A shape we used for our Peaceful Revolution T-Shirt that may be of use to some of you out there. It’s a saw-blade, or a razor blade that we traced in Photoshop. It’s kinda awesome.

Download the Razor Blade Custom Photoshop Shape

One thing we give with every shirt purchase from our online store is a free guitar pick! If you’ve been lucky enough to meet us in person, you probably got one attached to your business card as well. If you’d like to get a custom guitar pick shape to design your own guitar pick, free free to use our template:

Download the Guitar Pick Custom Photoshop Shape

Assault's SS Amnesia put on one of these mockups

While browsing through Emptees a few days ago I came across a talk post about some new mockups. To my surprise, they were quite good–and free!

They were done with American Apparel shirts, in size XS by Tom Neal of Ctrl Alt Defeat Clothing. They’re a great set of mock ups and come with prepared backgrounds. If you need some mock ups to make your store look a bit more professional, these are the ones you want.

Download Tom Neal’s T-Shirt Mock Up Kit V2

Our newest set of brushes is here! I created a handful of various high resolution brushes of fire and flames that I didn’t end up using on a project, and thought it’d make for a great brush set. As always, it’s a free download. Unzip, and double click on the .abr file to install to Photoshop.

Download the Fire & Flame Assault Photoshop Brushes

I don’t ask anything in return except that you link back to my site, or you can support Assault BLOG by buying one of our exclusive designer graphic t-shirts in our online store.

Also don’t forget about our first photoshop grunge brush set which is still available for download. If you’d like to know how to make your own Photoshop brushes, I’ve written several tutorials including, “How to make your own photoshop brushes,” and “Adobe Photoshop brush dynamics“. Check em out, they’re in depth with screen captures of just about everything you need to get started making your own brushes in Photoshop.

I almost quit the idea of starting my own clothing line altogether when I first started out because I literally didn’t know what to design. What could I put on my t-shirts? No one likes a shirt with just a logo on it–unless you’re Nike. I didn’t like semi-offensive parody shirts. I couldn’t use band names. I couldn’t afford any sort of licensing to use comic book superheroes. Essentially I was left with NOTHING.

The insecure designer in me was ready to quit

Not until I finally sat down and started listing things I thought were cool was I finally able to think of things that couldn’t be owned by anyone, that I could use as centerpieces to my work or at the very least hidden accents that would add to the detail. The finished list contained things that were cool for use in a t-shirt, that I would not get in trouble for using. My list ended up looking something like this:

Wolves are cool. Three wolves is better.

Animals

• Wolves (Mostly serious on this one)
• Cats
• Dogs
• Dead animal skulls
• Spiders
• Tarantulas
• Hawks
• Bald Eagles
• Bats
• Werewolves
• Giant Bugs
• Wolverines (Thank you spell check for this suggestion)

Cool Symbols

• Radioactive Symbols
• Stars
• Devil Horns
• Crosses
• Crossbones
• Poison Labels
• The Sun

Affliction has sort of (tm)'d this look.

Affliction-ize (if that’s what you’re into)

• Skulls
• Chainsaws
• Blood spats
• Lasers
• Barbed Wire
• Machinery
• Welding sparks
• Vampires
• Rays or bursts of light
• Broken Glass
• Grunge Textures
• Rust Textures
• Torn Paper
• Scratches
• Music notes

Military & Vehicles

• Atomic Bombs
• Airplanes
• Jets
• Guns
• Tanks

This also would have worked under the animals heading.

Nature

• Fire
• Explosions
• Floral Shapes
• Lightning Bolts
• Smoke

Other notable items

• Fist Pumping (in general this is a cool thing to do)
• High Fiving?
• Any sort of public domain imagery, or things over 75 years old

You get the idea. Are Pomeranians cool? Meh, but hey I’m sure that guy is out there who thinks they are… and I’m pretty sure he drives a bright orange Mazda Miata.

Feel free to add your cool things to the list at the bottom. Even if they’re inappropriate, which probably makes them all the more awesome.

I got an email this week from Shy asking for a tutorial on how we apply our t-shirt designs onto photo real mock ups. I must say as much as I’d like to act like we could do photo shoots every day with pretty girls like the people do over at Design By Humans, we can’t. So I enlist my resourceful mockup PSDs from Emptees, and Photoshop layer modes and by the time I’m done I’ve got something worthy of the Assault Shirts homepage.

There are already plenty of people who have built ready made templates to place shirts on and to adjust colors so I’m not going to go into detail on that process. Instead, I’m going to refer you to the post I did last week about a few quick tips, as well as point you to the Emptees resources page where I got my templates from:

• Tips for prepping t-shirt designs for print
• Emptees Resources & Downloads

I chose to use this prepared blank shirt photoshop mockup by Falseone.org and if you chose the same one I did, your design should look something like this when you are done:

For demonstration’s sake, I’ll be using the most recent design we released, SS Amnesia, because it fits very well on many different colors.

Is your design flattened and not on a transparent background? See Below:

You have several choices if your design is on a flat background:

1. Trace your design in Illustrator:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0yNFH99cWg

2. Use the magic eraser tool and delete your background (This will look like shit)

3. USE LAYER MODES

Depending on the color of design you can easily set the design layer’s mode to either “Screen“, or “Multiply” and it will delete the background (or blend it) so that you see the design placed nicely on the shirt mockup.

This will take some experimentation. Generally, if you have a darker background on your design you want to use “Screen” as your layer mode. Think of it like a screen door in a way. All the black and darker tones becomes see through. If you have dark colors in your design that now look brighter or darker, you may want to use Image>adjustment>levels (or cntrl+L) to adjust your colors to get them as close as you can to your actual design.

If you have a lighter background on your design set your layer mode to either “Multiply” or possibly “Darken”. @angbowen from Fuel Your Creativity has a great article explaining the various layer modes and how they work. I highly recommend reading her article, Photoshop Blend Modes Explained. It will help clear up any confusion about what each layer blend mode does.

Is your design is on a transparent background. Read below:

If you’ve prepped your design with a vector fill layer as your background layer, you should easily be able to hide that layer, and copy the other merged layers by hitting cntrl+shift+c or by flattening your image and hitting cntrl+c.

Change over to the blank mockup t-shirt file, and hit cntrl+v or paste your design on top of it. Scale it down as you see fit and place it on the design. If you had a transparent background on your design you should be good to go for the most part. The only other step is to change the color of the t-shirt to the actual color you want it.

To do this double click on the Gradient Map Layer which will bring up the gradient editor.

Double click on the red colored tab to the right which will bring up your color picker window.

What I do next is head over to the American Apparel Colors resource and grab all the CMYK values for the shirt color I want. The highlighted field in the screen shot above is where you enter the first value, the second value goes in the next field, and so on and so fourth. Here’s the color picker window with the proper CMYK values for the American Apparel red color:

The red code listed on the American Apparel page is 0,100,80,2. See where I entered them above? Nice work.

You can use any color you’d like for the gradient map color, but you probably want to stick to the exact color your shirt supplier gives you. Just sayin’

Feel free to scale/distort the shirt if you feel it needs to be warped a little to fit into the shirt, but I generally leave it as is. Here’s what the design should look like:

Click to see a larger version of this image to see the detail

Need more help still?

Post in the comments, and I’ll gladly answer any questions you have on using free mock ups or getting realistic t-shirt templates. GoMediaZine has also covered this in great detail and even sells templates. I wish I had an entire design team like they do, but unfortunately it’s just me, and Mr. 51% so you’ll have to take what you get!

I knew, from the vision I had in mind, that I wanted a nearly symmetrical design radiating from a central focus. In this case I found an image of the face of “Big Brother” from the movie 1984 to be the focus. Feeling that this imposing figure had all control over the populus (and viewer) through methods of fear, propagation, and surveillance I knew I wanted everything to stem from his mind and to point, visually, to his face as the central focal point.

I then began to layer in the imagery I thought were either directly available to work towards the theme or that linked to subjects indirectly corresponding with the theme. So, for this design I focused on this idea of “Big Brother”, of being watched, controlled, enforced, manipulated, opressed, etc… Here, I have an an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud rising from his destructive mind, and guns like crossbones on a pirate’s flag flanking his left and right.

Remember the central theme of the design at all times

During this particular design process, I thought of the current state of surveillance I thought of tools of oppression and fear propagation; televisions, loud speakers, and weapons. I wanted this endless  barrage of surveillance equipment to be erupting from behind his face.

Here, I’ve added elements such as CCTV cameras, some loud speakers and a couple TV’s.

At this point most elements are only made on one side and then copied over, flipped horizontally and added to the other side of the design.  This is only done for the sake of speeding up the production process. Once the design is filled out a bit more I will add/subtract elements to make the design asymmetrical.

Here, I’ve continued to fill the design out more, adding more TV’s, speakers and cameras. At the top and bottom I’ve added different antennae elements to elongate the design and begin to break up the symmetry.

View the design in different sizes

When doing a design with so many various elements all working together in a relatively tight space, it is important to take breaks to look at the image at different sizes.

The reason I do this is to remain focused on whether the design still works, whether it is balanced, i.e. are there so many elements that the design now feels overwhelmed and cluttered or is there still room for additional elements. I felt at this stage, there were enough primary elements, and only smaller tweaks and touches were needed. So here you can see, I’ve added static and eye elements.

Once these final tweaks were completed the design was ready for the addition of color, and more abstract complimentary design to aid in grounding the existing design elements. For this, I passed the design along to Tim.

The finishing touches – done by “third world Timmy”

Finalizing this design from Stani boils down to two steps:

1. Breaking up the symmetry as much as possible by adding “Victory” text elements. (The brand of cigarettes from the book, 1984) and moving megaphones, microphones, tentacles, and antennas. This is mostly accomplished by using custom shape tools and graphing things together the way I want them to display. I’ve also added some custom brush splats in the background to give the design more volume.

2. Adding an intense blue color palette. I accomplished this by placing duplicates of the design on top of itself and masking/cloning different color blues to get the exact colors I wanted. I also used custom adjustment layers (levels) and several layer modes (color burn, and color dodges)

The final image:

Related Links:

• The artist statement and inspiration that went into this t-shirt is discussed in full detail in the 1984 T-Shirt blog post
• Assault Custom Photoshop Brushes tutorial
• Photoshop Brush Dynamics Tutorial

After completing my first two designs for team Assault, Tim asked if I’d like to make a tutorial providing some insight into my design process.

Generally speaking I always try to work from general to specific. I also find that for each design, the process is unique. Some designers feel that thumbnails are always useful, some designers feel that just going at it, throwing pieces together and working out the design solutions on the canvass is the best method.

To be honest I do not prefer any standard methodology over another, the only consistent philosophies I try to abide by while working include, working general to specific, maintaining focus on what works for THIS design–don’t hold anything precious, and last but certainly not least, don’t be afraid to try something new!

For the “One Year As A Lion” design I already had a strong image in my head of what I wanted and a fairly certain approach laid out before I began, so lets get into it.

Gather source images

The first step in the actual production process is to search and gather images which I think could be useful. I’ll use ANY resource available, google, flickr, magazines, old sketches, ANYTHING.

When I was living in Amsterdam, taking the train to work, they would hand out free newspapers to passengers. As the papers were in Dutch I couldn’t read the articles, but i took the papers anyway and during my ride I would look through the images for anything that MIGHT be useful in the future. At the end of each month I’d scan all the clippings in that I had accumulated, and save them in a PSD file of reference material.

For this design I knew I wanted a man/lion figure standing out among a sea of sheep. I wanted the lion to be the only source of light as well as the sheep to resemble rocks of a cliff. I searched for sheep, sheep flocks, goats, lions, orangutans, (for fur) clouds/storm clouds/ash plumes, (all for rock like imagery to accompany the sheep) bodybuilders, (for the lion man’s base) barcodes, and skeletons.

As you can see in this image I’ve gathered and extracted various masses of sheep. At this stage we aren’t concerned with color, brightness, contrast or levels. Remember, we’re working general to specific, once we lay in the base of the image we can then work more specifically, tweaking when necessary.

From general to specific

The lion man is a good example of finding anything you think could work to your advantage and going with it.  Here is an image of two different body builders, a random hand, two different lion’s manes and even some orangutan fur to fill out the mane further. None of the images have the same colors, tonal values or contrast. At this point, even the seams between the different images are clearly noticeable. Again, all acceptable at this “block in” stage.

Here the lion man has come a little further, now with both arms and a leg. Where pieces didn’t line up enough i painted in a make-shift base. The further we go, the more layers we build up, the less noticeable the seams between the various pieces will become.

Combining the elements in gray scale

Here we have the lion man with his flock. I’ve gone ahead and desaturated the image so that I could focus on unifying the values to bring the individual pieces together more.

After using several adjustment layers, including: “levels,” and “brightness/contrast”, to even out the values I began painting in areas that needed more visual information before going any further with any additional layers.

Here I’ve addressed all the seams, I’ve added to and unified highlights and shadows and I’ve slightly altered the outreaching hand.

I’ve knocked back the brightness and added a layer of cloud imagery I’ve meshed together with the sheep layer. I’ve began to bring out a focal point and focus on building up the light source. This was accomplished by fading the edges of the flock to darkness and dodged up areas that would be closes to the light source. (his hand)

I’ve also adjusted layers of highlight and deep shadow by dodging/burning/over-painting.

Here, you can see I’ve added a flame for the light source. I’ve also adjusted the shape of his hand. Because I couldn’t find a hand “just right” for my design needs here I took a photograph of my own posed hand with my phone and then brought it into Photoshop for further manipulation. I’ve also brought in layers of hair I had assembled from images of orangutans set to multiply over the base of the lion man’s body.

I should mention that in order to streamline the design process I have a “hue/saturation” layer at the top of my layer stack in this PSD set to “0% saturation”. This way, no matter what color information a new layer or image brings in, as long a it is below this “hue/saturation” layer it will automatically show up as gray scale. This keeps me from having to individually desaturate every layer I bring in.

I’ve now began to bring in more subtle detail elements. Here I’ve added sheep skeletal information to various members of the flock including skulls, ribs, and spines. I’ve also added to the sheep’s head in the lion man’s hand.  Additionally, I’ve added in bar code elements to the back of several sheep’s heads, a subtle detail.

From my original mental image of this design, I knew that the final design would be a layered “posterized” look. I felt this would best add to the element of ambiguity in the flock. I believed this would also aid in bringing together the sheep and cloud elements.

Having had this in mind, I added another adjustment layer at the top of my layer stack in the PSD, as I had done with the “hue/saturation” before. This time it was a “posterize” modifier.

Bringing it all together with detail

Now that I had all of the basic design information unified, all that was left was detail work. I wanted a hot color palette of yellows and oranges to work with an earthy palette of browns. I tried several ideas before stumbling across the right design solution for this image: I ended up using color overlays and various hue/saturation adjustments.

Finally, dejected, I decided to take a wander through my reference library of images and textures I’ve collected. It was at this point I stumbled across a sheet of brown, discolored and deteriorating paper.

I then made copy layers of this sheet which were then merged and the seams stamped out with the stamp tool. All that was left was to find the most visually pleasing layer setting, which in this case was “color burn” at 100%, a little hue/saturation tweak and bingo!

Even though I felt I had achieved the colors I wanted, something was still missing. It was still too clean. I needed a bit of grunge, a bit more granular debris. So again back to the reference library to find an appropriate overlay.  This piece of paper had just the detailed dirt information I was looking for.

I set this layer to “multiply”, and knocked back the opacity and adjusted the levels so that only the darkest micro detail would show up.

And here we have my final image. I had completed my portion of the design, the base for which Tim would add his own design touches to in order to polish the piece.

The finishing touches by Tim

After receiving the final design from Stani, I decided to add a bit of the “Assault” flair to the design including some text, our hidden logo, (It’s in there I promise you) as well as some abstract splats to the lion and flames. I duplicated the entire design, and set the layer mode of the duplicate to color dodge. Next, I played with the opacity and levels to give the design more contrast, and more importantly a few less colors so we could afford to print the shirt!

What you see above is the final version of the design and you can purchase the, “One Year As A Lion” T-Shirt over at the Assault Online Store. You can also purchase Stani’s other design, the 1984 t-shirt, which we will also have a, “making of” blog post in the near future.

Related Posts

• Tutorial: Creating your own Photoshop Custom Brushes
• Assault Grunge Photoshop Brushes
• Tutorial: Photoshop Brush Dynamics
• Tutorial: Trendy Lightbursts step by step tutorial

Unlike a good portion of the design related blogs on the internet, we at AssaultBLOG try to write as much of our own content as we can rather than just link to other peoples’ hard work. It’s also been awhile since we’ve written an extensive tutorial so I’ve decided to make our own list of best posts from Assault that you may have missed if you just recently started subscribing to our RSS feed.

5 Tips to make your unsigned band stand out from the rest

List of tips to spend your hard earned day job money to make your band stand out from the rest.

HTML emails – A quick rules and primer tutorial

Thinking of writing an html newsletter? Consider these few things first.

When Every Sale Counts

When you launch your first online store, it takes forever to get sales. This article will give you a few insights as to how you can get those first few sales even when your traffic is relatively low.

SEO Tips and strategies the high priced consultants aren’t telling you

Don’t feel like paying $2,000 for an SEO audit of your site? Read this list of tips and it will greatly help you fare better in the SEO world. This is my most comprehensive and one of my best SEO articles to date.

How to float to the top of Google search pages

Interested in what gets you in the top ten search results for Google searches? I list out my secrets for free! (This list is a great list especially if you have no money to spend like I don’t.)

E-Commerce tips explained with some interesting human behavior psychology

Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need?  I came across this outline from a book by Dan Ariely called, “Predictably Irrational” that had some incredibly insightful information about people and why we at times seem to act completely irrational. It covers giving away  things for free, putting high price points on products to create demand, and even the benefit of arousal!

How to reset your Myspace page using CSS

A brief tutorial with working code to make your Myspace look a bit more respectable. If you don’t want to read the whole post, you can just copy/paste/edit the source code that is supplied.

Tips & tools to improve your conceptual web design

A list of tools that will help bring your web designs one step closer to print designs including non-standard web fonts, custom line breaks, and transparency across all browsers.

Assault Photoshop Brush Set 1

The first set of brushes released from some of our t-shirt designs that were never used.

5 tips & resources to help get your t-shirt company off the ground

During my time at the university of hard knocks in the t-shirt business I learned a few things that I share here with anyone else who may be starting a t-shirt company so they don’t have to go through the same growing pains that I did.

How to create your own Photoshop Brushes

A step by step tutorial outlining how to create your own Photoshop brushes so you don’t have to spend hours scouring the net for the perfect brush.

How to use Photoshop Brush Dynamics

Part two of my brush tutorials where I show you how to use brush dynamics to get some cooler effects with your brushes that you’ve created in the Photoshop brush tutorial.

How to make those trendy lasers and light bursts in Photoshop

I’ve seen tons of ads with cool looking light bursts and light rays, and decided to write a step by step tutorial on how it was done. Originally, I believe I saw them in wired from designer, Tom Muller, so I even got in touch with him and interviewed him to find out more about his design process.

Alternative ways to find design inspiraiton

My personal best ways to find design inspiration when watching tv or going to the park just doesn’t cut it.

Turn a WordPress blog into your own personal FFFFound

A wordpress theme tutorial with included plugins that will allow you to make your own FFFFound blog like I have done on VNovember.com.

Like what you see here?

I write one quality post like this at least every week, and time permitting I make additional posts about the music industry, apparel industry, and design. Subscribe to the RSS feed, it’s worth every penny.

Free Photoshop brushes available for download including several famous Guantanamo pictures that I meticulously traced, stars, grunge borders, anarchy logos, and the declaration of independence in several different sizes. Feel free to redistribute these as I have created them and would rather have them downloaded in as many places as possible from as many people as possible.

Download Photoshop Brush Set Assault 2.0

I don’t ask anything in return except that you link back to my site, or you can support Assault BLOG by buying one of our exclusive designer graphic t-shirts in our online store.

Also don’t forget about our first photoshop grunge brush set which is still available for download. If you’d like to know how to make your own Photoshop brushes, I’ve written several tutorials including, “How to make your own photoshop brushes,” and “Adobe Photoshop brush dynamics“. Check em out, they’re in depth with screen captures of just about everything you need to get started making your own brushes in Photoshop.

Thanks for all the diggs everyone! Sorry the article went down for awhile!

For some time I have dual booted my Dell Inspiron 600m with Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. Being a designer and a developer I have had to deal with the necessary evil that is Microsoft for years now and with Ubuntu picking up steam like it has past few years–the time was right to finally switch to Linux. The designer voice in my head says, “What about Photoshop?” and the developer in me says, “What about testing on IE6? What about Coda?” Here’s how I finally made the full switch and the tools I’ve decided to use instead.

But I need Photoshop…

Gimp! Bluefish! Ubuntu-restricted-extras! VLC! Yes, you’ve read all the articles on Digg about the replacement software. Some of them are awesome, and yes some of them kinda suck, and best of all they are all free! Some of you are saying they are hard to use so you won’t switch, but I’m here to tell you that you’re asking yourself the wrong questions. You should be asking things like:

Do I really use Photoshop on my tiny laptop all the time to justify keeping Windows?

Am I just doing basic image editing when I do use Photoshop?

In my case, I’m barely doing any Photoshop work on my laptop anymore. I may do some basic image work–for that I have the Gimp, and it does everything I could possibly want it to.

And just to prevent you haters out there from leaving me comments about how you can run Photoshop with Wine or Crossover Office–I’ve tried every which way and NEVER had I had a fully functional non-crashing version of Photoshop higher than Photoshop 7. Both CS, and CS2 crash and/or freeze. Photoshop 7 vs. The Gimp–I’ll take the Gimp anytime.

I get what you’re saying, but I’m a developer, I need Coda or Dreamweaver

So, you’re a developer and you use Coda, or Dreamweaver… Should you really be saying, “I can’t LIVE without Dreamweaver!” (If you’re not handwriting code, are you really a developer anyways?)

Am I really going to be doing full website development on my laptop?

Yes I might. In that case you have plenty of text editors: Bluefish, Quanta, GEdit, and you have Filezilla or GFTP to upload files.

If you’re a bit like me, you’re not managing huge development projects on your laptop. You may blog, and do some troubleshooting here and there–for that you have all you need with Firefox.

If you just edit a file here and there you can setup a permanent connection to your server via Places>Connect to server. That way I can open files directly with GEdit just like I would with Coda and edit them directly on my website.

A few other notes for developers…

The Web Developer and Firebug add-on both work in Ubuntu, and installing them is a breeze. In fact, rather than rooting around all the freebie websites you can install all your software at once from one place:

Applications>Add/Remove then select Show: All available applications

This includes most of the popular Firefox add-ons that you may do for web development, and some that you just like to use. (I personally love Foxy Tunes which lets me easily navigate my Pandora stations)

What about testing my websites in IE6?

I must admit this was one thing that kept Windows on my laptop for quite awhile. I had an old copy of IE6 on the Windows XP installation and it was my only last excuse for keeping the dual boot. After having to wait 8 minutes for startup everytime I restarted (Thanks to Windows Defender, Zone Alarm, and a few other things) I had had enough.

I googled IE for Linux–sure enough there was already a working IE6 package for Ubuntu. IEs4Linux took just a few minutes to download and install and now I have a functioning installation of IE6 on my laptop to test out my sites with! It even has a strange upside down IE logo!

Fine, there are other alternatives, but seriously–Ubuntu is just ugly and uncool

Here’s the real kicker for why I resisted switching for the longest time… Ubuntu is pretty ugly. The picky designer in me wants a combination of the cool themes plus the smooth animation and performance of OSX.

Enter Avant, Awn-Manager, Compiz, and Emerald. After adding those via the add/remove section outlined above, I have a nice OSX style dock, a cool icon theme, a cool window border them, and after downloading a GDM theme from Gnome-Look.org my computer is looking just as slick as OSX!

After getting GMail and the weather on my desktop with Conky, I personally think I have something a bit better than the silly widget dashboard from OSX! You can install themes for Avant as well!

Conclusion

I must admit, it took me just a little while to tweak things to get them just the way I wanted them. (The avant-window-manager and conky mostly) You may have to get your hands dirty using GEdit and the command line, but ultimately it’s a pretty stable installation, it’s lightning quick, and very easy to connect to the internet.

I must admit I do miss Photoshop a bit, but I still have a desktop computer with the full CS3 suite on it so if I really feel like doing some design work I can–but for now I’ll stick with my Ubuntu.

We’re proud to announce a new designer has been added to the family, Assault, Fernando Rodriguez. Fernando, formerly of Ecko, is currently in the preliminary stages of launching his own design agency called EyeKandy. He currently resides in New York, but will be moving back to Puerto Rico to dedicate his time to developing his new company EyeKandy.

The shirt he has designed for Assault comes in black and white and is called Fatal Justice. It features the classic underlying political message that Assault has become known for, as well as some of our favorite design motifs–skulls!!!

Fernando had the idea from his experience living under the Puerto Rican government. There’s alot of corruption, like in most governments, but especially in the Latin American governments. His other inspiration for the design comes from the current situation in Darfur. Some common themes in this design as well as in many other Assault designs are about how greed for power leads to killing and mass poverty among the working class.

The design’s major theme being about how there really is no more equal justice for the rich and the poor. Justice has just become a beautiful icon, and is no longer what it used to be. Fernando hand draws all of his designs, and then inks them and scans them into Illustrator. He uses live trace and later brings them into Photoshop to clean them up. The color palette is neutral based to further emphasize the grunge look to go along with his original idea for the concept.

Fernando is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design. If you’d like Fernando to do some apparel design work for you, or… if you’d like to contact him because you are a pretty lady who likes artists, you can go to his personal website and email him–especially if you live in Puerto Rico, or NYC.

Relavant Links

• EyeKandy
• Fernando’s Personal Website
• Buy the Fatal Justice T-Shirt in Black
• Buy the Fatal Justice T-Shirt in White

Assault Photoshop Brush Set 1 (2mb .abr file)

From time to time I like to export my brushes to upload onto our webserver for backup. (We currently have several thousand custom Photoshop brushes in our library now) We’ve decided to release a few of these brushes at a time to the readers of the site for free!

To install the brush set simply double click on 08312008_assault_set1.abr file after it’s been downloaded and it will launch Photoshop and install the brushes to your brush palette. (To view the brushes hit the “b” key and right click anywhere on your canvas and scroll down the window. You should see the new brushes there)

Have your own brush sets? Know of another link I haven’t included? Post it in the comments!

Photoshop Brush Resources

• Deviant Art
• Brusheezy
• Photoshop Brush Dynamics Tutorial
• How to create your own Photoshop brushes

A co-worker of mine recently found a great article in Wired that had some really beautiful looking “lasers”, as he called them with some light bursts and motion trails around them. He wanted some insight as to how one could emlways wanted to write a cool trendy tutorial so I’ve decided to unwrap the trendy light trails with a handy Photoshop tutorial.

Download Source PSD
Download Custom Brushes used in this tutorial

Begin – Choose a source focal point

To start out you need some sort of focal point so I figured a picture of one of our t-shirt models, Kendra, would do just fine. After extracting her from the background using various techniques (pen tool, magnetic lasso, and masks) we’re left with a blank canvas and a girl. If you can, preserve your layer masks.

Drawing Lasers and Motion Trails (option 1)

There are plenty of ways to make the little lasers, and I’ll be the first one to tell you that there really isn’t any right or wrong way–so for demonstration purposes I will show you the two ways I made my lasers in the above image. The first way of which is by using the pen tool and making a wavy line like I have done below:

After you’ve drawn your path you need to select the brush tool by hitting the “b” key or by selecting it from the toolbar on the left. Right click on your canvas to bring up your brushes window and select a brush with a very soft edge that (depending on the size of your image) is about 7 pixels wide.

After you’ve done this, select the pen tool again by hitting the “p” key or by clicking on the pen tool button to the left. Create a new layer (Layer>New>Layer) and then right click on that path and goto the “stroke path” option.

A window will popup. Check the “simulate pressure” option and make sure your brush tool is selected. Then click ok.

You will notice that you have a brush stroke going across where your path is and it should go from thick to thin at certain points in your curve with simulated pressure.

Now to get the glow effect on the brush you need to apply a layer glow. (Layer>Style>Outer Glow) Here are approximately the settings that I used with the color #006cff:

You may notice your glow may not have the intensity that you want. The best way to remedy this is to duplicate your layer by selecting it in the layer box and hitting apple+j or cntrl j and then merge those two layers together by hitting apple+e or cntrl+e. Here’s what mine looks like currently

After making one of the lasers this way you may want to repeat the process with another path, or you may want to just move your other path down and transform it. Save the paths you create as we’ll be using them later in the tutorial by going to your paths layer, and dragging your “work path” to the new path icon which should give you something similar to this in your path window:

Creating Motion Trails and Lasers (option 2)

Now one way to make very smooth consistent “lasers” is to use the above method. The other way, which may be a bit more quick and dirty but looks just as good is to brush the lasers on by hand. To do this, create a new layer and select a brush similar to the one you just had, except size this one down a few pixels by either opening the brush window (F5) or by hitting the “[” key which will scale down the brush size one pixel at a time. Then, by hand, draw several “lasers” from right to left across the canvas as I have here:

Somewhere between creating the live demo of this tutorial and writing the actual tutorial I did manage to forget a few screen captures so forgive me if there is some slight inconsistencies in my lasers. (I re-drew mine for this demo, but the actual lasers in the image were slightly different–but they were created in the same fashion) Now that you have several white lines you need to apply the blue glow effect to them. To do this, copy your layer style from your previous outer glow layer style and paste it onto your new layer. (Right click on layer with style and goto copy layer style, then right click on the layer you want to apply the style to and click paste layer style)

You can also recreate the layer style from scratch by going to layer>style>outer glow. and enter in the same settings that we did above. After you’ve done that your image should look something like this:

A few things to note about my image:

• My previous lasers have their layer modes set to things like color burn, and overlay to give some variation in the colors as you can see here.
• I’ve moved Kendra into the foreground in front of the lasers because… well because she’s the focal point!
• After getting my second laser technique down I decided to duplicate that layer and motion blur the layer to give it a bit different of a look from the first layer of lasers.

Add Light Bursts and thick Motion Blurs

It’s at this point that it might be a good idea to reference our original source inspiration to get an idea of what else they were doing with their design. I notice with some of these images that they use a bit of a blur with some of their lasers, as well as lasers of a different thickness.

The first thing I do is repeat my first technique for creating lasers, only this time I use a thicker brush and I’m going to blur the thick laser as well as distort it to give it a smokey feel. I repeat my first technique above by creating a path and a thicker brush and stroking my path.

Don’t forget to re-apply the previous glow layer style to get the right color blue neon on the outside. The next thing we want to get on this specific laser is some distortion. To get the right kind of distortion on this laser I want to use the glass filter, and in order to do that I need to put my white laser on a black background. To do that I create a new layer (Layer>New Layer) and fill it with black and place it below my white laser layer. I then merge the two layers by hitting apple+E or cntrl+e. After you have the laser on black you need to apply the glass filter with these settings (or something close to it):

This should give you a fatty laser beam that looks something like this:

Now those of you who are beginners are thinking, “OH NOES!? Where are my beautiful laser beams and motion trails that I made before?!?” Don’t worry they’re still there. What we need to do now is one of two things. You can either set this layer mode to “screen” which will act just like a real screen and make all the black invisible…

…or you can use the magic eraser tool. (Shift+E or hold the mouse down on the eraser tool till you see the magic eraser.) I don’t quite recall why I used the magic eraser, but for some reason it seemed to be the quick and dirty way to get this done so we’ll stick with it.

After selecting the magic eraser tool and clicking on the black areas of the image, I duplicated my fatty laser beam and set the layer mode of my copy to overlay to give it a more intense glow effect with a slightly reduced the opacity. Here’s what my layers currently look like.

Bring out the focal point with large light bursts with brush modes

After looking back at the reference image, I think our design still needs more of a focal point for our lasers, so we need to add some distorted light bursts. There are plenty of ways to do this whether it be using the lens flare or light effects, but I prefer to use good old custom brushes with layer modes. To start out, pick a dull tone of the color you want your light burst to be. I’ve chosen a dull blue (#1b294e if you want the hex code) Create a new layer. Then you need to set your brush settings to something similar to what I have here:

In order to get that intense bright look it’s important that you set the brush’s mode to “Color Dodge.” Then you need to pick a place on your canvas and click in roughly the same place three times as I have done here. You’ll notice that the more you click the more intense your color dodge becomes. I’ve clicked three times and ended up with a shape that looks something like you see below:

To polish off our light burst I want to add some white in the middle of the burst so that it doesn’t look like such a tacky gradient. To do this I simply set my brush mode back to normal for the layer mode and set my foreground color to plain white. After clicking in the middle of the current light burst you should see a nice gradation to white. Now we don’t want this perfect looking sphere shaped light burst showing up–we want it to be distorted, and for that you can use almost any of the distortion filters that Photoshop has to offer, but I recommend using a combination of the shear filter and the liquify filter.

After getting your gradient sheared to your liking, I recommend setting it’s layer mode to “lighten” and also duplicating the layer once and set that layer mode to “color burn” to give it a more intense look. (refer to PSD to see my final settings for this) I ended up duplicating my layer three times, and to make each layer unique I ran another filter, the liquify filter with these settings and adjusted my layer modes to give it the desired look.

At this point in the tutorial I’m not going to go into exact detail of each and every step because I’d be typing all day–the more you experiment with layer modes, masks, and layer modes the better the image usually turns out. I use a combination of all of those things to get to my final image as you’ll see in my final PSD which you can download here.

Add masks to light bursts for texture

After I get the desired intensity with my large light burst I merge those 3 layers and add a layer mask to hide certain areas of the burst that I don’t want. (Plus the source image appears to have a textured look to it) I select a dirty brush and paint a mask around desired areas of the image to hide/show more of the light burst. There are plenty of tutorials out there that teach you how to use masks and if you’re not using them along with custom brushes then I highly recommend you start doing that.

Rinse, Repeat, add color, use different distortion filters

In order to bring in some more color I’m going to repeat some of my earlier steps to make more lasers, except this time I’m going to use a purple color instead of blue, and instead of using the liquid filter, or the shear filter, I’m going to use the ocean ripple filter. First things first, you need to put your newly created lasers onto a black background so the distortion will work properly as I have outlined above. Then select the ocean ripple filter from the distort menu and apply something similar to the settings you see here:

The edges should be a bit rough looking and to smooth these out we’re going to slightly blur the ripples using the motion blur filter. Make sure to set the direction of the blur to mostly horizontal so it doesn’t lose it’s overall shape.

Experiment with your design!

To add some more volume to my composition I duplicate those new laser levels several times and experiment with different methods of transformation and layer modes/opacity.

Ultimately, the design is going to really come together in these phases and you’re not limited with what you can do. If at this time you wanted to completely change your design’s colors you could do so and continue on–or you can re-arrange the layers to get different effects on every layer.

Experiment! Save versions of your file so you can revert back in case you don’t like what you see. There’s been plenty of designs of mine that I worked on for several more hours and then ended up actually using a design that was done much earlier on in the process. (Look at our Radioactive II t-shirt design. It ended up being done alot sooner than I thought it was and I ended up throwing away what I had once thought was the “final” version.)

It’s hard to take your hands off the keyboard/mouse sometimes and actually decide when a design is done. This method of saving versions of your design is a great way to be able to look at your design later on with fresh eyes to see that maybe it was done a long time ago!

Clean it up! Accent the Focal Point!

Cleaning up your final composition and adding bits and pieces to the design is what’s going to give it it’s focal point, and if you haven’t been doing so already it can be really good to experiment with some of the same techniques using type. Before I get into adding type to my design, I’d like to touch upon adding a bit more variation to my color palette.

One thing I tend to notice about my design as it gets in the later stage is that I may want to add some variation in color to certain layers. The best way I find to do this is to utilize the clouds filter which I think is one of the most dynamic filters in Photoshop which is often under utilized by Photoshop n00bs.

To a beginner the clouds filter looks like just that, it makes pretty clouds, but once you learn how to use layer modes, masks, and custom brushes, the clouds filter can become your best friend for making your designs interesting and more dynamic. In this particular instance I’m going to use the clouds filter to add some more variation in color to my lasers by choosing a purple and a blue using the color picker tool for my foreground and background colors. After running the filter>render>clouds filter with purple and blue set as my foreground and background colors I decide to set my layer mode to overlay, and I also duplicate the layer and add a layer mask to it so that it’s hidden in various places. After getting the desired look that I’m happy with, I merge those two layers together.

Now that I have the desired color variation I want, it’s time to further emphasize the focal point, which in this case is Kendra the t-shirt girl. To bring more attention to her we’re going to duplicate her layer as you can see above and apply the layer mask to her. Your lower layer should no longer have the mask thumbnail next to it on your layers palette. This basically means nothing is being masked on your lower layer anymore.

You’re going to smudge using the smudge tool and a custom brush to give it the textured glow look that you see in the final image. If you’re not seeing the smudge’s show up outside of Kendra then you probably haven’t applied your layer mask and your smudges are getting hidden. make sure you’re smudging the bottom layer, so that the original Kendra image is on top.

You should see something similar to this:

Duplicate that smudged layer one more time and set that layer’s mode to color dodge:

Copy your layer style you created previously from one of our laser layers and paste that glow layer style onto your top original layer in this instance it’s called “Kendra Original”.

Add the finishing touches and details

I’ve been in the habit of adding little orbs to designs in this style so I create several new layers above and below my Kendra original image and use various custom brush settings to get some of those little orbs and light bursts surrounding my image and focal point.

Color correct and adjust your color palette!

The only other thing I can really think of to do on the image besides clean it up in various areas is to adjust the color of Kendra to match my color palette. To do that I’ll use some adjustment layers on my original Kendra layer (that still has a layer mask on it) The first type of adjustment layer I use is a curves layer:

You’ll also notice there are a few new items showing up here including some of my dynamic brush creations as well as some repetition of the purple lasers that I created before. One final thing to do is to add another adjustment layer which will add some blue hues to the original photo (Gradient Map):

Here’s the gradient settings I used:

Your layers window and image should look something like this now:

That’s about it for now. I’ve gone through and added some square looking brushes with brush dynamics.

I also added the name of my brand, Assault, to my image just because I like shamelessly plugging my product after writing these long tutorials. I’ve applied the following layer style to that layer to give it a similar neon look to it as well. (I’ve also applied a slight gaussian blur to soften the lettering)

Here’s the final image after cleaning up some of the layers and deleting some unwanted artifacts. I’ve also re-cropped the image because it felt nicer with a bit more head room for our center piece.

Conclusion

I’ve decided to post as much as I can from this tutorial so that if you knew 80% of what I covered you can at least benefit from my custom Photoshop brushes, or the original source psd of the graphic so you can see the actual layer breakdown I used to get to the final image. If you want to see some of the other tutorials I’ve written that I may have blazed past in this more advanced tutorial you can find links to them below.

While this may not be the EXACT process that was followed in our original inspirational material this is one of the many ways you could accomplish the same effect very quickly. Here are all of the files and links to my other helpful tutorials.

• Download the source PSD for this tutorial
• Download Custom Trendy Photoshop Brushes from this Tutorial
• Adobe Photoshop Brush Dynamics Tutorial
• Custom Photoshop Brushes Tutorial
• Additional Photoshop Tutorials
• Assault – Buy some t-shirts so I can start doing this thing full time!

In my earlier tutorial I went over how to use brush dynamics from a preset brush, but what I didn’t show you was how to actually create your own brushes. If you’re not using custom Photoshop brushes then you’re missing out on one of the best features of Photoshop that will save you a ton of time and bring some new flare to your designs. The first step is selecting what you want to make into a custom brush…

I will be creating two brushes in this tutorial. One is a cement face and  one is an image of Beelzebub from the Public Domain:

Step 1 – Adjusting your image for creating a brush

Make sure when selecting an image to make into a brush you’re using one that isn’t going to get you sued. A good place to start is images in the Public Domain that you can do what you want with! After you have the image open in Photoshop you may want to adjust the levels (cntrl + L or command + L) so that it gets the right amount of contrast you want. The way that brush samples work is very similar to that of a mask except that the darker the tone the less translucent the brush will be.

What’s that mean? What this translates to is that if something in your image that is completely black will be 100% of the brush color you select, and something that is 100% white will not put down any paint at all.

This is an important concept to grasp in regards to creating brushes because you can create brushes of ANYTHING. If you have a wispy image of hair it’ll actually create the same translucency of hair via the brush. In the image below I did 4 things to prep it for being a brush:

• 1. Normal Image cropped to a square
• 2. Bumped up the contrast with levels (cntrl + L or command + L)
• 3. Desaturated (Image>Adjustments>Desaturate) and inverted the image (cntrl + I)  because we want the black information (the only color used to make a brush)
• 4. Painted out parts of image I didn’t want to have in my brush.

This is a great way to bring texture and different variations of  smoothness to whatever project you may be working on. As you can see I’m only going to be getting the black part of the image as the brush face.

Step 2 – Select a square area around create the brush preset

Beelzebub is already prepped for brush sampling because he is black and white, so now all you have to do is select the marquee tool by hitting the m key or by selecting it on the tool palette. Hold down shift to make it a perfect square selection, and drag around the item you want to make into a brush. When you’re ready to create the actual  brush go to Edit>Define Brush Preset… A dialog will pop up asking you to name the brush. Click ok. (screenshot below)

You should now have the brush of Beelzebub selected, if not hit the b key (shortcut to select the brush tool) and it should be selected. If is still not, right click and your brush palette will open up and you can scroll to the bottom of your brushes and you should see Beelzebub there.

Step 3 – Adjusting Custom Brush size and settings

Now you should see the brush overlay and if you click you’ll see that the item you selected as your custom brush appear. If you hit the [ key the brush will increase in size. If you hit the ] key then the brush will get smaller. In this particular example I’ve used my two brushes, Beelzebub and the cement face and set their color blend mode to color dodge to get some cool color effects if I click in the same place twice.

It’s at this point that I recommend you read the Photoshop Brush Dynamics tutorial that I wrote because you can take your custom brush and scatter it around, rotate it, and have it change colors and opacity dynamically as you drag the brush around. (It can even interact with a drawing tablet)

Step 4 – Creating Brush Sets

Something I like to do after I’ve made a nice selection of brushes is to export them into a .abr file so I can access them on all of my computers as well as provide them for downloads to people who frequent the Assault T-Shirts website. To save a custom brush set you need to be using the brush tool. (at least the way I make sets you have to have brush tool selected or you can go into the brush window)

Hit the b key and then right click to bring up your brushes. Then click on the triangle in the upper right hand portion of the window and select Preset Manager…

Then use select all the brushes you’ve made that you want to go into a set by either using cntrl + click or command + clicking if you’re on a Mac like I am and then  click “Save Set..” and save the brush set somewhere on your computer.

Conclusion

This is just meant to get you going on creating brush sets. If you’d like to skip the step of making all your own brushes you can go to some of the resources below and download brush sets for free! I highly recommend giving credit to these people who made the brushes though, and if you’re selling something that uses custom brushes like we are at Assault, then I recommend you make your own brushes from your own images so you don’t get sued.

Photoshop Brush Resources:

• T-Shirts made with Custom Photoshop Brushes @ Assault
• Assault Custom Brushes from this tutorial and a few others I’ve made
• Deviantart Photoshop Brushes – Where I download the majority of my brushes
• Brusheezy – another great brush set resource
• Public Domain Image Resources – Wikipedia page with free public domain image resources
• Custom Photoshop Brush Video – If you can handle the guy’s weird voice, here’s a video that outlines the same topic.
• Another Custom Photoshop Brush Tutorial Video – if you don’t fall asleep this will work for you.

When a design is in it’s final stage and ready to be moved to a developer, or if there are product images ready to be uploaded that just need some final touches to get file size down, the “Save for Web & Devices” window (formerly part of Imageready I believe) can save you tons of issues with file size and compatibility. In this tutorial I’m going to break down a few things I have picked up through various projects that may help you with your own projects.

Images with Lots of Color – JPG is the answer

There comes a time when it’s better to use GIF files, and there are other times (the majority of the time) where JPG is the proper format to use. By default the JPG quality is set to 60 and generally without zooming in it’s hard to tell any quality difference. The photo I used below ended up being 72k with the JPG quality set to 60. As a GIF the image is 113k and you can see a noticeable difference in the quality. (The JPG being the better of the two even though it is smaller) Here’s my files and my settings.

You can see the image on the left has less color and detail especially in and around the glasses where it gets pixellated. The settings for these images is below:

Images with few colors – GIF is the answer

40k JPG:

32k GIF:

In this particular situation you can see that the images are virtually identical, and yet the gif is smaller in file size. If you’re really sharp you’ll notice that the word “ass” appears too, it actually says Assault people, before any of you people on QBN go ahead and post it and make fun of me. Here’s the settings I used for these two files (I tweaked the GIF settings to lower the color count which ultimately dropped the file size down significantly)

The basic rule that I find is that the large images with lots of color will always be JPG, but sometimes when images are small, around thumbnail size, gifs will work better then as well because you can only see around a hundred colors anyways. (For images under say 100px by 100px)

Other Reasons to Use GIFS

Another topic I will cover later is transparency. If you need an image to be partially transparent then the answer is never going to be a JPG, because there’s no transparencies with JPG. GIFs are currently the only form of transparent image that are supported by the major web browsers all the way back to Internet Explorer 6 with the exception of using a quite handy (yet at times tricky) png transparency workaround. My next tutorial will be on transparency, and when it’s better to use PNG vs GIFs for transparency. For now let’s just say that if you can make the gif look good with a matte and transparency you should use GIF for transparent images.

Conclusion

The majority of the time when it comes to putting photos up on the web it’s going to be better to use JPG, but when there isn’t alot of colors you can reduce the color count in the Save for Web & Devices settings and get a result that looks the same, but is smaller in file size.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, GIFs are also the only image format that supports animation (although it tends to get really large in file size really quickly. (Thanks Sean)

UPDATE 2: If you’re going to rant about GIFs, read the full article and refer to my Transparency Tutorial for any transparent related issues.

Don’t Miss:

• Assault Apparel T-Shirt Website (We use both a combination of Gifs and JPGs here to keep our page sizes down)
• PNG Transparency for IE6 Workaround

The Skull Wing Assault shirt was made in similiar fashion to the Red Assault and Green Assualt shirts. This shirt is printed on the American Apparel 50/50 Jersey T-Shirt which in our opinion is the best/most comfortable shirt on the market now. (They’re also sweat shop free!)

If you’d like to download some of the custom shapes used in this design you can get them for free here.

I do believe that I primarily used custom brushes for this shirt, not shapes, and you can download the custom brushes here. There is also a brush set that I used that contains the winged shapes you see here. They are modified slightly, but the shape I started with is in this downloadable Photoshop brush set. There was also one font that I used for this which I can’t seem to track down but it is called Skulls TS 2. Download Skulls TS 2 Font face for free here

As always we ask that you keep buying our shirts instead of just downloading our brushes and making your own! We got mouths to feed!

This shirt originally looked a bit more like the Punisher’s logo, but in fear of getting sued by DC Comics I decided to dress it up like an old Spartan Warrior. Take that Marvel! I made this using many of my custom shapes and custom brush sets in Photoshop which I have decided to post here on this as a free download. Do with them what you like, but don’t make an exact copy of my shirt and get it printed on your own! Let me save you the trouble by pointing you in the direction of the Skull Spartan Warrior’s product page on our official store.

As of now it’s only $22.99, if you can’t afford that then you shouldn’t be able to afford an internet connection.

As promised here is the zip containing several items: click to download the custom Photoshop skull shapes, and the custom star random brushes. Click the image to the right to download the high resolution image of the Skull Spartan Warrior T-Shirt. I cannot take credit for the custom shapes, but the custom brushes are all mine baby. You’re getting a spartan warrior custom shape, and a few skull shapes that I found on my long trek through the internet.

For those of you new to Photoshop, you must use custom shapes and brushes in your designs. They’ll save you hours of time and it brings you to the next level of Photoshop. Be sure you have a high powered machine of some kind cause they tend to eat up processing power and RAM. I prefer using my Dual 2ghz Powermac G5 with a gig of ram. (I know I need more) Photoshop CS2 runs like a charm!

Download custom photoshop shapes of skulls, spartan warrior in vector format

The Radioactive II T-shirt was conceived in a night of furious T-Shirt design by yours truly. I belted out I think 3 shirts that night. (I was consuming Miller Lites until I couldn’t see straight, at which time t-shirt creation came to a hault) Like most of my t-shirt designs I had an idea of what I wanted the design to look like at the begining of said process, but generally they end up looking nothing like the original vision. The hardest part is trying to decide when the shirt is done. This mostly explains why there are two versions of this design.

Crank up the streaming techno/house music from iTunes and be on your way with your custom shapes/brushes and Photoshop techniques that you have mastered over the years, and I’m sure could come up with this design in about 30 minutes. (At least that’s how long I think it took) I took the liberty of tracking down the falcon shape and putting it here for you to download: Fascist Falcon Custom Photoshop Shape.

There’s a famous quote riddled throughout this design that I liked so much I turned it into a custom brush shape and used it on several of the other shirts. I appreciated this quote for the irony of it and it’s direct relation to many of the main themes involved with most of our shirts. I hesitate to reveal who said the quote because I do believe I will be using it for a discount code one of these days.

The design’s print is oversized in two colors predominantly over the left shoulder. Unlike it’s sister deisgn the Radioactive 1 T-Shirt it does not go over the seem, but is equally as cool.