A customer of mine wanted to have T-shirts made for their family reunion in July of 2018.  They decided that the theme would be "The Black Panther".  The super hero movie had just come out and it was a family favorite.  The challenge here was to come up with a shirt idea that wouldn't copy the movie, but would resemble all the parts of it that the family liked.  I began work by selecting a panther and building a center piece to build the shirt idea around.

The family is from South Carolina so I wanted to make sure and incorporate the state map in the design.

First I cropped out a picture of an actual panther.  Then I cut out a black stamp of the panther's profile.  As you can see I placed it on top of the S.C. map and surrounded it with a two part circle.  The inner green part would be the relief area of the medallion, and the outer gold part would be the out side of the medallion.

Looking at the end result you can see how the constructions of the circles and the positioning of the map and panther gives an ancient medallion look for the center of the shirt.

Gradients and tribal texture was added to capture the African theme of the movie as well as the old ancient treasure look.  I used the same theme for their families team number "10" to go on the back of the shirt as well.

Here is another look at the medallion portion and the final layout for the front of the shirt, before taking it from Adobe Illustrator to Photoshop.

The men all received "King Panther" shirts and the women all received "Queen Panther shirts".  The customer did not know I was going to do this but loved the idea and was happy I went beyond just a medallion and number 10.

Fun Fact:  The tribal overlay is actually a desaturated photo of a bed quilt.  This provided a great tribal look.

Over all the project was a success, and I received high praise for the work I did.  This also landed me two additional clients.  Both needing creative designs for their functions.