MR.NET MANTA RAY
Anton Shmakov, CEO of MotionRay reached out to me with a request: To design a very cool motive for a T-Shirt that his team would wear at a conference.
His request was that it looks “lively”, with strong motion, not too clean looking … In other words, the request was exactly what I hoped it would be.
My favourite part was he even brought a sketch with him.
The project was made towards the end of 2022.
HOW IT STARTED
Anton's Drawing of a concept
I suggested a slightly different composition.
Full Artwork
How was it Made?
Manta Ray - Technique test
As a first order of business, I wanted to implement the style I’ll be using.
As my test subject I chose the Manta Ray. Its design was complex enough that if it’s going to pass there, it should pass in the rest of the artwork.
I chose the “texture” style brushes in Affinity Designer to give the artwork fairly ‘analogue’ feel.
Shading
I used a very graphic technique to simulate shading. In print, everything that happens, it comes in a form of dots. I took this approach to the border of passable using a variant of it. Decreasing size of the dots give a feeling of a brush stroke. By shoving enough of them on a surface small enough, they blend together to form a feeling of a shade.
Cutout Edge and Portal
I was determined to give the edge of the artwork an uneven look. I want it to look like something ripped through the shirt to give us a peek into the happening behind it. Making a jagged edge by hand would have been an ordeal for a week. Instead, I figured out that I could use a very irregular font, modify it and use this as a stencil to make the edge. It still required cleanup work afterwards, but it worked well.
In an artwork like this, the challenge I tend to face most often is - how to make something glow ridiculously bright and not have all of it look just white. It was much the same in this case. I used a mix of color choices, layer effects and layering to give the portal effect still a sense of color, velocity, but also that it shines with a power of solid plasma.
Alternative Edition
As with most of my work, I made sure that this one is also somewhat reliably flexible to be used in different formats, layouts, etc. I made a version of it that can be used horizontally.
Also, Anton is using a slightly tilted original version as his LinkedIn banner. :)
