So, for my senior thesis, I'm doing a brand. Tonight, I finally finished the 1st t-shirt design. I struggled with the colors initially, but what really helps is studying another artist's palette you want to incorporate into your work, and also converting the image into grayscale to see if the colors are working value wise. I tend to struggle with color so it's super helpful. This first illustration is based off of The Little Mermaid, by Hans Christen Anderson. It's actually a really gorey, depressing story, if you divorce yourself from the Disney take on the story ( I get it, you cannot make the movie exactly like the story otherwise the kids will cry, and get upset) The part of the story that really stuck out to me was the part where the sea witch cuts out the little mermaid's tongue in exchange for her 3 day excursion above water as a human to win the prince's heart. I feel it is very important to have a subtle narrative or story to inspire your piece. Going blindly into a design can mean bad ideas, corny imagery, etc. A theme or underlying concept helps you to think more about the mysticism and symbolism behind the illustration. I uploaded the line work as well, I thought it looked nice. I fixed her boobage in the color image, I didn't like the tangent and unevenness it create with the octopus head. I have people interested in the line work copy as well, so fixing her breasts is probably the smart thing to do before I get them printed nicely.
