Illustrator Hop-Up
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Special to Motorburg.com
Creating a three color T-shirt design with Paintbrushes and 3D effects in Adobe Illustrator
by Ger Peters
(This is a six-page tutorial. Please follow the navigation at the end of each page to view the next.)
1. Introduction
In this tutorial, Ger will be showing you how he uses the Paintbrush Tool and the 3D Effects in Adobe Illustrator to create a simple piece of three-color T-shirt artwork. He’ll show you how to use the brush tool to ‘ink’ a pencil sketch and the 3D effect to create somewhat convincing flying flags with logos.
While a lot of people use Illustrator, it seems that both the brushes and 3D effects are widely neglected by most: It’s as if most users never ‘grab’ beyond their trusted pen tool… But both features, especially the brushes, provide great opportunities to come up with vector artwork with a bit more of a hand-drawn flair.
Ger will be using an actual project he did for Firebird Raceway of Boise, Idaho as a basis for the tutorial. He’s been doing artwork for this particular client for several years and knows the general course of their projects, and the way they will use the artwork. So, lets get down to it, as Ger briefs us on the project and then shows us how-to – from beginning to end ~
2. Project briefing
The client was looking for T-shirt artwork for their annual “Oldies But Goodies Drags” nostalgia race event. The shirts would be freebie giveaways to the participants in the race: For budgetary reasons, the number of colors to be used was limited to three.
They supplied a photograph of the style of car they had in mind for this year’s design; It was Jim Lytle’s famous “Big Al” ‘34 Ford Tudor race car of the early 1960’s. The picture showed the car with the heavily chopped fiberglass “flopper” body that Big Al became famous for. The driver’s position was actually in the back seat as there was a 6-foot-long Allison V-12 P-38 aircraft engine stuffed into the car – hence the name “Big Al”. The client suggested that I’d draw the car with a little less chop than in the picture and at the moment of launch, lifting the front wheels off the ground. They also supplied a couple of sponsor logos to include into the design with the stipulation of trying to make the addition of the logos look not too much like an “afterthought”…
There just so happened to be a story on Big Al in the November 2009 issue of Hot Rod Deluxe Magazine. It featured a tiny vintage photograph by an unknown photographer of Big Al racing at Lions Drag Strip in 1963. It showed the car in an early guise, back when it still had a steel body instead of the flopper body and with less of a chopped roof. Even though the car had all four wheels on the track, I thought it would still make for a good reference photo for my drawing. The client seemed to prefer a more or less realistic style for the drawing so I decided to do a pretty accurate representation of the photograph, but alter it a bit with a wheel-stand and a driver and some other changes of my own.
-
story on Jim Lytle’s “Big Al” in the November 2009 issue of Hot Rod Deluxe Magazine
story on Jim Lytle’s “Big Al” in the November 2009 issue of Hot Rod Deluxe Magazine
3. Sketchpad
To integrate the sponsor logos into the design, I came up with the idea of adding flags for the background: Besides providing a ‘natural’ space to put the logos, the flagpoles would have the additional benefit of granting the design some extra ‘body’ since the car by itself was pretty low. The challenge would be to have the sponsor logos arch along the curves of the flying flags in a nice way.
I repeated some design elements from the shirt designs that I had done for previous Oldies Drags events and did a quick sketch for the overall outline of the piece; just a small thumbnail really to capture the basic idea:
-
quick thumbnail sketch
quick thumbnail sketch
Now I needed a larger, more refined sketch to present the idea to the client. So I started a more detailed outline as a rough draft and I e-mailed that to the client: They thought it looked good so far and gave me the green light to carry on. The rough draft will double as a template for my final artwork.
- rough draft as presented to client
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
Wow Ger, great tutorial!
The brush explanation and application is fantastic and the 3D mapping is awesome to know.
Thank you for taking the time.
Awesome job man!
-lemorris
Very cool tutorial on the brushes. I will agree they are a not so widely used tool in Illustrator. I have played with the 3d tool but never though of using it to wrap/warp objects. I have always used the enevelope distort to accomplish this, thanks for the tip.
Ger wrote a tremendous piece here, and I sincerely hope that you’ll all give him a big “Thank You!”. TONS of great info, and by far, one of the best documented tutorials I’ve seen in a long time.
So much to learn yet….
Grrrr! Very well done my far away friend. I got a chuckle when you mentioned that ancient Dimensions program. I still have my 4.5 inch floppies of that program (1994 maybe?) My problem as a quadriplegic is, I have no pressure sensitivity in my hands and I can’t press the little button on the stylus. I’ve been designing a pen, but it has a wire that runs to a mouse that I can click. I can draw with a ballpoint pen and get some pressure control, but I’d have to be watching my hands. I’m sure there’s a real-time monitor tablet. But I’d need to sacrifice a few pens and mice to get the electronics correct. Maybe this year (twentyten)! Meanwhile, great tute!
Great tutorial, well written and illustrated! Now to see if I can find similar features in the vector program I use, and try out some bits of your technique.
WOW Ger Awesome work man. I can use alot of this in Photoshop (I don’t use Illy) Thanks for bringing this great technique to our attention!
Thanks for the kind words guys! I really appreciate it!
Great tutorial.. Explains a lot of the mysteries of making Illustrator a useful tool.
Could you explain how you do the grille texture and wheels. Specifically how do you make the grille bars parallel to each other..copy and paste? or just a real steady hand? my attempts freehand are always wavy and distorted..
Do you freehand the wheels and tires or copy and paste multiple ellipses. Making the wheels look right always seems a challenge…
Thanks for any additional insight you can give
KJ
A great tutorial for the whole process. Very helpful!
Ok this is perfect timing, as I have some Illy stuff to work on! Thank you for the great & concise tutorial!
Very nice Illustrator tutorial, you have got to have one steady hand to get the kind of linework you achieve! I’m curious about the settings you use for the Brush Tool — the ones you access by double-clicking the Brush Tool icon.
I can’t maintain consistency in the brushstrokes with the Brush Tool.
Thanks George – You know; I never even realized there was such a thing as Paintbrush Tool Preferences… I guess my values are just the default values as I can’t remember to ever have touched them: Fidelity: 4 pixels; Smoothness: 0 percent. All other options are checked and Within: 12 pixels.
Very well done tutorial. I haven’t gone digital yet, but am glad I will have this to refer back to when I make the move.
A couple of questions… what size artboard do you set up, and what size monitor do you use? Also, what size tablet? I constantly have probplems with a 19″ flat panel and a Wacom small Intous3 tablet…the sizes just make it difficult to pull a good line. Plus, with paper, you can always turn it…how does everyone deal with not being able to turn the monitor?
Great stuff, though. I’m glad you got hooked up with pals, the News in Boise…you’ll have to go there someday!
Jim Sorenson
Thanks Jim – sorry for the delay in the response.
Artboard is usually pretty small initially – works best for me to work on a smaller scale; Usually Letter size or smaller. But I make sure the final artwork is scaled up to 100% of the actual size required. Don’t forget to include scaling your line widths when you scale your vector art!
Monitor is 17″ but bigger would be better… less scrolling. Wacom tablet is a vintage 6″ home-and-office Graphire…
Not being able to turn the artboard is not so much of a problem for my procedure as I can micro manage
my strokes later… You can turn your artboard in Corel Painter by the way but that is not a vector application of course.
Say hello to Scott for me when you see him Jim!
Leave your response!
Associate Artists
Links
Browse by Article Category
Browse our Main Pages
Motorburg on the Web
Recent Articles
Most Commented
Most Viewed