Hostilia - T-shirt adaptation

Swedish thrash youngsters Hostilia needed a t-shirt version of their latest album (whose very fitting cover was painted by Karl-Oskar Hansson).

These paintings with an old school metal aestheric don't always transfer well to the screen printed t-shirt format due to the extensive colour gradients and textures, and the result is often a blotched mess that doesn't capture the intricacies of the original artwork.

Instead, we decided to adapt it to a classic two-colour print, which involved re-positioning and re-scaling some of the elements to better fit the more rectangular format before making the image monochrome. From there, the canvas texture (which wouldn't look good on a shirt print) was removed, and most of the image was re-traced by hand in order to function as a standalone white-on-black illustration. Some new details were added, some old ones were removed.

This required quite a lot of work, but it's fun challenge to adapt an existing image to a new context. In some ways, the end result is a "cover version" (pun intended) of the original painting:

Some time later, the band wanted to make a version for a white shirt. For obvious reasons, just inverting the image wouldn't work since some of the elements would look very weird. Instead, we selectively inverted the right areas of the illustration and made some manual retouch to make things look as good as possible: