I'm trans and have always liked monsters and puns, so I decided to design a shirt featuring a transgender vampire posing in front of a postcard of Transylvania. They are wearing a chest binder and there’s a trans flag patch on their jacket. For this project, I used a combination of the pen, brush, live paint and typing tools. I wanted it to have a vintage postcard feel so I used an old cursive font. As a contrast, I wrote Transylvania in a punk one and colored it the pink, blue and white of the trans colors, just in case it wasn’t obvious enough.
This project gave us the unique opportunity to design whatever we felt like creating with Adobe Illustrator, and then bringing it into the physical world through a shirt, stickers, patches, etc. It made me feel more comfortable using the pen tool and allowed us to practice our Illustrator skills without limiting our creativity. We learned how to use helpful tools like live paint and how to use a die cutting machine. I really appreciated being able to bring our designs to life, since it is a lot easier to appreciate them in the physical world. And, c’mon, I really wanted a vampire shirt, ok? It would’ve been a missed opportunity.
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