How to design a funny Monkey T-Shirt illustration

      A few days ago we published a set of tee shirts mock-up templates. Today I gonna show you how to create a nice monkey illustration and how to apply it on a t-shirt of the set. We will use Photoshop tools to modify stock images and work with shadows and color contrasts. Then we will switch to Illustrator to create the vector monkey. Even if the result can appear easy to achieve, I’m sure you will learn some new tricks with this tutorial.

T-shirt design world is one of my favourite source of inspiration. Every time I walk in my city shopping streets, I spend most of the time observing appeal design and graphics. This is the classical obsession of the graphic designer: to see everywhere patterns and inspirational forms! On the web side, there are sites like DesignByHumans and Threadless that I regularly visit.
There are nice tutorials on the web about how to create a graphic tee in Photoshop and how to prepare files for screen-printing. Recently James Davies has written a tutorial on this specific matter on PSDTuts. I suggest you to take a look at this video-tutorial published by Jimmy Heartcore too.
Today I’m not talking about printing technique. This tutorial deals with how to create a funny vector image that can be easily applied on a shirt. At the end of the process we will use the live trace tool in Illustrator to achieve the final result, but it requires a process in Photoshop to make the image ready for live tracing. Let’s start!

Final Result:

Step 1

We will start making a composition in Photoshop with these three images:

Open the monkey image in Photoshop, zoom on the animal face, grab the pen tool and start tracing the head. We are going to extract it, which is the only part we need. You don’t have to be too much accurate with the pen tool.

Once the path is closed, press ctrl+enter to create a selection. Then press the “add layer mask” button to isolate the selection from the background.
Note: If you’re a newby and don’t know how to extract objects in Photoshop, take a look at our tutorial about Photoshop extraction techniques

Step 2

Open the glasses image in Photoshop, and use the same technique of step 1 to extract them. In the glasses document ctrl+click on the mask in the layer window to select glasses, then ctrl+C to copy. Open monkey document and press ctrl+V to paste in.

Step 3

Glasses need to be re-sized and rotated to match monkey’s face. Press ctrl+T to activate transform tool and decrease glasses size and rotate them a little bit.

Step 4

Monkey’s left ear is too high positioned. Remove the mask: right-click on the mask in the layers window and select “Apply layer mask”. Then go to filter>liquify. The image will appear in a new window. In case you want to visualize glasses position, check “show backdrop”. Grab the forward warp tool (W) and move the ear lower down. If you want, you can modify other face details. For example, I’ve played with monkey’s lips to give the impression it is smiling.

After made glasses layer visible, the ear is still too high. Here is the solution: select the glasses layer and go to Edit>transform>warp. Move anchor points to modify glasses form.

We have to eliminate some parts of glasses. Reduce layer opacity: this will help understand better where to work. Then select the mask in the layer window, grab a black brush and paint over the parts you want to remove
Note: With the mask selected, black brushes are used to remove image areas, while white brushes to restore them.

Step 5

Now that glasses perfectly match monkey’s face, we can extract the cigarette and paste it into the canvas:

Step 6

Hide for the moment glasses and cigarette layers. We need to modify a little bit monkey’s head. Take in mind: we will use Illustrator live trace tool to recognize and trace black and white areas of the image. To obtain a good result, we need to increase image contrasts and darken image edges. Let’s start from desaturating the image. With the monkey layer selected, go to image>adjustments>desaturate or press shift+ctrl+U. Then press ctrl+M to open curves and make a “S” as shown in the screenshot below.

Grab the burn tool (O) and start painting at the top of monkey’s head to darken these areas. Continue using the burn tool to darken all the parts you want to be sure will be black in the vector format. Also you can use the dodge tool to lighten those parts you want to be white.

The last retouch to this nice face: create a new blank layer above the monkey’s one. Ctrl+click on monkey’s layer to select its pixels. Grab a black soft (hardness 0%) brush and start painting over the edges. The aim of this step is to highlight the edges with a black brush so that the final vector will have black edges. This will be really useful if you’d like, for example, to color the vector in Illustrator using the live paint tool.
A little summary:

• create a new blank layer above the monkey’s one
• ctrl+click on monkey layer (in the layer window) to select its pixels
• grab a black soft (hardness 0%) brush
• paint over the edges of selection to highlight head edges

Step 7

Make visible glasses’ layer and desaturate it (shift+ctrl+U). Pres ctrl+L to open levels window and move the black arrow to the right to darken the image.

Press ctrl+I to invert image colors. Then right-click on glasses’ layer and select blending options. Add a 3px black stroke effect:

Step 8

We now have to replace glasses lens. Grab the pen tool in “paths” mode and create a path that traces one of the lens

Create a new blank layer. Press ctrl+enter to activate the selection and alt+delete to fill selection with foreground color. The color used is not important. We will replace it later using blending options.

Right-click on the lens layer just created and select “blending options”. Add a gradient overlay going from white to black and a 3px black stroke effect.


Do the same with the other lens:

Step 9

Make visible the cigarette layer, grab the eraser tool (E) and eliminate the top part as shown in the screenshot below. A reduction of layer opacity can helps you achieve a better result

As we made with monkey’s head in step 6, highlight cigarette edges using a black soft brush.

Step 10

The image is now ready for live tracing. Save as a jpg and open it in Illustrator

Go to object>Live trace>make and expand. Then grab the magic wand tool (Y), select the white area and hit delete. Now you have your ready-to-use vector monkey!

Step 11

Let’s apply the illustration on the t-shirt mockup. Open the mock-up psd and choose one from 5 available t-shirt templates. In Illustrator copy the illustration (ctrl+C) and paste it in Photoshop as a smart object.

Using blending options, switch monkey’s color to white. Now duplicate the t-shirt (layer>duplicate layer) and move the duplicated layer above the  monkey’s one. Switch the layer blending mode to multiply and reduce opacity to 35%. You can notice that some shadow effects of the shirt affect now also the illustration, thus giving realism to the image.

White is now too faded. Go to layer>new adjustment layer>levels and use them to increase image contrasts:

Ok the image is ready to be showed to our friends or clients. Place a nice background and a soft shadow below the t-shirt. Finished! Try using different t-shirts templates and other colors for your illustration. This is my result: