Events in 2009 Illustrated

The new theme for Shirt.Woot is "Events of 2009 Illustrated."

I had a hard time thinking of any good ideas on this one, but this is what I got:

"Eclipse"

On July 22, 2009 the longest solar eclipse during the 21st century took place. I came up with a more abstract interpretation of the eclipse image.

"The Bully"

It was reported that the type of bird that caused US Airways Flight 1549 to crash land in the Hudson River on January 15 were a migratory Canadian geese. After the rest of the geese heard the news they gained a new found fear of engines protruding from airplane wings which never seemed to be threatening before. Some geese use this to bully others. The audacity.

Color Separation

In response to a comment on Woot, here is how I separate colors for the print ready file. I'm sure there are far, far better ways of doing it, but this has worked for me so far.

In photoshop I usually end up merging all the layers together.

Then I create a new layer for each color I need and grab the Paint Bucket tool with about 10-15 Tolerance and the All Layers box checked. Next I color pick each color and fill with the bucket into each new layer (the All layers box will allow the new layer to be filled with the selected color based on the color on the original design that you click on). Clicking the bucket tool twice on the same color pushes the color out a few pixels, as does increasing the Tolerance.

Again, this way is far from perfect, can’t handle extremely sharp angles, and takes some finagling on complex designs, but it’s what I’m used to and if anyone knows a better way I would be glad to learn.

I hope this is what you were asking. Photoshop is all I have ever used so I have no idea about any other software.

Here's my new design for Woot called "Destructive Frolic."