I can't even begin to express the feeling of having your first Threadless print (after 18 months of submitting) be a 555 winner. If I had to compare it to something, it would probably be like winning the Nobel Prize for t-shirt design. And I even got a medal!

Thanks to Threadless for picking this, and to all of the voters and commenters for your amazing support of this design.

In appreciation, here's a partial walkthrough of the process for this design, since so many people have asked for it:

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To begin with, I sketched out all of the various elements (the ship, island, waves, etc) on standard drawing paper, then cut them out, and scanned in all of those pieces both as positive and negative shapes




After that, I brought all of the pieces into Photoshop, and reassembled them as a single page. I also made a copy of the page text for each element at this point, and as you can see, the ship's text layer is still missing in this image



The clouds that I originally included in the composition made the scene too busy, so they were removed at this stage. I then rotated and skewed the page to give it the illusion of three-dimensional depth. I created a displacement map (a grayscale image used to show high and low areas) and used that to turn this:


into this:


After rotating/skewing each of the items that would be vertical, I re-applied the displacement map to each of them individually.


then added shadows


then added the text to each cutout element, once again displacing the text for each individual part. giving us one completed page:



I repeated this same process for the other page (though there were some complications since the waterfall pieces actually show the previous page of text) resulting in both full pages:




PHEW! Now that that part was done, I built each book spine using an assorment of leather and cloth textures that I had:



The book covers were created in the same way, and rotated/skewed to give a sense of depth, each one offset a bit as stacked books commonly are:





The opened book was added to the top of the stack (after its pages and cover were added)



And last of all, shadows were placed to ground the image and give it a feeling of light and space.


In total, the final Photoshop file has 72 layers.

And there you have it: countless hours of work reduced into an easily read walkthrough. I hope it's been helpful, or at least moderately entertaining.

Thanks again!