Artwork

Creating the artwork for the new shirts was more challenging then one might think.  It would have been easier to do new artwork from scratch but this is not what I wanted, my goal was to recreate the older shirts.   Below is a nice new picture of a tiger courtesy of ChatGPT and a picture of the Tiger that's on the MLHS gym shirts.  Despite the fact that there's a bunch of strange whitespace in the MLHS tiger's mouth and his head is sort of flat, that's what I wanted.

It then turns out there are different versions of the MLHS gym shirt.  Below an older shirt (left or first) and a newer shirt (right or second).  If you look closely you'll notice a few differences:

• The Tiger is a mirror image on the newer shirt

• The newer shirt has three colors, orange, blue, and a lightish blue.  The older shirt just has orange and blue.

• The "MOUNTIAN LAKES" on the newer shirt is arced more and comes down lower.

• Not all the whiskers on the newer shirt are clear

• The "PHYSICAL ED." font size and spacing is different between the shirts

My guess is that somewhere along the line someone lost the original artwork for the shirt and created new artwork from scratch, copying the Tiger somehow, mirroring it in the process, and losing some accuracy overall.  I wanted something as close to the older shirt as possible.

The biggest challenge is that I had no access to an actual shirt and the only pictures available were from Facebook.   Below is a picture of the older shirt I was trying to copy on the left and what you get if you try to enlarge the Tiger image.  It gets worse if you try to enlarge it to the size needed for the gym shirts.

So I needed to engage a graphic artist (or a print screening company that had graphic artists) to recreate the older shirt taking hints from the newer shirt which had a more detailed picture.  The graphic artists were much more accustomed to creating new shirts from scratch using stock imagery and fonts rather than trying to recreate an old shirt from low quality photographs.  I went with a print screening company that had graphic artists on staff and they had no idea of what they were getting into.  Getting the artwork to my satisfaction took a few weeks.  The final results are below....