Process post: Tapisserie de Arrrgggh

Hi guys! I have been wanting to do another Holy Grail design for a while now, and decided to pay tribute to it tapestry style, by showing the amazing journey of King Arthur for the Holy Grail. The shirt is currently up for scoring at Threadless:  

Let me show you some of the steps. First of all, I looked at some images of tapestries, like the Bayeux Tapestry which was stylized enough to serve as a inspiration for a shirt design: 

 

Next step is super important: Layout! I have to figure out where all the little characters go, a busy design like this needs a lot of design. I concentrated on moments of the King Arthur storyline (so I skipped some very funny moments that didn't involve him). 

Next, line art, my most feared challenge. As you an see, in this phase I added some ornaments to the design which I later deleted because they turned out too busy. This step is traditional, I use my favorite multi liners and the light box (with the printed out layout underneath).

Next: First ground colors. I worked on cream colored background because I assumed that would support the tapestry feeling the most. I decided to use pretty basic colors but one popping color (yellow) to support the "golden tapestry" look and make Arthur's crest pop out. 

I got rid of the ornaments. They were making the design too busy and to hard to follow, distracted the eyes from the actual story. 

This is the design on a new color, "jade" - I liked it because it made the yellow and red pop out more. I also added "parchment" textures to the design by turning the texture into halftones and coloring the texture layers in different colors. I decided to add the clouds on top to support the "holy parchment" feeling. 

Tata! The final result. I added some little flowers to seperate the scenes from each other (which was really necessary) and I added some flow to the ornaments surounding the scenes.