that i did almost a year ago, and had no idea what to do with. I had always wanted to make it into a pattern, but just didn't know how. Professor Mike Lowery taught us how in class to use Photoshop to create patterns as part of one of his lectures. He himself makes incredible, really cute patterns, and they get bought by various companies and applied to different products such as journals, cards, etc. I was very inspired not only by his pattern work, but also by Julia Rothman, an artist Mike introduced us students to during the trip we took this quarter to the Surtex (surface design/pattern convention) in New York (more about this trip later in another post!).
I had a lot of initial trouble creating the right feel for this project, I felt like it kept going in too much of a cutesy direction, and Young Blood has a definite urban, edgy feel. So I did some things, like half-tones, and combined the pink pattern with black, and that definitely helped to reign it in. It still took a lot of tweaking, and many pages of more badly drawn bunnies to create the total project.
So once I had the art done, I did a mock up of the shirt (above). I had never screen printed before, and with the help of Mike, and the rest of the class, I learned how to make a screen, and print in registration for each color. I used five screens, four colors. I decided to wrap part of the text around the shirt, which I did by using two screens, and it worked beautifully to make my hand-made font a cool graphic element. So, here is photos of the finished product:
Finished shirt and boxI made an iron-on label for the inside neck part of the shirt, which included washing information and size.
I attached the hang tags with a pretty prink Kate's Paperie ribbon which I tied in a bow
a view with the stickers I made and included in the hang tag as an "bonus extra" for the buyer of the product
The inside of the box was lined with the pattern i created:
I don't have any shots of the different angles of the box, but here is kind of a lay-out of the box and shirt's different elements:
I learned a lot and took a lot of risks with this project: I had never on such a large scale done lettering by hand to include in my work, which i really enjoyed doing; also, I had never done any screen printing, and had always wanted to, and glad I got the opportunity to learn before leaving school. What I really loved about this class, was the opportunity to create every part of the project: the product, the packaging, right down to the every last detail, for instance, the tags. It combined graphic deisgn sensibilities, as well as illustration. This was something i really enjoyed doing.
