Our clothing line has entered into round two of TeeMadness! We’re in a neck and neck race with another clothing company, and we need your help to advance to the next round! It only takes one second to vote, and two clicks!

All you have to do is click on this link, and then click on the green button next to our name which I have spot shadowed for you. Please help us avoid an EMBARRASSING second round elimination, and we’ll high five everyone and do everyone’s laundry. Mr. 51% has also been so kind to volunteer his singing talents via voicemail to anyone who can prove they voted for us, and told their friends.

Two years ago we launched with a small t-shirt store, (We only had 12 shirts) and virtually no clue what we were doing. Two years later and we’ve become a full fledged design/music/apparel resource with 30 products sold to every state in the US and 20+ countries.

It’s been great, and we wanted to say thanks by giving 25% off on everything in our store as well as free shipping on everything. No discount codes needed–and please share this with your friends and family, especially if they’ve been wanting to order shirts from us for awhile. (We’re sold out of alot of stuff quite often.)

Here’s to another two years–hopefully by then we’ll have our retail store in Chicago, a thriving video podcast of some sort, and millions of dollars and a stripper pole in our corporate offices.

Thanks to everyone who have helped us over the last two years

• Lex and Terry Morning Radio Network
• Phil and everyone at Woot!
• The Kaplowitz Family
• The Toomey Family
• Adam Hendle, and Beau from IATT.tv and IAmTheTrend.com
• Oswald Hobbes who makes me laugh and inspires me every day
• Tubbs! + future baby
• Dasimator (@quornball)
• Andy from Hide Your Arms
• ShirtsOnSale
• All the bands we sponsor and are friends/fans of (Dear Enemy, A Hero Named Hope, From The Broken, Seven Day Sonnet, The Swellers, Alkaline Trio, Rise Against, Invisible Gods, Trippy Wicked, Puddle of Mudd, The Delivery Boys, Motion City Soundtrack, Paramore, Radiofix, Direct Hit!, Anna Vogelzang, The Action Blast, The Fold and many many others)
• JumboG
• EddieFTW
• Rich Bellamy
• Ron Guerin
• Peter (Slashfilm) and Neil (Film School Rejects)
• The Emptees community
• Jud & the lovely Marietta from ShirtFight
• The guys from Cameesa
• Nick & Jon from Storenvy
• Chris Martin + Merchspin
• Jon Kruse from Shred
• Dane, Scott, Dennis – Photographers and professionally good looking male models extraordinaire
• John Staniforth, Fernando Rodriguez, & Candice Ciesla for their incredible design work
• Martin Atkins
• Chad Lehner + everyone at Total Assault

Help us spread the word!

Paste this code into your site to put our flyer in there (We know it’s large, that’s why we made 3 sizes!)

Large:

<p style=”text-align: center;”><a href=”http://www.assaultshirts.com” target=”_blank”><img title=”February Sale at Assault Shirts” src=”http://www.assault.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/february-sale.jpg” alt=”February Sale at Assault Shirts” width=”705″ height=”912″ /></a></p>

Smaller:

<p style=”text-align: left;”><a href=”http://www.assaultshirts.com” target=”_blank”><img title=”February Sale at Assault Shirts” src=”http://www.assault.it/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/february-sale-231×300.jpg” alt=”February Sale at Assault Shirts” width=”231″ height=”300″ /></a></p>

The Retro Galaxy t-shirt makes up our quasi fall/winter line of t-shirts, and is primarily made up of images captured by Nasa’s very own Hubble Telescope. Ever since I heard the story from a co-worker that earth had nearly been annihilated several times in my lifetime I knew I wanted to design some sort of crazy space-inspired shirt, but never found a good source of inspiration.

Click to view a high resolution image of the shirt design

That all changed when I started looking around at images actually taken of space from the Hubble Telescope. Throw in some adobe phtoshop custom brushes, and some brush dynamics and I very quickly had something that was ready to be printed.

The only problem I had with the shirt was that I was unable to place it onto an actual t-shirt because of how haphazardly the brushes were laid out on the design. After browsing through the thousands of custom shapes I had, I found something I liked. I added some of our classic hidden logos and text throughout the stars and nerve impulse images, and the design was done.

• Buy the Retro Galaxy T-Shirt at Assault
• <3 it at Emptees

(Currently priced at $22.99 but you can get 10% off with the discount code HANDHSAKE)

Layer Breakdown

This shirt was designed around the same time that Proposition 8 made headlines in the state of California. Proposition 8 was side note to an election ballot that was primarily used to strip away the previously granted rights of gay couples to legally marry. The new wording of the ammendment essentially stated that, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

What most people don’t know about Proposition 8 is that it marked the first time in American history that the rights of a group of people was taken away after being granted by law. Who do we have to thank for this black mark on the history of our country? None other than the Roman Catholic Church, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormons.

These two groups were heavy proponents of Proposition 8, even donating hefty sums of money to the overall campaign in favor of passing the amendment. Does that sound fair? A tax-free organization that is allowed to contribute around 50% of the total budget to lobby against a cause it opposes? A tax-free organization that doesn’t even reside in the state where the election ballot ammendment vote is taking place?

No matter the person, no one should have their rights limited, and no book should dictate the status quo. Gay and lesbian couples deserve the same rights. The pursuit of happiness should belong to every man woman and child. Repeal prop8.

This shirt was designed by me, (Tim Toomey) and depicts an 8-legged spider stepping on the bill of rights which grants us our basic freedoms.

To purchase the Anti-Proposition of Hate Section 8 T-Shirt click here
(Currently priced at $22.99 but you can get 10% off with the discount code HANDHSAKE)

More images of this shirt

Shirt depicted below on Kyle Smith, lead singer of the band, A Hero Named Hope

Almost two months ago, Assault had the honor of being reviewed by Buy-Tees.net.  After reading what came from that review, I felt compelled to dig in on the mind of Paul, co-owner and main contributor at Buy Tees.  I was very impressed with both the writing style and in-depth review of the art itself, rather than just a bland t-shirt review.  If you aren’t familiar with their site, I recommend you BEG Paul to check your stuff out; he has this uncanny ability to actually tell you things about your work that you may not have known.

I had the honor of interviewing him to try and get a little insight into what drives him, enjoy!

First and foremost, what is buy-tees.net?

Hmm… well I suppose the clue is in the name heh. It’s a t-shirt reviews blog first and foremost–although it’s probably not quite like any other you’ve read. I do have a tendency to quote the world and his wife and just about every homespun philosophy imaginable when I get cracking on a review. I am probably what you’d call a ‘natural blogger’ – I’m from a creative background in both the fine arts and literature and so I suppose it made sense to hone my abilities by venturing into blogging. It just so happens that I use the excuse of t-shirt reviews to express my opinions to the world.

What drove you to start it?

There are two answers to this. The first was simply to promote a few of my own t-shirt designs, way back when I’d decided to set up my own independent t-shirt label, I was sick of the enormous profits and poor service that many major print-on-demand sites were offering and so I thought I’d have a bash. Promoting the label was a total nightmare, besides which the overall costs of setting up a label were beyond my reach at the time and so I thought a blog would save on marketing costs and be a good way of drumming up business. The second reason came along within a week or two of blogging. Essentially, I found that a lot of other designers were in the same proverbial boat – vis-a-vis they also hadn’t two pennies to rub together and needed quality sources of promotion and marketing without the extortionate expense of traditional advertising such as Adwords or hiring an SEO expert. So I filled the gap, featuring designers’ work in return for a back link to the blog.

I know buy-tees.net is made up of yourself and another silent partner; is there anyone else that is part of the team?  Do you ever have guest posts and if so, how do you go about selecting the individual?

Short answer no – I have had offers – although for the main part they’re rather self-promotional in the main. I’m not exactly an objective reviewer myself, I am however an artist and so I know when I see something conceptually or visually superior and that always urges me on when it comes to deconstructing the mindset or ethos of a brand/designer. I’m also not ‘in it for the money’ as they say – I make a few dollars from the odd banner now and again but it doesn’t even cover hosting most of the time.

I have always enjoyed the company of artists, whatever medium they may choose to specialize in – it just so happens that I believe t-shirt design has until recently been treated as a rather lowly distant cousin of say illustration or graphic design and thought it’d be rather satisfying both personally and for the arts community at large if someone could give this niche a boost.

My partner helps out with some administration of the site from time to time and we discuss our reactions to designers’ work, we like to bounce ideas off of each other and see if there’s anything more I can add to the review than the usual ‘pic and click’ offerings out there.

How did you go about setting up your site, and what tips/suggestions can you give to others?

In truth I’d say exactly the same thing now as I always have, if you enjoy what you do, if you take pride in your work, if you can offer something truly original in whatever form the world will slowly rub its eyes, stand up and take notice of what you’re doing. There are plenty of options out there for marketing but I’m not the best person to ask, I am not a marketing expert, I simply enjoy being creative and sharing the results.

I designed the blog myself, I suppose I could revamp it but ‘if it ain’t broke why fix it?’ There are plenty of gorgeous looking sites out there with very little to say or offer, no matter what niche they cover, it’s funny how people make a distinction between the online and offline world.

Salespeople annoy me, they are for the most part impatient, desperate to sell their wares and rarely listen to their prospects views and opinions. I’ve actually worked for a few major companies in a marketing capacity (many of whom probably rather I hadn’t) and they all seemed to make the same common mistake, forgetting that the public consists of millions of individuals, each with their own way of seeing and doing things. The only thing I have learned about marketing this last year is that excitement is infectious, if you can share the thrill of what you do then others will want to as well.

What sets buy-tees.net apart from the many other resource sites/blogs out there?

When I first set up Buy Tees almost every t-shirt reviews blog out there knocked out posts with a title, a photo, a price and a link. They may not like to admit it but I’ve seen a lot of those very same blogs turn my way, almost all of them will now,  at some point or other, wax lyrical about a designer or label. I am of the opinion that if you can’t pour your heart and soul into what you do why bother?

I have received so many emails from designers thanking me for helping them reach the next level of success, for saving a brand, even reinventing one that I can’t keep track anymore. I suppose the biggest difference, without wanting to sound arrogant, is me. I am different, I am an artist and I need constant sources of inspiration and so it’s a two-way street, creative people contact me, ask for my opinion or help and I, for the main part, am glad to help. You could call it a calling, or perhaps that’s a little over dramatic, but it certainly adds something special to my life.

You appear to get very personally involved in each of your reviews.  What approach do you take when reviewing a brand or particular shirt?

I can’t say there’s a formula, I’ve always been good at ‘reading people’, I don’t mean I am some kind of psychic, I don’t tell fortunes or read tarot, I just understand basic human motivation, especially when it comes to creative outlets such as t-shirt design. It’s as if I sit down and look at a body of work and imagine I have created the tees in front of me, then I work out why, where the inspiration came from, and how well it has been conceptually resolved.

I do have a habit of making up my own layman’s terms for things and this I’d call ‘logical progression’. You take things, no matter what they are, one step at a time, a creative mind follows a pattern, built up over years of experience, interactions, events, actions. If you for instance had been a backpacker for the last decade I’d expect a lot of cultural reference in anything you did, an openness to new experiences, an understanding of geo-political and historical boundaries, a longing for freedom, a zest for adventure. That would show in any creative outlet you pursued. I suppose I’ve specialized in ‘what makes people tick’ and try to connect with them personally through my opinions of their work.

Being creative is rewarding, connecting with other creative minds is probably as exciting as it gets for me.

I am very impressed with your writing form and style; do you have a background in literature?

Thanks, I have to admit I do get quite a bit of praise for my writing style which even now surprises me. I write the way I talk, which yes, must be exhausting for everyone involved. My mother was an English teacher, she taught me to read and write within the first few months of my life.

I’m the guy at the party at the end of the night, when you’re trying to get everyone to go home, who just won’t shut up.

I did write a screenplay once, it was almost accepted by Fox Searchlight in the mid 90s, they decided against it in the end saying it was too hot to handle, imagine The Matrix with more body parts and you’re half way there. I actually trained in conceptual arts at college, don’t ask, it’s all twaddle, but the tutors did force us to justify everything we created, however absurd the reasoning, and so I got into the habit of deconstructing everything and everyone around me until I felt I was about to burst – hence the outpouring of opinion at the slightest opportunity.

Are you involved in any other sites other than buy-tees?  If so, what?

Yes, I’m an artist, you can visit my site at http://paulbaines.co.uk – there’s also my arts blog at http://paulbaines.co.uk/category/blog where I review other contemporary artists. I’ve recently been approached by a major arts publisher who wants to feature my designs in a student textbook for illustrators which quite surprised me as I’d never considered I was an illustrator – but there you go.

I work on rather a large scale, at the moment I’m offering digital prints up to 44″ x 55″ in size however I’m in the midst of creating my own silk screen print studio and will be hand printing limited edition signed and numbered A1 prints by the end of summer if all goes well. It’s hard to explain my work, you will probably either love it or hate it. I have a few ties with the UK graffiti movement, I’m also hoping to have a few outlets and galleries selling my work by the end of the year.

Where do you see buy-tees heading from here?

Who knows? I was recently offered a very tidy sum for the blog, a major t-shirt producer wanted to buy it, and keep it as an archive which was very tempting and rather flattering. However I’d had so much feedback asking that I continue I didn’t have the heart to sell up. So what does the future hold? I really couldn’t say, perhaps it’s time for a t-shirt book? In the long term if the art career really takes off I will have to find a worthy successor, if not I will probably continue to review t-shirts until I drop. Either way it will be an exciting ride!

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!

In the past year I’ve learned quite a few things that I didn’t know about t-shirts, and t-shirt printing that I thought I would share with anyone who’s either already designing their own shirts, or just getting started.

If you’re printing your shirts using a direct to garment type of solution you need not worry about many of these tips such as reducing the colors, but for those of you using screen printing, like we are at Assault Shirts, I think you’ll find most of these tips and resources very helpful.

Reducing image colors in preparation for a screen printing in Photoshop

Throughout many of our t-shirt designs we’ve had to reduce the amount of colors in an image in order to make it fit into the color scheme of our design.

Reducing the amount of colors also makes it cheaper to print, and it gives you a better idea of what your design is going to look like once it’s been screen printed. We used this technique in our 1984 T-Shirt design as well as our One Year As A Lion T-Shirt.  The key to reducing an image’s amount of colors for screen printing is the Posterize image adjustment. To demonstrate, I’ll use this image of Johnny Depp as the iconic Chicago gangster, John Dillinger.

Image > Adjustments > Posterize…

Posterize reduces the amount of colors in your image to the number of levels you specify. Depending on what kind of a look you are going for you can reduce the amount of colors once, or sometimes twice to get the desired look for your image. I’m sure you can even reduce it further, but I generally use 3 or 4 levels.

To posterize your image, first make sure you are on the selected layer you want to posterize. Then, go to Image> Adjustments> Posterize…

After posterizing your image, you can either desaturate it or try varying the amount of levels within the Posterize settings to get the desired effect. Here’s a few other options I managed to come up with:

You can also bring your image into Illustrator, and start to trace the image so it doesn’t look so crispy which you’ll find  may have a better effect than what I’ve outlined above. I personally am all-Photoshop guy so I prefer to keep everything in Photoshop, but Live Trace in Illustrator is another popular method for vectorizing an image.

New Document Presets for Screen Printing T-Shirts

The two document presets for the two sizes of screens that we use are:

18x23 canvas with 300 dpi resolution in CMYK color mode

With the large image sizes it may make sense to start at a resolution of 150dpi if the computer you are working on is a bit older. You can also use a Fill Layer for a background rather than a raster background layer to reduce your document file size. I do this with all my designs so my working file isn’t a 2gb fail whale waiting to happen.

Getting Pantone color codes for exact color matches with your printer

In order to guarantee your designs colors are matching and actually printable you need to send your pantone colors for every color in your design to your printer. Rather than let them do the color work for you, you should send the colors pantone codes.

To do this,  use the eye-dropper tool by selecting it in the tool palette or by hitting the “i” key and then clicking on the color in the design.

After you have the color selected, in your tool palette double click the color, and your color picker will open with the color you just eye dropped. Generally, this color will still be an RGB or CMYK color and isn’t the pantone color code we want. To get the approximate pantone color code, click on the “color libraries” button.

This will open up your color libraries window and the eye dropped color should be selected. The P542 C is what you want to send to the printer along with every other color code associated with your design.

2 minute color separation in Photoshop

Our printers have always done the color separation for us after we send them the high resolution images, but in case you need to do color separation on your own here’s the easiest and quickest way to accomplish that:

• Select the Magic Wand Tool in the tool palette (or hit the “w” key”)
• Uncheck “Contiguous” in the tool options area

• Click a color on your design
  

• Create a new layer and fill it by hitting cntrl + backspace or alt + backspace (depending on what color you want to fill it with the foreground or background)
• Repeat this for each color in your design and you should have each color separated on it’s own layer! (Here’s my design with new colors all separated on their own layers below)

I also found several detailed step by step Youtube videos which outline the above process using similar techniques:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmspWZqbc2Q

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uydc2VmfvQ

T-Shirt placement templates and mock ups

To ensure your printer gets your shirt printed with the correct shirt placement you should place your design on an actual shirt. This should be included with your high resolution shirt files that you send to your printer.

In the past we’ve used a combination of the below sources for t-shirt templates and mockups:

• Photoshop T-Shirt Custom Shape -- Download Use this custom shape as a background and place your shirt design atop it and mask out the outside area.
• Go Media’s Arsenal T-Shirt Templates are a the best way to get a photo realistic idea of what your designs will look like. They’re worth every penny.
• Color Overload’s Men’s T-Shirt Templates Another PSD with an assortment of color t-shirt templates to use for creating mockups from Color Overload
• Assault Shirts Product Page Photoshop Mockups This is our T-Shirt mock-up that we use on our product pages at Assault Shirts. It’s my personal favorite and can be used for shirts of all colors in the American Apparel style.

Related Links & Resources

• T-Shirt Forums Graphics & Design Help
• Designer’s Guide to Apparel Printing from Go Media
• Emptees T-Shirt Resources -- Great assortment of downloads and resources

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

High resolution 1984 image

For some time now I’ve wanted to design a shirt inspired by 1984. The newest member of the Assault team, John Staniforth took on the challenge to bring this entire deisgn to life,  and this is the final product which I’m proud to say is some of our best work yet. 90% of the design work came from Stani’s mind, and the other 10% was myself adding color and a few other elements to, “take it to the next level.”

This Orwellian design’s focus is on the subject of totalitarian rule; rule brought about through the tyrannical control of thoughts, beliefs and ideals. By censoring and controlling the doctrine of which people live by, through the constant barrage of the oppressive propaganda machine, power is taken from the outreaching open hands of the many and tightly grasped by the clinching fists of the elitist few.  Through surveillance, censorship, fear of random violence, fear of torture, fear of nuclear war and death, freedom becomes not only an unspeakable word but an unthinkable and unobtainable ideal.

This design was created using a combination of digital matte painting, as well as grafting images together in Photoshop to achieve the final look. It also utilized several custom Photoshop brushes and shapes that we’ve created using our custom Photoshop brush tutorial.

If you’d like to see this shirt in high resolution, click on the image above. You can buy this shirt for $22.99 currently on the 1984 t-shirt product page over at Assault.

If you happened to be in a local Hot Topic or Barnes & Noble lately you may have seen the October/November issue of American Music Press Magazine with Rise Against on the cover. If you ALSO happened to turn to page 121 you would see us featured in their fashion section with a small picture of our favorite deranged cartoonist, Candice, donning the Justice Rave girls t-shirt and some really tacky looking 80s sunglasses.

But, in case you missed us, I’ve taken the liberty of scanning the article and cover for your viewing pleasure.

From the article:

Unconventional was one word that came to my mind when I first saw the designs from Assault come over to the office. Assault Shirts are so cool that they are highly susceptible to getting stolen from your local laundromat, so watch your back. This shirt was designed by co-owner Tim Toomey himself, and is one of the newer ones.

-Kristin Schuetze

Rise Against on issue 35 of AMP Magazine

Assault's writeup in AMP Magazine.

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

Mr 51% decided to use his exclusive membership to the Blood Pact Alkaline Trio fan club to get some of our t-shirts to Dan, Matt, and Derek from the Alkaline Trio at their show recently in Dallas, Texas. Little did we know that Derek would actually wear the shirt to the show!!!! For now all we have is a picture we grabbed off of FlickR where you can vaguely see the Radioactive II T-Shirt.

There’s also a picture of Dan holding his Skull Wing Assault Shirt. Hopefully, we can catch a photo of him wearing it somewhere on the net!

I never thought anyone would take the time to figure out the morse code on the mix CD Craig man put together for those of you lucky enough to get a Zombie Bait T-Shirt, but sure enough someone got the answer!

Congratulations Brad Stiffler! You’ve won yourself a free shirt! Sorry Curtis, you were just a bit too late! Don’t forget everyone, you can still get yourself $10 dollars off of any of our shirts with the coupon code in the first track.

-Tim

The Assault Shirts Official Tee displays the official logo of Assault as well as our slogan, “The price is negotiable, the message is not”. It was the final design completed just before our first batch of printing from the great people at Merchspin. The shirt is printed on the American Apparel 50/50 Jersey t-shirt and it officially rocks harder than your mom doing beer bongs during parents’ weekend at college.

Love it? Hate it, post your thoughts and comments and if you’re lucky you’ll get a sweet secret code fo discounts yo deezy.

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!

Want to design this t-shirt on your own? Download all the custom Photoshop shapes that I used to make this design. Double click on the .csh file and they’ll install themselves to your Photoshop custom shapes tool. (You can access this tool by right click on your canvas when using your custom shapes tool.)

All we ask is that you don’t design the exact same shirt and then try to sell them. if you do this Mr. 51% will have to hunt you down and do scary things to you.

To download the high resolution image of this shirt click here, or click here on my t-shirt SEO optimized link here which we will call the t-shirt design download green grunge free. (or you can click the image to the left.

The Red Assault T-Shirt is by far the best and my personal most favorite graphic t-shirt that I have designed to date. Unlike all the other graphic t-shirts out there, this shirt costs just $19.99 and features an over-sized print on the very trendy American Apparel 50/5o jersey t-shirt. It’s one of the few shirts where you can actually see the name of the FUCKING BRILLIANT company who made the shirt, Assault.

It being that this shirt was created in a half hour (yes, most of the designs take hours, but this one poo-pooed itself out in a few minutes of brilliance) I’ve decided to supply you with the tools to make the magic happen on your own designs. Granted, there isn’t a sweet printing company like Merchspin to make the magic actually, physically print onto your t-shirts, but it’s a good head start.

As always, like it? Hate it? Comment below? I’d love to post a tutorial series on how I design my shirts, as well as give some insight to the process as to how we make this all happen… Anyone interested? Email us, comment, let us know and I’ll make it happen.

Red Assault Shirt custom photoshop shapes

The first Assault Apparel item Craig and Tim have seen first hand, (via photo on the internet) This print features an oversized design done completely in black on a white American Apparel 50/50 Jersey T-shirt. (sorry girls, for now it’s guys only)

The print is oversized and goes over the seam as well as over the collar. It easily adds 3 inches to your forearms and 10 inches to your chest muscles. (even if you have moobs, we’re all gonna be there some day anyways)

It being that this was one of the designs that came to light via some hardcore miller lite drinking and house music listening, I highly recommend you wear this shirt to the club and to any important presidential speeches, especially if you’re gonna be on TV. We need all the free press weez kin git!

Like it? Hate it? Want to download the photoshop brushes? Let us know.

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