I heard about a NASA and Threadless partnered t-shirt design contest through Twitter a while ago. I thought it sounded like fun, but I got busy and forgot about it. Then on Saturday, I saw a tweet from Leland Melvin about the contest saying there were only two days to go. I decided I really wanted to do something for the contest and needed that last creative outlet before entering back to school mode. (I officially go back to school August 1.)
What followed on Saturday was a frenzied bout of ultra focused creativity. I was surprised at how quickly I developed the idea I wanted to create. Once I sketched out my idea, I knew I’d have to use a couple of different techniques to get the look I wanted. I wanted my rocket/planets section of the t-shirt to look sketched – like someone planning out the future. I created three plumes for the rocket, each one emanating from a different body (Earth, moon, and Mars). I also made sure the scale for the size of the Earth, moon, and Mars was accurate. I decided not to use scale distances, though! I used Inkscape to create this part of the shirt. I used some of the basic shape tools (circles/ellipses, polygons, and bezier lines) to create the initial shapes. Then, I tweaked the basic shapes using the nodes function. Finally, I added a sketched line effect to the path and changed the colors.
The second main part of the design is the nebula. When I think of space, nebulas often come to mind. They are such amazing places – remnants of a dead star that gives life to new ones. It’s such an amazing cycle, and the image is one I often picture for space (even though if we traveled to a nebula our eyes would not register the same vibrancy of colors). For the nebula, I used the Gimp and created some clouds using solid noise and difference clouds in a couple of different layers. I then applied color. I did this twice to get the two different colors for the nebula.
Overall, I was going for something simple yet inspiring. I hope that is what you see when you look at it. The theme for the contest is Final Frontier. Even though my t-shirt idea is minimal in design, there is still a lot of symbolism incorporated into it.
If you’d like to see my design on Threadless and score it, you can visit this link. As of today (July 26, 2011), there are six days left to score. I hope you enjoy the design, and how cool would it be to see it on a t-shirt one day?!
