Studio Art: Designing T-shirts

In studio art class we will be continuing our design unit with a t-shirt design project this week. Before we begin designing we'll take a look at the amazing short documentary series above from a NPR's Planet Money which shows how the t-shirt they make for listeners is created from start to finish.  The series was funded via Kickstarter and will help us learn about the global economy.  We'll see how the clothes we wear are actually made from a cotton farm in Mississippi to factories in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Colombia  then shipped back to America.

To create our t-shirt design we will be using Adobe Photoshop along with a new sister program Adobe Illustrator.  We'll learn the difference between the pixel based program and the vector based program and why it matters but before we get too technical you need a great idea and it needs to be sketched out.  The video below gives you some ideas on what makes a good t-shirt design and some of the basic rules we'll be following such as centering your design and choosing an appropriate shirt color.  We'll begin by drawing 5-10 thumbnails in our sketchbook wiof design ideas and variations.  Remember to be original and not to use copyrighted ideas or characters in your work. The final graphic image should be one-color and scanned in and it will be due on Friday at the end of class.