Woot.com has a derby. No, not the type of hat Charlie Chaplin wore as "The Little Tramp." And not a horse race either, though the truth is not that far off. It's a shirt derby where any artist can enter a t-shirt design and be voted on by the Woot community.
If you've read some of my previous blog posts, you may have seen that I've entered designs at another site, but Woot is a little different. First, it runs the course of one week and follows a very specific time table. There's always a theme and rules about subjects that can't be included, and art must have all colors on separate layers and converted to halftones to represent anything less than 100% opacity. It took me a while to even figure all that out, and one of the drawbacks of working only with Photoshop Elements is that halftones can only be made with dots and not lines. (If anyone knows of a good plug-in that will allow a PSE user to do halftones in lines, please comment and let me know!)
I like to get my entry in as early as possible, but with only 24 hours between the theme announcement and beginning of entry acceptance, my life has become too complicated to do that very often. But every now and then, they'll hint at the following week's theme, and I can use that time to my advantage.
Seven days ago they dropped the hint "Americana," and this became my project for the week: spending an old-fashioned 4th of July watching fireworks.
The trickiest part of making this design concerned the fact that the dog and people are not really there. The background is navy blue and there is no black ink where they appear. But that doesn't mean that I didn't actually draw them.
For the highlights, I did something similar. I drew the reflected colors on the spaces left by the previous deletion, on layers separate from the others. Then I again selected the images I'd drawn, but inverted the selection (CTRL-SHIFT-I). When I went to the other color layers and hit DELETE, I was then getting rid of everything except the color on the images. In the completed design, there was no need for the original dog and people I'd drawn to be visible.
If you've ever purchased anything at all from Woot.com, you're eligible to vote in the derby at shirt.woot.com between now and noon Central Time, June 19, 2014. Please stop by to see all the wonderful entries, and any votes for "Simple Celebration" are greatly appreciated!
And one more thing: Derby winners usually sell for $12 on their debut, but if there are at least 1,776 unique voters this week, those shirts will cost only $10! Good price for a shirt, so exercise your right to vote!
Thanks for visiting and please come again!
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