'Patches-O-Plenty 2'
I am not a huge football fan to be honest. I don't watch it that often anymore but growing up I did enjoy it and collected football cards so I am familiar with all the stars from when I grew up. Such as Kenny Stabler who was called 'The Snake', Tom Landry's trademark fedora or the more modern term coined from a 1990's Saturday Night Live skit of 'Da Bears' and many others.
So when Upper Deck Company contacted me to create a set of NFL Licensed embroidery patch designs playing off these popular fan familiar terms and nick names of various players through out the sports history I got excited.
The patches themselves are not large at about 1.5x1.5 inches so the level of detail had to be kept somewhat simplified but still visually interesting and fun. Embroidery technology has really improved though over the past decade so I am still surprised at how much detail it can hold.
If you'd like to see the set of Major League Baseball Licensed embroidery patches I designed for the same company you can view them by clicking here.
It was a lot of work but it was also a lot of fun.
3 comments:
Cool work Von! I'm actually doing my first design for a sorority jacket embroidery. I'm doing the design in Illustrator. Is there anything special that I should do to the file?
Thanks in advance.
A few things to consider.
Avoid Hairlines.
Make the line weight at least 1 pt. I don't go below 1.5 and it works fine.
Avoid Gradient Blends.
They look good onscreen but always look lame when embroidered. This of course depends ultimately on stitch count. If you pay enough you can get a ton of stitching and pull it off but it's far more expensive because it takes longer to run.
Think shapes and flat colors.
Detail minusa gets lost easy. Creating detail such as shading and highlights via solid shapes will translate better.
Find a good vendor.
The final embroidery will only be as good as the one who digitizes the artwork. Higher end vendors have better tools that can do digitizing nearly all automatic so as long as your files are clean and designed well with the above criteria in mind it'll more then likely come out fine.
But many still manually map out the stitching regardless if you give them a digital file. They go in and using their program and manually figure out where the stitching will go and how dense it will be etc. A good digitizer will follow your art exactly and not cut corners to lower stitch count which in turn lowers level of detail and quality. So ask to see vendor samples to get an idea of how well they do this. Error on the side of cauton is a good rule of thumb.
Thanks so much Von. Yay, I'm going in the right direction. I'm going to save your suggestions. It's always good to have something to refer to. Thanks for being such a helpful professional. ^_^.
Oh and thanks again for the IllustrationClass site. I've downloaded all of the tutorials. They're extremely helpful. ^_^.
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