Retro Halloween T-Shirt Graphic

For this t-shirt design, I was inspired by Halloween artwork from the 1950's and 1960's. I wanted to create a Halloween design that incorporated some of what is now 'retro' design elements, such as the boomerang and little sparkly asterisk things, all common in commercial artwork and advertising about 60 years ago. One of the advantages of designing in this style is that I was able to keep things fairly simple. I wasn't concerned with shading and texture, just the overall design of the elements and evoking a retro feel.

The graphic was created entirely in PhotoShop, using a combination of custom shapes, the rectangular marquee tool, and drawing with the pen tool.
The boomerang was actually a custom shape I created for a different design; drawn using the pen tool. The asterisks are custom shapes I downloaded a while back. The pumpkin was drawn for this piece using PhotoShop's pen tool. Each element; the pumpkin outline, stem outline, eyes, nose and mouth; were all drawn on separate layers to allow for flexibility when arranging the face of the jack-o-lantern, and to allow for coloring each element independently. This proved to be very helpful, because at first I wasn't sure what to do with the eyes. Then my wife took one look and suggested coloring them yellow, which would give the effect of the eyes being back-lit by a candle inside the jack-o-lantern. Duh - sometimes I just don't see those things; one of the reasons that drawing and graphic design don't come easy to me.

The coloring was all done in PhotoShop as well. I really like how purple has become part of the Halloween color palette, in addition to traditional black and orange, I chose a rather pale violet color for the purple boomerang, as well as the outlines around the rectangles.

To see the design on a shirt, click here. I also placed it onto a card, as I thought it would make a nice Halloween card.