Female Suit For Photoshop Png

[Milton Beaty]

This was a very interesting project, it was also very useful in that I learnt many new skills that are transferable to both my concept art work as well as my animations, I will briefly discuss these throughout the post. It is also very important to note that because in this project I had to visual and create something that was the clients description it improved my design skills.

In the last several years one of the things that I have learnt from the numerous blogs, vlogs and websites of concept artists and animators that I follow has taught me that a lot of work can come from word of mouth and referrals, this is something that has proven quite true in this last academic year. Much of my client work has come to me, In fact I have had more offers for work than I could handle. This project was another such example, I have done numerous projects for a Prop company called Axis Replicas and one of the owners (John Collins) had recommended me to another company (seen below).

We specialize in creating everything from recreation to completely original costumes. We are constantly striving to learn the newest techniques used to ensure our products not only have the best quality, but also as much diversity as possible with an array of materials.

We currently have the capabilities to create custom fabrics, sculpting and molding with rubbers and silicones, leather-crafting, and even 3d modeling and printing if the project calls for it. No costume is too complex or too tedious a task, but merely a matter of your time and budget.

The brief for the first project is shown below and was agreed with the client (although this was later tweaked as between us we realised the limitations of the printing process and also how the project would look physically rather than a computer render.

To digitally create a computer render of a female muscle base that can be printed using a special rubberised screen printing process. This suit will be worn underneath another suit to give the illusion of chrome muscles underneath. The digital file must be made to real-life scale and be in a format that allows printing and sewing on fabric. The fabric will be black and the printed rubber texture will be printed in rubberised silver ink, this means that the file will need inverting for printing.

Like with the male muscle bases I have made in the past the first thing that I did was collect a lot of reference material. I used google to collect numerous pics of athletic woman, I composed these into a reference board and from this I would digitally paint the muscles into Photoshop.

Below you can see the first version I did of the file, because this has never been done before (at least to mine and the clients knowledge) we were making decisions on what would work best as we went along. We decided that the best way to start the project would be for me to create a design from which we could test and make changes.

This project immediately lent itself to improving/learning skills that were transferable to my concept art and animation work. Below I created the first design entirely from digital painting in Photoshop, I looked at numerous images of the female muscles and in my mind merge them into a single design, I then painted this using the soft,hard and chalk brushes. Actual painting from start to finish was something I definitely wanted to improve, I have previously relied on photobashing to create a lot of my work, so this provided an opportunity to improve my digital painting.

Above you can see the clients feedback, it was at this point that something was made more clear to me, previously I was of the understanding that the printer could handle a gradient of black to white and I assume I could paint the design In the same style as I have for dye sublimation printed suits. The client clarified to me that the printers can handle very little gradation and basically there needs to be much more contrast and basically as black and white as possible.

The client then shared the below images with me, these pics really helped me to understand what the client wanted to achieve. The image below shows the muscle suit worn by Superman in the recent films, wearing this muscle suit underneath the blue fabric suit gives the impression of silver muscles shining through the suit.

Below I have included 2 of the pictures I used as reference for the rest of the project. Here you can see that as the blue fabric stretches over the muscle suit the silver shines through, this is what the client wanted to achieve be for a female.

There is however a large difference between the movie costume and the design me and the client were working on, the movie suit would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to make and here the client planned doing it on a small fraction of the price. For this reason the manufacturing process of the two suits is very different, the movie suit is a black lycra suit that has foam latex muscles attached, they are they painted in chrome. Being latex sculpts the muscles are actual 3 dimensional, whereas with the clients suit he will be using screen printing and the muscles will be chrome but they will be flat. This means that we would have to tweak and alter the design until we could get the best result possible.

The above version shows an amended version 1 design, here I tweaked the design so that there was far more contrast, I also sharpened up the details more and made the muscles more defined looking. I sent this to the client for some feedback and he told me to make the changes more extreme, adding even more contrast and definition.

The client like the look of the design but at this point he decided that the limitations of the printing process would not allow him to recreate this. It was decided at this point to make a much more simple design. Where I would do the design in just black and white with no gradient.

The client was actually making this suit for one of his own clients, at this point his client was asking for some progress reports. He sent his client all the work that I had done on the project so far and the below picture shows the results of his conversation:

Whereas previously I had attempted to paint realistic muscles of their outward appearance on the body, the female actually wanted a muscle structure similar to that found beneath the skin. I collected plenty of new reference used that to begin digitally painting version 3 of the design.

I sent the above picture and got positive feedback and so I decided to continue the rest of the design in the same aesthetic.I made sure that I separated the muscles and made them really defined, I also added some details within the muscles like the strands of the individual muscles.

Below you can see the design with the alterations, I painted one half so that it could be compared directly to the previous. Here you can see that I took the clients feedback, the areas between the muscles is much closer and with less fade, I have also amended the under the breast area as instructed. Finally I brightened the whites and neatened the whole file so that it could be used for printing.

At this point the client was very happy with the design, it was exactly he and his female client wanted, at this point I could now finalise the design, I inverted it ready for printing and added things such as the sewing lines etc.

Below you can see a copy of the final version sent to the client, the actual size of the file is approximately 200cm x 130cm, this is because it is printed full size to the female clients measurements, I also sent the client instructions on how the design is sewn together.

The pictures below show the arm design printed onto the black spandex, this was the first time myself and the client would really know if this was going to work. At this point it is still hard to visualise how the suit will look when it is sewn together and worn underneath the outer suit.

The pictures below show some images the client sent me several days later, although the suit has not been sewn up yet, you can see hints at how the finished suit will look. You can see even on the unsewn suit that the silver muscles shine through the outer suit.

Once the undersuit has been sewn and is completed I will post the pictures, I really hope to get these in time for my Degree show, it will be good to see the project from the inception to the finished article.

Like I mentioned in at the beginning of this post, many concept artist that I follow have iterated the importance of word of mouth, referrals and also repeat custom, this client project has proved this all to be true and because the client was very happy with the results of this it cements second project that he mentioned in the beginning. Once I finish my degree I will be working on them on a project to replicate a Batman costume from the new Batman VS Superman film.

This was one of the more recent client projects that I have undertaken, I have already had a working costume design business for 9 months and so the professional side of things I already had a strong grasp of, after all this client was given my name as a recommendation which proves that I am building a good reputation among people I have worked with.

One of the main things that I have taken away from this project is to try and get an detailed as possible brief, here the initial brief was not particularly detailed and I actually assumed that I knew exactly what the client wanted. This was partially due to the nature of the project, myself and the client were both working this out as we went along but in terms of the aesthetics of the design if I had gotten and coordinated a more detailed brief I could have saved myself some time and effort and also gotten the final design delivered in a quicker time frame. Being unsure of what we needed to do and also my commitments to numerous other client projects meant that the project took several weeks longer than anticipated and planned for. With the next client project I will ensure that I plan and schedule better and ensure that the client is aware of the timeline and also things that may result in delays.

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