HOW TO DESIGN BOOTLEG VINTAGE RAP SHIRTS (FULL PHOTOSHOP TUTORIAL)

what's up everyone in today's video I'm going to show you the resources and techniques I use to create bootleg style designs this is a super trendy popular style that has taken over places like Urban Outfitters and PacSun in the last few years I've had some really good luck with it and I'm gonna show you exactly how it's done let's go what's up everyone in today's video I'm basically going to break down how you can create bootleg hip-hop style designs so this particular style isn't exclusive to hip-hop whatsoever it's basically just the kind of vibe that's like 90s sort of like street wear influence but mostly just made to look like kind of a cheaply made t-shirt obviously become really popular in Urban Outfitters and Pakistan zoomies places like that and it's just a style that I get asked to do a lot so I've gotten to be somewhat good at it I would like to think at least so for this particular tutorial I'm going to use Snoop Doggy Dogg as the example because I have designed bootlegs style t-shirts for Snoop Dogg I had one that ended up in route 21 I believe another ending up in Kohl's so I have had some success with it and I'm just gonna use the folder that they sent me and show you kind of what it looks like so you can you know go through here you know logos you know album artwork logos photos iconic imagery then you know it's basically free to use if you're actually you know commissioned to design or pseudo so what we're looking for here is basically photos that will work well what I like to do you know there's a million different ways you can do a bootleg t-shirt design I have a whole inspiration folder that has some stuff in it already so you can kind of get a feel for you know especially what works for retail we've got this whole folder full of stuff this is actually kind of a good example like this is clearly posterized in you know Photoshop which is not really a technique that really would have been available back in the day I don't think at least that's a cool example that's awesome you know what I love to do with bootleg t-shirts is use one photo like really baked similar to this assured design one photo prominently in the background or foreground and then a smaller photo either one or two to the side or something like that this is a great example this is like one of the most iconic bootleg t-shirts all time Kanye wore this t-shirt at one point get a ton of other celebrities wearing if you tried to buy this original t-shirt today you probably have to spend at the very minimum like $1,500 for a t-shirt so I think that's definitely part of the reason why it's really been a popular style in the last few years so let's use this to pop design as a reference and sort of use it as a guideline in making a collar bootleg t-shirt okay so we're gonna go back to finder and we're gonna jump back into the snoop dog assets and take a look at what photos might work this is a pretty awesome photo I think I used this for another t-shirt design for him that's usually not a problem you know if you're designing I think I did six or eight designs for Snoop Dogg and you know it's kind of unavoidable to just reuse the same photos in at least you know one or two designs if indeed three or four so let's use I really like the straight on shot that's pretty cool let's use that one and the fact that it's black-and-white doesn't matter because we're gonna be coloring this all in by hand anyways and I'll show you exactly how to do that so first things first we are going to create a new document 15 by 25 of course because you know that's what I like if you've watched any of my previous videos I always say 15 by 25 is move so what I did there was just grab you know the proportion of the photo we want to use use the old rectangular marquee here copy it paste it over to the new document and I'm gonna blow it up just a little bit nothing crazy you don't wanna you know hopefully if you're doing a project for a bigger artist or you're doing your own you know bootleg style t-shirts you're gonna want to use photos that are as high of resolution as possible so that you can adjust them you know a little bit and you're not going to lose a ton of resolution on it because they're pretty big in the first place so similar to this Tupac design you can see that the original photo has been cut out so like the background has been completely cut out and we're left just come in to Boxhead and like some of his shoulders so we're gonna do that that exact same thing to this photo and I'm probably gonna end up speeding this part up but I'll show you how to start there's a few different ways that you can do this okay so my method is not necessarily the fastest but it is what I've come to really find is best for me because I don't trust you know there's there's ways that you can quote-unquote remove the background from photos you could go on YouTube you can find tutorials about you know slick little ways to do it but I personally don't like I've tried that and it works sometimes if the background is already mostly like one color and it can work sort of like otherwise like it might work on this photo but I just don't trust that process and I'm you want it to have really clean lines around the outside and you don't want to mess with it a ton afterwards you just want to start the process finish it and be done in my opinion this is the best way to do it bear with me I'll probably end up speeding this part up just so you know he doesn't take it take a bunch of time so first thing I'll do is just grab like a color that is unlike anything else in the photo and I'm gonna use the brush tool and go down to like all I guess smaller size maybe like this case yeah it's just before you screw them take it easy math then we're gonna create a new layer above the photo and I'll literally just zoom in and by hand this like just draw like this wherever you know I want to cut I just draw around it and you're probably thinking holy this would be really tedious if it was like a band photo you know and there's like four or five guys sometimes more and yeah it is sort of tedious but if you really want you know to do this the right way in my opinion this is this is ultimately the easiest it's like the easiest hardest way to do it that makes sense okay and we are finishing it up right there okay so I've got this outline done and like I said as you can imagine if you're working with like a band or something like that it's going to take longer to do this but you'll just have to trust me that like it's gonna make things a lot easier ultimately in the end like just doing some of this grunt work upfront it's going to make things a lot easier as you you know create your entire design so once you have the your outline done what I'll do is just go over to the magic wand tool and click inside of that area and go down to background and do command J that'll basically create the shape of the photo right and that'll just place it over it and you'll see like if you actually zoom in here it's not like perfect there's a little gap here so I'll just go in and like add a stroke I'll just use the same color red and I'll make the fill right as well just so you can see exactly what's going on so yeah basically here we're just trying to make sure this is the solid shape so you can see the stroke going away right there so now we have a nice blob of red that we will now be using the clipping mask tool header blob of red or you know whatever color you used underneath the photo click the original photo right click create clipping mask and then you'll see it takes on the shape right so like I said it's you know pretty damn clean if you really took your time and like made sure you know you made the correct shape and everything like that and you didn't like go outside of the the main part of the image if you need to edit anything you know all you have to do is go down to the shape and you know you've got a brush where you need to see here I want to make these lines a little bit more straight and like smooth we don't want these like kind of breaks here ultimately it's not going to make a huge difference you know if there's like little bumps but you might as well just make it as like smooth as possible so anyways now we have our main imagery right so I'm just gonna groove these in case I want to use them later and I'm going to duplicate that group so that I can go back to this if I decide you know later on - I don't know do whatever it's just always good to duplicate things in my opinion before you make any serious minutes so I'm going to convert this main image to a smart object and I'm going to adjust the brightness and contrast so that the black of the photo is like truly black so it can just be the t-shirt right now we don't want too much of the details to go away because in my opinion like if you look at a lot of like bootleg t-shirts you'll see like a pretty decent mount of detail still in it so you don't want to like wash that away you know so from here what I'll do is start creating like the rest of it and like I think for the sake of this tutorial I'll probably just jump right into the coloring aspect of it so you guys can understand that close that tab there so what I like to do is color things by hand which again can be somewhat time consuming but it allows for a lot more flexibility than trying to go in and like you know go to like adjustments photofiltre or selective color and like change things around like I've done that technique in the past it's fine but I've just learned over time that like I think what works better is just coloring things in my hand because you have way more flexibility so in order to color things by hand I'm going to just name this I'm going to create a new layer above my main photo and then I'm gonna right away create a clipping mask and I'm gonna change it to multiply because we're basically just going to be more or less painting in this area this photo and [Music] you know creating skin tones and you know we can make the hoodie whatever color we want basically like with bootleg t-shirts I found it best to stick to maybe I don't know like no more than five colors I would say I mean there's definitely like full color bootleg t-shirts out there but I just think as far as retail is concerned and like in terms of keeping things screenprint friendly it's just smarter to limit your color use I just think it looks cooler too you know that's one thing about retail they have to keep in mind is like they're thinking about the consumer and not you know every consumer is going to be down with like a shirt that has you know a million colors on it because people want to be like you know they want to be fashionable and probably you know it's just like safer to use just a few colors so that it's a little bit more I guess commercially viable so now you can see like it's starting to look closer to like this you know as opposed to a fully colorized photo of snoop you know so from here you know we could even just for the sake of this tutorial you know I don't recommend using the same colors as another well-known bootleg t-shirt any means but you know you can use some of them for sure so from here you can do another layer and you know you can name this skin tones you know layer naming your layers and all that stuff is just a good habit to get into it Sun completely necessary but if you're doing something that's a little bit more involved like this where you're gonna you know definitely have like tons of layers and things like that it's a pretty good idea so here we just did like the Hat and on the eyes and the face you know I basically just painted it literally like you were doing like paint by number or something you know so we're just gonna keep doing this process of creating new layers making the blend mode multiply and you know just painting you know snoops clothes like we can have fully this is fully flexible you know you could pick any color scheme you want and as long as you're like paying attention not like accidentally going like that it's gonna be good [Music] so there we've got our main you know snoop image looks pretty dope I think we're gonna end up putting text down at the bottom because you know we don't want all of this you know ink to be here when it's printed on a t-shirt one thing I'll probably just do really quickly is throw a gradient on this bottom area yeah it looks like how the Tupac one they just have it cut off like that that's kind of hard to get away with in my opinion like so let's reset this real quick so I'm just gonna throw a gradient on this bottom so basically I just have the top layer color swatch over here is black so that when you go into your gradient overlay you can just select this one in the middle here that is just one color black and then transparent so it looks like that in your like gradient bar and then I'll move the scale down so that it's just like kind of fading on the bottom there right you see how if you have up there it doesn't allow you to do that but if you pull the scale the percentage down you just have like a nice little clean fade at the bottom probably here yeah that's pretty good so yeah that's what we want okay so from here and I'm just gonna save this really quick Peters gonna think about it desktop just gonna save this in case anything crazy happens and fails or something so from here I think I'm ready to add some text down at the bottom so let's go back to our fonts in use and look at what might work you know it's awesome if you want to use the official logos for you know the artist or whatever but if we're trying to get this bootleg vibe you know why not use something from the 90s from 80s so I think I already have in mind what I want to use but this is a really good resource for just getting ideas aside from having your inspirations folder because you might not necessarily know what the actual fonts are I've kind of been doing this long enough that I know at this point like some of the main fonts or bootleg t-shirts review gets used a lot you know mistral but you know it's the nwa font gets used a lot Coover black yep is used a lot any sort of wide font like wide serif fonts are used a lot as long as they're not like classy and thin like most bootleg t-shirts have like a pretty bold style sometimes it's literally just like Arial font Arial bold or something like that our black rather Arial black Helvetica things like that so in this case we are gonna go with let's go through view okay so so this is kind of a cool technique I'm going to show you right now so let's just use you should already have it [Music] we're just gonna write yeah let's just go all caps we're gonna just write snoop [Music] I think what actually I think might be cool is if we made really big above above his head like that and just had doggie dog on your head yeah let's move I love doing that - just because that'll also give us the opportunity if we want to switch this font up to something else so it's not as boring but what I want to show you guys was a cool technique that I'll use sometimes that definitely gives more but bootleg vibe it's kind of similar to what's going on here where you know you can have it straight like that you can arch the text or whatever I think we're gonna do a little why I kind of liked it Tupac design and not do too much [Music] just a little bit nothing crazy so you want to make sure when you're doing this technique to try to have all of the text PES occurring which means the spacing between the characters be pretty close to the same so I had to adjust that P a little bit because it was a little further away from the OA than we wanted and now everything is essentially pretty close so first thing I'm gonna do is duplicate this snoop text and then I'm gonna make it a different color so let's just use the red like we used on the outline here when we are cutting out the photo and we're just gonna I'm just gonna hold down shift and use the arrow keys and just like bump it down a little bit so we're basically creating like a shadow the reason I don't use the actual shadow like style you know drop shadow is it's I just find this a lot more easy to use like I like being with just like bump things around with the arrows I don't like having to open this up I'm like you know move it to where I want it and like I don't like how that looks and then go back and do it again this way I can just like do it super quickly so from here we're basically going to connect all these letters and to do that I'll go and make a new layer above the red shadow kind of layer here and I'm just going to use the polygonal lasso tool and start connecting things right connect the edges of the letters to the other edge just like the corresponding edges right so like we're going to connect this part of the letter S to the same part in the shadow and we're going to continue to do that for every area so just like this connect them okay and again this is something that's like a bit tedious but if you really want to do this stuff right you have to do this kind of work and it is gonna pay off in the end you know you don't want to just like rush through things and try to cut corners you know every chance you get you really want to do it right you got to put in the work so I'm probably gonna speed this up actually no I don't need to speed this up this is Snoop is short enough word you just do this quickly yep connect that okay the bottom of this P connect the top here and you also don't want to forget about some areas that are covered so you can go up to the top layer here the top snoop text and just make it transparent momentarily and go back down to your layer underneath and connect these two so that's always it's really important especially when you're working with like real ornate typography and there's like a lot of swooshes and swoops and you know kind of classical ornate elements though anyways we basically have the connecting areas ready to go and so now I'll just fill them in so you basically have like this kind of three-dimensional drop shadow here so and I'll probably just draw in here just because it looks weird with that little gap so this is pretty cool you could leave it like this and what I'm gonna do is just combine these two layers so that we don't have two separate layers for the shadow because now it's just one thing so you could you know just like make this you know green or make it well the green would make sense with the cookie there but like you know make it like blue blue kind of dough whatever let's let's use a blue color let's breathe so you couldn't leave it like this so it's actually similar to this Tupac idea but what I like to do from here is merge your shadow layer and I'll do a stroke outside of it in the same color as the shadow layer so that kind of gives it like another dimension you know to it so you know that's one thing you can do you can you can add it leave it doesn't matter like I think in this case I might just leave it off but that's just another element that you get that's right so we've got our main text like I was saying before now we have license to kind of make this bottom text wherever we want I think I'm gonna go with stencil which is actually army regular and I believe that was on here as well yeah because it was a Public Enemy [Music] yeah it's the Public Enemy fun essentially so you'll see this used a lot in bootleg stuff so you know we could leave it straight you know it definitely for the sake of readability it's not a bad idea it's just kind of making the whole thing look pretty like pleasing to the eye overall you know what I'll probably do is like you know you could make it black and then do a stroke around it it could be cool right you know and then maybe do another shadow but not do the connecting thing here because it just doesn't it's not going to look the same you know something like that pretty simple another cool thing that you can do is inlay a photo into the text if you have like a really big text I've done that in the past looks pretty cool we probably won't be doing that for this tutorial because I'm gonna try to keep things as simple as possible so you guys can just like really knock this stuff out and make like some cool stuff happen so from here you know we've only got the one photo we could definitely will definitely want to add another photo you know somewhere on the side I'm thinking we can add it right here so let's just bump snoop over a little bit and then what I kind of do here is just a little trick that will allow us to not lose any of the imagery by just straight-up erasing it but since I already have this gradient layer fading out the bottom I'll group it again so it's a group within a group and then I'll do another gradient layer on this and we'll do it on the side so that basically the side fades out the same way the bottom does and then that way you know we're not gonna lose any of the image if we want to go back and use the whole thing it's as easy as just idling off the gradient overlay right so basically all we're trying to do here just faded out on the side so that it just looks a little bit more natural so now we've got a nice you know kind of layout going and let's go back and grab this grab another photo so from here we will want something that's a little bit more that's a little further away this one's actually pretty good and it's like already cut out so it's nice we already have it cut out so we don't have to go through that whole process again you know we could add it yeah it doesn't look too great above it so let's just keep that's just keep it in the background and looking at this Tupac example they went and colored the whole thing you know was probably just a real photo that you know I guess I don't know it was manipulated or something back in the day it's kind of hard for me to say the exact technology and I wasn't alive but I mean I was alive but like I wasn't doing t-shirts so with this you can definitely add some more dimension to it like you could just take his head and use the polygonal lasso tool I just grab like this part of his head and I'm just going to do command J and move it up to the top so it's like hanging over just this is strictly just to see how this might look truthfully it looks kind of weird it maybe could work and I don't really love it so instead let's just make like let's maybe use the blue and this and put that as the background that's not terrible I think I'm gonna end up using three photos in total on this so basically to make the photo in the background this blue color all I did was use multiply as my blend mode and rather my color overlay no color overlay blue blend mode multiply that's what I meant okay so now we've got this kind of blue image in the background we could you know mess with the contrast a little bit maybe make it a little bit more like black and white ultimately or it was already pretty good might not even mess up in a ton but uh yeah that's pretty good something here I'm already thinking about some of these other boot like examples that we'll have like a shape in the foreground and an image and I just I think dude Cory Thomas I think did that one he's a designer sort of Piermont and it's bootleg rock so I guess there's not an example here but sometimes what you'll see is like just like a shape in the foreground you know sometimes just like a circle and I think in this case that's gonna look really nice so let's just use the shape tool make a circle and then we're gonna go back to the photos and find another picture of snoop from this era that's the other important thing you want to consider is like if you're doing a bootleg teacher try to make like all the photos kinda from the same era like in general so I'm not going to use like one picture of Snoop Dogg from ladies you know 20 and then another photo of phonies like 50 look very cool that's a pretty iconic photo but let's try to use something that's pretty good on let's try to use stuff that's always in the same like g-funk you know doggystyle era so from here all I did was the same thing that we did initially you know use the rectangular marquee tool grab you know this little bit that we want here man copy bring it over into our document we've got our shape here and I'm just going to command V and paste it home there and then I'm gonna do right-click create clipping mask and that'll allow us to just move it into this circle okay so I'm gonna convert to a smart object the same thing we did with this photo originally and you know just kind of position it how we want it it's not going to be full-color you know so keep that in mind and that's pretty good like that can be done so then I'm going to do command U on our new scoop photo I'm going to take the saturation down to negative 100 so it's just purely black and white let's mess with the brightness and contrast a little bit that's just image brightness and contrast alright so getting that black and white there again and I think in this one we're gonna want to use the same coloring process we used for this original photo so if you remember how to do that we basically just create a layer above the photo that we're going to be coloring in and we're going to create a clipping mask change the blending mode to multiply on our layer coloring layer and go back to this brown that we used for his skin tones and do the exact same process here not black here we go and you know hopefully these these videos that are a little bit longer are helpful to you guys you know I'll definitely edit you know wherever I see fit but if a park is running a little bit longer you know it's just because I want you guys to really see how this stuff works and I don't I just don't want to like skip over anything that maybe you guys want to see and you know if if you're watching this and you see what's going on and you you know know where I'm headed with something just you know skip ahead but you know I suggest definitely watching these videos like all the way through if you really want to see how this goes down and again there are so many ways to like do this stuff my way isn't the right way it's just the way I do it so whatever works for you [Music] okay so we're just skin tone or snoop and you know we could make his hoodie the same year but I think it's gonna look cool if we use like this blue Peugeot so V in this particular image sorry dude we did for the skin tones layer above it clipping masks multiply and you can definitely like go the extra step and remove the background on this I think it kind of adds to it because it's a little bit like you know gritty and it's obviously reminiscent of like the original photos good ears just delete that erase it rather hoodie [Music] you just want to be like real sort of meticulous with this you know wherever you can be like I have said in previous videos the devil really is in the details on this stuff like if you just do it right the first time it's gonna pay off tenfold you're gonna be way happier with it because you know while it might not be noticeable to other people it's gonna be noticeable to you and you're gonna know that like you could have just took in your time and really done it the right way but you didn't drive you crazy it'll be like you know telltale heart I'm thinking shout-out to Edgar Allan Poe so from here let's make his chain this yellow color that just sort of worked out nicely for us [Music] this is like I said just try to get it as close as possible especially like if you're just submitting designs to get approve because you know whoever's receiving them isn't gonna see the original file and like see like oh looks like you went outside the lines right here like you know you can get away with with just getting it like 90 you know percent of the way there and you zoom out it's like pretty clear like that it's just fun so you know I don't love that the background here is like Wyatt so mmm I don't know what to do maybe like use this we could try using this yellow color in the background here - yeah that looks yes that yellow works I think if this were something I was really gonna be submitting and it wasn't just for the sake of this tutorial I'll try you know a million things right here I'm definitely a pro types of different colors I would try maybe like a pattern behind him instead of this brick wall I know a few ideas but I think just for now we're gonna leave this yellow because it is kind of a nice balance between the yellow at the top and then you get a little yellow at the bottom and get it at the very bottom of the text so I think we can just leave it how it is so now we've got this circle with the new snoop photo in it we're gonna bump it down a little bit there and I'm going to add a stroke around it so it add adds kind of another dimension first we want to do a black stroke let's do 15 and then I'm going to group this again and that'll allow me to make another stroke around the outside so you'll have that inner black stroke and you know one on the how excited well which i think is a nice little touch so yellow yellows not bad what's green look like this actually I'm gonna leave this as yellow okay so let's just save this really quick alright so from here you can see that like it's definitely got that bootleg feel so from here I'm gonna throw a texture over the top so we're gonna go into our handy 15 vintage textures available now on creative market and we're gonna use what would be good here this rough wall ones always go to I'm thinking maybe the soft grunge though we're good so bring that into Photoshop and if you watched my other tutorial on using vintage textures or any sort of textures with a mask the masking tool what we're gonna do right now so we're going to command a grab this texture go back to our bootleg design or any group everything together we're going to go down here to add a layer mask click that and we're going to hold down the option key we're gonna clip this white box we're in command to taste our texture in here we're going to hold down option click this again to go out of it and we have our texture and the Sun so command I'm just gonna kind of move it around see what it looks best good I like when there's like a nice chunk oh that's pretty good I like how the heavier chunks land right on oohs here that's pretty cool I don't like how this is like there's nothing wrong with you know that just stress being like super heavy in areas but I don't like to make it so that you can't even make out what something is so I'm just gonna grab like a little bit from here added a few things so what I recommend if you don't see like what exactly I'm doing is go watch my video on using textures in Photoshop because I'll show you exactly what I'm doing and it's a really simple way to like manipulate textures and get everything exactly how you want it just like I'm doing right now so I mean that's pretty good right there you know I wouldn't have a problem sending it just like this I think there's definitely other areas here where you could add more details you know for example I can make like the zipper here white to sort of match this hat I could make this background image instead of just straight blue I can do like a gradient of green to blue there's a ton of things that you can do to make to kind of go the extra mile but the purpose of this tutorial was basically just to show you guys how you can set up a sort of bootleg style and you know really kind of capture the essence of 90s bootleg specifically in this case bootleg hip-hop t-shirts so that is it for today I hope you know this video wasn't too long and you guys were able to get some actionable stuff from this that you can apply to your own design work in the future so I would appreciate it you know if you like this video subscribe like leave a comment and let me know you know if you found this useful or there's something you want you want to see in the future like more done in detail something slowed down anything like that I'm open to all suggestions and yeah I really appreciate you guys that is it peace [Music]

Channel: FULLERMOE

Views: 211,351

Keywords: t-shirt design, photoshop, photoshop tutorial, bootleg rap, bootleg rap design, graphic t shirts, how to make a rap tee, design tutorial, design a shirt, shirt design, t shirt design, how to design a shirt, rap tee, t shirt design photoshop, designing shirts, how to make vintage t shirts, bootleg, diy vintage t shirt, rap tee photoshop, designing t shirts

Id: WL8f3miADV8

Length: 46min 22sec (2782 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 19 2020