reconfiguring artwork for dimension change

Lantern Press has a collection of original and vintage artworks that they print on a variety of products. As a production designer, one of my roles was to change the dimensions of artwork to fit onto a product with different dimensions than the original artwork.

In this example, the original artwork is a postcard in Lantern Press’ collection from c. 1914, which was to be printed onto a square coaster. Using Photoshop, I moved elements of the original artwork to fit into a square template.

For newer artworks, created with Photoshop or Illustrator, this is sometimes a simple matter of moving and rearranging layers. For vintage artwork, all the pieces are connected, and in order to move any part, it must be carefully selected, and any area that was “behind” the moved segment must be filled in to match the background.

Applications: Adobe Photoshop

Original and reconfigured artworks

The original artwork from 1914 has a 3:4 ratio. My job was to create a 1:1 ratio artwork from it.

creating contours from open compositions

For some products, such as postcards, Lantern Press prints their artwork onto the product as is. However, there are some products, such as t-shirts, that look better with a closed composition, so production designers enclose any open elements within a contour.

For this example, the original artwork in their collection has both the wine bottle and the wine glass cut off by the image’s frame. I created a contour to contain these elements.

Application: Adobe Photoshop

Original and CONTOURED artworks

The original artwork was created in Photoshop and the file contained the silhouette of a wine bottle. As the area covered by the bottle, glass and wine is basically a diagonal narrow rectangle, I thought it was an elegant solution to use the wine bottle silhouette to encapsulate those elements.

contours for diecuts

Lantern Press creates diecut stickers from their artwork. In order to create a diecut sticker, a production designer adds the artwork to an existing template and creates an outline - this determines where the vinyl will be cut, and where the edges of the sticker are.

Application: Adobe Illustrator

original artwork and diecut sticker

In this example, I created an outline around the original artwork in the existing Lantern Press template.