Photo Manipulation Tutorial – 1984 T-Shirt Design
I knew, from the vision I had in mind, that I wanted a nearly symmetrical design radiating from a central focus. In this case I found an image of the face of “Big Brother” from the movie 1984 to be the focus. Feeling that this imposing figure had all control over the populus (and viewer) through methods of fear, propagation, and surveillance I knew I wanted everything to stem from his mind and to point, visually, to his face as the central focal point.
I then began to layer in the imagery I thought were either directly available to work towards the theme or that linked to subjects indirectly corresponding with the theme. So, for this design I focused on this idea of “Big Brother”, of being watched, controlled, enforced, manipulated, opressed, etc… Here, I have an an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud rising from his destructive mind, and guns like crossbones on a pirate’s flag flanking his left and right.
Remember the central theme of the design at all times
During this particular design process, I thought of the current state of surveillance I thought of tools of oppression and fear propagation; televisions, loud speakers, and weapons. I wanted this endless barrage of surveillance equipment to be erupting from behind his face.
Here, I’ve added elements such as CCTV cameras, some loud speakers and a couple TV’s.
At this point most elements are only made on one side and then copied over, flipped horizontally and added to the other side of the design. This is only done for the sake of speeding up the production process. Once the design is filled out a bit more I will add/subtract elements to make the design asymmetrical.
Here, I’ve continued to fill the design out more, adding more TV’s, speakers and cameras. At the top and bottom I’ve added different antennae elements to elongate the design and begin to break up the symmetry.
View the design in different sizes
When doing a design with so many various elements all working together in a relatively tight space, it is important to take breaks to look at the image at different sizes.
The reason I do this is to remain focused on whether the design still works, whether it is balanced, i.e. are there so many elements that the design now feels overwhelmed and cluttered or is there still room for additional elements. I felt at this stage, there were enough primary elements, and only smaller tweaks and touches were needed. So here you can see, I’ve added static and eye elements.
Once these final tweaks were completed the design was ready for the addition of color, and more abstract complimentary design to aid in grounding the existing design elements. For this, I passed the design along to Tim.
The finishing touches – done by “third world Timmy”
Finalizing this design from Stani boils down to two steps:
1. Breaking up the symmetry as much as possible by adding “Victory” text elements. (The brand of cigarettes from the book, 1984) and moving megaphones, microphones, tentacles, and antennas. This is mostly accomplished by using custom shape tools and graphing things together the way I want them to display. I’ve also added some custom brush splats in the background to give the design more volume.
2. Adding an intense blue color palette. I accomplished this by placing duplicates of the design on top of itself and masking/cloning different color blues to get the exact colors I wanted. I also used custom adjustment layers (levels) and several layer modes (color burn, and color dodges)
The final image:
Related Links:
- The artist statement and inspiration that went into this t-shirt is discussed in full detail in the 1984 T-Shirt blog post
- Assault Custom Photoshop Brushes tutorial
- Photoshop Brush Dynamics Tutorial
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About the Author
John Staniforth is the newest member of the Assault team. He resides in Atlanta, GA and works as a freelance designer. You can see more of his work at stanidesign.com Email this Author | All posts by stani
Photo Manipulation Tutorial – 1984 T-Shirt Design…
Our most recent t-shirt line included our 1984 t-shirt. To accompany the design, we've decided to do a step by step layered breakdown of how we came to our final version of the shirt.
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I think i’ve seen this somewhere before…but it’s not bad at all