With t-shirt designs, I've gotten bored over the years with just a basketball and arched text. This design was a nice change of pace. The client had found in a Union magazine a design that they liked, but wanted to heavily alter a lot of the components. For me, it meant I got to put on my creative hat.
I started with their Union bug. Right from the beginning, I knew the intricate cog was going to be a pain. Although it's known for creating nice, clean and complex shapes; when it comes to gears/mechanical objects with symmetrical layout, Illustrator falls short in my opinion. To combat the cog, I opted for a different approach. Using a star spline in 3ds Max, I was able to chamfer the points on the interior and exterior, then fillet them to found them out a bit. Voila! The interior of the cog was done by creating a circle spline and an overlaying box spline. By first duplicating the box and rotating 120 degrees, I merged the boxes together then performed a negative Boolean against the circle. From there, I simply filleted the edge points and rotated 30 degrees to line everything up.
The metallic wings were a lot of fun actually. Illustrator CS4 has a lot of new gradient features that made it so much easier. With the basic shape in place, I made a base gradient for the top and bottom parts that resembled a metallic shine, then duplicated those pieces above. Changed the gradient type to linear and altered the angle. Since adding transparency to gradients is so much easier in CS4, I removed the outer areas of alpha so that it appears there is a shadow from the upper "feathers" casting on the upper part of each piece.
Creating the flag was standard linear gradient overlays on top of base colors. However, the clipping mask that holds it was a different story. After playing around with several brush styles, I abandoned brushes altogether. What ended up working was entirely different. I started with a simple square, then rotated it 45 degrees. Since Illustrator understands that its rotated, I had to merge it with another object that was laid directly in the center to reset the transform controls. I stretched the square on the x axis until it was wide enough to hold the shape I wanted and then created a blend of two of these above a simple reference oval. Once the blend was created, I changed the end points of the blend path to curved and shaped a 1/4 oval. A few duplicates later, some merging, and I had the base clipping mask.
After not having anything creative to do with a t-shirt design for a long while, this was a nice change of pace. The final artwork turned out well and I'm sure the client will be more than happy to see this on their Union members.
