Electric Jellyfish Tshirt Tutorial

I've been meaning to write a tutorial for how I created Electric Jellyfish for Threadless since 2007. I've also received emails about it forever, I find it hard to believe anyone wants to know how to do this, as the technique is one of the first ever things I learned in Photoshop. But then again this is me, I need to ask where the spell check is in InDesign every day.

Unfortunately I've misplaced some of the working files for the design, but its fine, to make things easier I'll do the same thing with a slightly simpler graphic. You should be able to get the gist all the same.

First some history…
I actually made the artwork for the final design in Illustrator 8, Photoshop 6, and a copy of Adobe Streamline. For those of you not old enough to know, Streamline was a magical program that only ran OS9. So I had to boot up in Classic fro OSX to make this work. In short, all it did was convert bitmap to vector. You can now do this in Illustrator under the well abused 'Live Trace' feature, but a fundamental understanding of resolution (dpi) and threshold are what really still make the difference in my opinion. Basically, if you start with crap, it'll probably end of like crap, don't expect a 100px 72dpi JPEG to look good as a vector on an A3 poster.

1) Start in Illustrator with a simple shape

Create a new Illustrator Document of 1000 x 1000px and simply draw a circle edge to edge of the canvas so you've got a 1000 x 1000px circle also. You may find this easiest with Smart Guides turned on to ensure snapping to the grid.



Resize the circle to 50% of its original size so it sits in the middle of the canvas. You can just draw the circle to 500px in the first place if you like, so long as its centred.

Draw a box this time edge to edge of 1000px, and give it no fill or stroke so its just an invisible square. You should now have a black circle sitting inside of an invisible box.



2) Moving to Photoshop

Copy everything from your Illustrator document (including and empty square, we're just going to use this to set some space to work with) and when still in your clipboard, go 'File > New' in Photoshop.Now, Photoshop's default tendency is to bring this in as a 1000 x 1000px document at 72dpi. But we don't want that.



Change the resolution too 300dpi and simply click cancel. Then 'File > New' again and you'll be presented with the right 300dpi setup for print. You can work on smaller files, but with bitmap to vector to want to work on the largest possible file size as it'll save you having to do it twice when someone wants a bigger version.



Now you can finally paste into Photoshop's window.

3) Feathering a selection

Using the Magic Wand (quick key W), tap on the black circle. Create a new layer and turn off Layer 1 where your artwork is so you can just see the marching ants. Go 'Select > Modify > Feather' and enter 150px.



With the feathered selection now back in Photoshop, go 'Edit > Fill > Fill with black' and you'll end up with a horrible looking gradient pf black to white in a circle.



4) Masking your feather

This is probably the defining characteristic in what made Electric Jellyfish, where the dots fade from large to small. Go 'Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All' so you get a layer mask showing in your layers palette.



Next select your Gradient Tool (quick key G), make sure your swatches are reset to black and white, and click on the Gradient Editor that displays a little gradient by default (found just below 'Photoshop' in the top menu). Then be sure to reset this to 'Foreground to Background'. Its important not to confuse this with 'Foreground to Transparent' or 'Black, White' as those won't give you an editable gradient you are about the draw out.



Drag you Gradient Tool over the circle until you have masked out about the half of it. Its takes a little while to get to grips with how this works, and you might have to drag beyond the canvas area to get the desired effect.



5) Converting to bitmap

Go to 'Image > Mode > Greyscale', then 'Image > Mode > Bitmap'. The input settings of your document just refer to the current dpi you have set, an the output settings refer to exactly that, the final output size. Rather than blowing up your vectors, it makes sense to have biggest possible file to import in the first place so you can scale this down later. So enter 600, and 'Halftone Screen', all will become clear.



The frequency is what controls how tight your dots are. Generally the smaller the number the less dots you will end up with. Angle doesn't really come into play when just doing elipses, but if you had chosen 'line' in the previous step then this would control the angle of the lines.



Hit OK and and your gradient will convert to a bitmap. It may look a little crushed so be sure to go 'Image > Mode > Greyscale' and make the Size Ratio 1. You'll have a faded heavy to light dot going from top to bottom now, but also radiating from the centre at the same time.



If you wanted to go back and adjust the gradient or bitmap frequency you'll either need to keep a working version of the file saved, cause one you've bitmaped and closed the file there's no going back. Finally save as a TIFF for importing into Illustrator.

6) Converting to vector

Head back to your original Illustrator file and create a new layer. Place your newly saved TIFF onto the canvas and align it centred so its covering the original circle. Don't worry if it looks awful, Illustrator always handles TIFFs like this, all the information is there it just previews poorly.

Go 'Object > Live Trace > Tracing Options', you may get a file warning as the file we've created is quite big. For this particular image I've just used the default settings but it does pay to experiment with the sliders.



Be sure to click 'Expand' in the menu bar along the top, and then you'll have black vectors, and white vectors. Using the White Arrow (subselect) click on one of the white fills, and go 'Select > Same > Fill & Stroke', and with all the white selected in the document delete this.

You're now left with a single selection of black as one vector which you can group for an easy selection. Don't worry if this looks a little jagged on screen, just zoom in and you'll see the circles have rendered very smoothly.



7) Adding Colour

All you have to do now is add a grey background colour, change the dots to blue, and create some artwork in white to sit on top of the whole thing. I've just brought in the line work from Electric Jellyfish to show it sitting in place.

On a final note, getting the right feeling for the dots on Electric Jellyfish took a long time to perfect. The right combination or Gradient, Bitmap Frequency, and Trace settings are specific to each project. You'll get very different results by just changing one of these settings, so they need to work in harmony to create a balanced feeling. This is a complicated process at first so feel free to ask any questions.

Happy Streamlining Live Tracing!