T-Shirt Design

T-shirt, or tee shirt, is a style of fabric shirt named after the T shape of its body and sleeves. Traditionally, it has short sleeves and a round neckline, known as a crew neck, which lacks a collar. T-shirts are generally made of a stretchy, light and inexpensive fabric and are easy to clean. The T-shirt evolved from undergarments used in the 19th century and, in the mid-20th century, transitioned from undergarment to general-use casual clothing.

T-shirts are inexpensive to produce and are often part of fast fashion, leading to outsized sales of T-shirts compared to other attire.[1] For example, two billion T-shirts are sold per year in the United States,[2] or the average person from Sweden buys nine T-shirts a year. In the 1960s, the ringer T-shirt appeared and became a staple fashion for youth and rock-n-rollers. The decade also saw the emergence of tie-dyeing and screen-printing on the basic T-shirt and the T-shirt became a medium for wearable art, commercial advertisingsouvenir messages, and protest art messages. Psychedelic art poster designer Warren Dayton pioneered several political, protest, and pop-culture art printed large and in color on T-shirts featuring images of Cesar Chavez, political cartoons, and other cultural icons in an article in the Los Angeles Times magazine in late 1969 (ironically, the clothing company quickly cancelled the experimental line, fearing there would not be a market).  Custom T-Shirt artwork is now a common artform in nearly every American town today.

Project Goal:

Create a T-Shirt design with personal meaning that uses 3 or more stencils to create the finished artwork.

Monochromatic Painting

Monochromatic colors are all the colors (tones, tints, and shades) of a single hue.

Example of a monochromatic color scheme

Monochromatic color schemes are derived from a single base hue and extended using its shades, tones and tints. Tints are achieved by adding white and shades and tones are achieved by adding a darker color, grey or black.

Monochromatic color gradient on color wheel

Monochromatic color schemes provide opportunities in art and visual communications design as they allow for a greater range of contrasting tones that can be used to attract attention, create focus and support legibility.

The use of a monochromatic color provides a strong sense of visual cohesion and can help support communication objectives through the use of connotative color. The relative absence of hue contrast can be offset by variations in tone and the addition of texture.

Monochromatic in science means consisting of a single wavelength of light or other radiation (lasers, for example, usually produce monochromatic light), or having or appearing to have only one color (in comparison to polychromatic). That means according to science the true monochromatic images can be strictly created only of shades of one color fading to black.

Project Goal:

Create a watercolor painting from a reference photo using just one color and controlling the mixture of paint to water.