The “Evil Clown Beast” design ( see here ) underwent a bit of an evolution to get to it’s current style. Originally a small bit of tattoo flash with other “evil clowns” made in the early 2000s, it was recently upscaled and recolored to it’s current form.
Original clowns tattoo flash sheet
The “tearing” evil clown tattoo design by itself. It was a laser printed copy colored in with colored pencil, so when blown up to the new size (for t-shirt designs), the dot pattern was noticeable.
The goal was to upscale the small tattoo design to something more suitable for Halloween themed t-shirts. Digitally recoloring, fixing and changing some style elements. A few in-progress shots of the recoloring and cleaning process (in Photoshop):
First steps, erase white portion that will be transparent, blur an underlying layer to get rid of the dot pattern and smooth the colored pencil coloring. Next, overlay the starting pic on top of the blurred one, upping the contrast. Next, copy that layer, invert the colors, set to multiply. This is where the white clown becomes much darker with sharp contrasting highlights. Final steps are painting in more color layers over the grays, smudging, dodging and burning the blurred original color layer, and darkening the inside background.
Final clown
Like this design? It’s available on RedBubble as t-shirts, stickers, and phone cases!
