Floral Composition in Ballpoint Pen

 

I decided that my previous attempt at ballpoint pen art was interesting enough that I could make this into a rashguard. The geisha v demon drawing would form the front and back panel but I needed something on the sleeves. I always like including flowers on many of my designs so it seemed natural to attempt a floral composite for this project. 

Here's how I put it together.

I began with an extensive search for images of vintage flower prints online. These photos would form handy references for the next stage. You can see my Pinterest gallery here.

I composed my favourite flowers from the collection in Photoshop to see how they would look all together. I then opened a layer on top of these flowers and inked over the flowers in outline form only. The end result looked like this image below:

It looks odd like this but you have to imagine it curving around the shape of a person's arm.

I printed this design out onto two A4 sheets of paper and joined them together to make an A3 sized version. The next stage would be the lengthy period of my drawing over the top of this template with a biro pen.

The video below is a timelapse of the whole biro drawing process condensed into 50 seconds. It was very handy to have an A3 sized light box so that I could see the outlines beneath the paper. I used cheap watercolour paper to draw the biro marks on. It is a little more grainy than I would prefer for such a drawing but I quickly got used to it.

Once the biro lines were complete I then scanned in A3 drawing in sections and pieced it together within Photoshop. 

One side effect of drawing in blue biro is that the blue ink colour doesn't translate accurately in CMYK, which is the safest colour gamut to use when designing for dye sublimation printed garments (in my opinion). What looks vibrant and saturated on paper and in normal RGB mode on the computer will look far duller and less saturated in CMYK mode. This is to be expected so I placed an adjustment layer on the biro art to play with the colours a bit - pushing the vibrancy and levels as much as I could but still keeping it within the CMYK acceptable parameters.

The end result looked like this:

The canvas size is really big, to accommodate the likely printing size of the actual rashguard sleeve. This contrasts to my vector artworks (Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer) where the canvas size can be much smaller since the vector lines are infinitely scaleable.

The next stage is to draw the other sleeve and perhaps draw smaller elements that I can add to the design. Once all the artwork has been placed onto my rashguard template, I will send it off to the factory to get a test sample made. I don't think any other fightwear brand has tried converting ballpoint artwork into rashguards so this is new territory for everyone.

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