Chicago T-shirt

chicago t-shirt skyline chi-town

I’m trying to update this website and I thought to make a nice footer yesterday… I like alot electric power lines so I wanted to do something with it… I ended up liking a lot that I thought it would make a nice t-shirt too, so I did some small changes to the final footer to make a Chicago T shirt even thought the houses and electric poles doesn’t relate too much…

I didn’t feel like drawing all this from scratch so I started browsing through some references pics to use and I applied some curves and black and white filters in Photoshop to make some silhouettes and make a rough collage.

So this is how it started…
I also used one of my photos of the Chicago skyline I took with my phone recently by the Adler Planetarium.

Most of the comp was done on Photoshop and did the final re-drawing on SAI as it makes better lines and its easier to edit them, besides I like that I can make the silhouettes comps I did on Photoshop transparent which I find it very useful, specially to make PNGs.

To make greys into a t-shirt with just a black color, I need to create halftones, sometimes it gets tricky to silkscreen but is still better than creating another 2 separate screens for the grey scales. it would be too much time consuming when just printing one or a few T-shirt as most them are made-to-order. So this method works perfect and still looks nice…

Chicago T shirt Skyline water tower

This is what I came out at first but then I liked a lot an electric pole with a lot of wires on it I have on the right side. I moved the water tower on the middle so i can get more of that pole but then again I didn’t like the composition. so after making quite some changes, I ended up moving the pole that I liked and just leave it like that, even thought I’m not quite happy with it…

Here are some other versions of it. I’m still trying to decide which one to use or what should I change. I really like to spray paint into the t-shirts, and create some gradients with the halftones and the paint… I like the one with the sort of sunset better but the morning or twilight looking and with the stars may fit better so it looks a bit as the Chicago flag… well, I’ll see which one I end up doing…