At work, some projects that I have been dealing with use elementary particle names for their internal project names. Without giving away company secrets, its about a Unix- and a Windows-based platform that will finally be merged. Of cause, this is very similar to nuclear fission, so I wanted to illustrate this by setting the project name in the context of particle physics. With nuclear fission as well as with our company's vision, there can be many different outcomes; some desired, some rather problematic. I wanted to express this to my colleagues (I have to admit that an outside person doesn't get the joke quite right). To avoid legal issues, I slightly modified the product name (to OvenView).
| date | Jan 2002 |
|---|---|
| time | 5 days |
| object | bright blue short-sleeved shirt |
| technique |   |
The background required quite some experimentation. I wanted to slightly texture the entire shirt; in contrast to a T-shirt, there is so much more space available that almost any motive will get lost. I could have quickly sketched the various formulas with the airbrush, but I wanted the letters to be even more fuzzy and faded, so I tried the watercolor method: I moistened one side of the shirt with a wet sponge, then applied diluted paint in some fast and spontaneous writing motions. Most of my initial effort was wasted, because the cloth was so wet that the entire paint faded into oblivion! Additionally, the three different hues of blue had different color components that spread with different velocities. In the end, it took me a lot more time that expected, but I liked the result.
For the actual motive, I chose the traditional shirt partitioning: a small monochrome logo on the front pocket and the central piece on the back side. The light, thin cloth allowed me to put a template underneath the cloth, so I just had to trace the lines. To prevent the text captions from getting too much attention and rendering the entire drawing fidgety with too much details, I diluted the silver color with water to get runny colors.
Note: These high-quality images take some time to load. Some images are sized to fit the page width, so try your browser's full-screen mode or resizing the browser window. If you want to view the picture in full detail and zoom into it, save the picture and use another imaging application to view it.
The images by Ingo Karkat on this page are licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
