Paperwork T-Shirt by Paul Baines

Yes, yes, I’m submitting to DesignByHumans.com again, no I’m not a glutton for punishment, I know I’ll probably get very few votes, but who cares, it’s all good. Matt from DBH support has put my mind at rest, (see the last post), and be assured I will keep pressing them to improve the comments system. However we’re both here, and for one thing, and that’s t-shirts.

The latest submission to Design By Humans, it’s called Paperwork and I believe its pretty much self-explanatory. It features a two characters wrapped in newspaper, one sweeps the road, the other is homless, the two share a moment under a sky-filled faux-water colour ticker-tape parade. I could push the whole eco argument again, but in all honesty this is more an exercise in the pointlessness of life than ecology. To be more accurate, the pointlessness of many of today’s society’s mechanisms of control, order and general management. Those who have little clear up those who have most, those who have nothing are cleared out of sight, and those with everything can’t see the trees for the paper.

{Has been accepted by DBH - VOTE FOR PAPERWORK HERE!}

I doubt it will get much attention but what the heck I enjoyed making this one. Incase you’re interested in how I created the faux-water colour effect, it’s quite simple really, if you have Adobe Fireworks that is. I know I know it’s supposed to be used for creating web graphics, but the usability and functionality of the layout means even if I was running on half the brainpower I have now (which isn’t much) I’m sure I could still handle it. Photoshop is great, but however many add-ons I add on, however many tutorials I follow it seems to take forever wherever I’m involved in the process. I’d love to merge the two, have all the fancy tricks of Photoshop built into a dummy interface like Fireworks, but I suppose I’m in the minority.

Back to the tip, find a complex and intricate photo, the larger the resolution the better (that’s basically how many dots per inch the image contains - imagine blowing up a Gif thumbnails a hundred times to see an unsightly splodge - basically not enough information for a larger image to process), and click the select tab in the toolbar of Fireworks. Now you’ll see one option called select similar, oh this is such a timesaver for me, coming from a collage/photo-montage background originally I rely on this everyday. Essentially you choose your parameters, including tolerance (play with this is can really make a difference later), anti-aliasing or feather (I don’t recommend hard for this) and click a colour or shape you hate, now “select similar”.

You’ll see hundreds of complicated shapes of the same colour surrounded by dotted lines. Delete them, or if you’re not sure save as a layer and then hide. Continue on until you have the bare bones of what you want. If the image is too dark invert the colours, and vice-versa, if the lines are too jagged, go back to the original and adjust your selection settings. Play with the contrast and hue functions too, sometimes you can find yourself staring into a world of psychedelia (if you’re lucky) other times it may seem more brusque and Constructivist (if you’ve a limited pallete), sometimes it will reveal a completely new image to work from. You may still need to work on those bit-mapped edges, there are plenty of vector tools to work from. If you have Adobe Iillustrator CS3 you can even turn the whole thing in to vectors (vectors create smooth lined images and can be enlarged without loss of clarity) and rid yourself of all the raggedy bits. Although I do enjoy a few raggedy lines, if you’re designing a screen-printed design you’ll need to lose them, unless you’re ready to spend a few weeks cutting out the image for printing.

Anyway will add a note if it’s accepted so you can vote if you wish, although you’ll have to join DBH if you do which is a little tedious, but then again, the added security means less cheating I suppose. Don’t worry it’s free, unless you want to buy something lol.