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Yesterday's City of Tomorrow

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Description

Pardon the cheesy title — it comes with the theme :laughing:

The design challenge states:
"This time around, step back into the Retro Future and design a t-shirt that captures the essence of idealistic imagery of the future as imagined in the pre-1970s era. Skyscrapers that round to a bulb at their top, ringed with futuristic bands for extra support. Flying cars that drive their silver-suited inhabitants to their jobs on Mars. Sleek, spherical household appliances that do everything from shower you to cook your dinner in a matter of instants. You tell us!"

One of my resolutions this year was to challenge and train myself better by creating artwork as often as possible. Part of it is joining as many contests as I could manage, because it really is great exercise trying to work with a predetermined theme and medium.

The Retro Future shirt design challenge caught my interest because it brought back memories of watching cartoons like The Jetsons and stuff on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim as a teeny kid. Later on I was exposed to vintage futuristic art from even farther back. Their idea of what was 'modern' or 'futuristic' is entirely different from how it's depicted today — usually streamlined silhouettes, restrained color, and minimalism. In contrast, their vision of tomorrow was full of lots of bright color and odd forms that would give construction companies headaches (then again maybe it was because they planned to have the robots do all the grunt work).

:bulletblue: my design:
My main inspirations for my design are the futuristic illustrations of Arthur Radebaugh, and cartoons I watched growing up.

It's pretty straightforward — a stylized retro futuristic cityscape with the deviantART logo integrated as part of the crazy architecture. It fits in there pretty well, hahah. I also wanted to maximize the shirt as a canvas so I made the unprinted blue part serve as the sky so that that even the negative space is really part of the composition as a whole.

I did my best to make a shirt design I would wear, and I'd like to think my taste in clothes isn't horrible and hopefully other people would enjoy this too. :lol: I tried to balance the stylization in a such a way that it would keep with the theme but also appeal to a large demographic with modern tastes.

7 colors; halftones were used for the gradations and to simulate the look of more colors

I really enjoyed working on this, and even learned a couple of new tricks in the process so I'm happy. :)

It's fascinating to observe how these aesthetics evolve. And now I can't help wondering how the future is going to look in twenty years or so.
Image size
1500x1800px 457.03 KB
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Comments39
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privodanima's avatar
The colors are so so well chosen!
My Cute Monsters Contest Entries:
[link]
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