Heli-Ugly Sweater Design
Personally, I love ugly Christmas sweaters. So, when a client came to me with an idea for a custom ugly sweater design I was thrilled to help bring his idea to life. As a helicopter mechanic, the concept for the design was something near and dear to the client’s heart and he had a pretty clear vision of the basic design. It was up to me to turn his vision into reality.
Because the design was going to be printed and not actually stitched, I got to work building the design out of hundreds, maybe even thousands (who has time to count?), of tiny squares, exes, and hearts to give the illusion of a stitched design. The design includes 3 specific types of helicopters that needed to be identifiable from one another. In order to keep the amount of detail needed for this to happen, the individual shapes building the design needed to be very small and the spacing between them quite tight.
The design looked great in a digital environment, but all of those tiny shapes and tight spacing raised some concern (from me) about how well the design was going to print, especially since it was intended to be printed on fabric. Fabric printing has unique challenges and I wanted to ensure my client's sweater was going to be everything he had hoped for. So, before printing the more expensive sweater version of the design, I created a test print on an inexpensive t-shirt. Even though the printing method used for the t-shirt wasn’t exactly the same as what would be used for the sweater, this gave us a better idea of how the final product would look.* The client and I were both satisfied with the test print (phew!) and moved on to final production.
*Read more about the printing processes at oliveridleystudios.com
The final sweater, or hoodie if you want to be technical, was created using an all-over, dye-sublimation print method where the fabric is printed, then cut and sewn together. The end result was a happy designer and a happy client. It was the perfect project to wrap up 2020.