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The Daily Tar Heel
Visually Speaking

Behind the scenes: March 8, 2013

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The Daily Tar Heel front page on March 8, 2013 included an illustration of UNC basketball player P.J. Hairston. Design & graphics staffer Melissa Borden put together the illustration. Below, Borden talks about the process behind the design.

My name is Melissa Borden, and I am on the design and graphics desk here at The Daily Tar Heel. We ran a profile on P.J. Hairston on March 8 leading up to the Duke game. We couldn’t decide whether to use a photo or some kind of illustration—How cool would it be to illustrate Hairston and all of his energy? That’s what I thought too.

I had my eye on an illustration of another athlete, but had no idea how to create it. Kevin, the design and graphics editor, knew that graphic design professor, Terence Oliver, could have the answers. I showed Terence what I wanted to do and he briefly described the steps I needed to take. I knew it would take a lot of effort, but could have the potential to look awesome.

The first step was to find a photo of Hairston with heavy emotion in the face and body language. I decided on a photo by Katie Williams and brought it into Photoshop.

P.J. Hairston original photo

There was a lot of experimentation and switching between Illustrator and Photoshop to see which effects would be most appealing. I decided not to use the “posterize” effect in Photoshop because I wanted the illustration to be created more intentionally than by just adding a filter. I took the black and white photo off of its background and pulled it into Illustrator.

In Illustrator, I created 5 different versions of Hairston using image trace, each having different amounts of detail. I brought all of these into Photoshop and placed them on top of one another. Next, it was all about erasing and compiling the layers to make the illustration really resemble Hairston.

I had some problems with the smaller details and the nose, but the more I added different shadows and highlights from Illustrator, the more it started to look like him. I constantly compared my illustration to the real picture to get everything just right. After it really started looking like him, I started adding the paint strokes and splatters. Some of these were actual pictures of paint and others were brushes from online.

P.J. hands close up

I was creating all of this on the computer, but I had to think like a real painter or drawer would for the illustration to work. I used black splatters to emphasize the facial hair I had already created. I started playing with the Carolina blue paint to make the jersey pop.

The more it was coming together, the happier I was. The illustration originally was from the shoulders up, but my editors – Kevin, and Visual Managing Editor Allie Russell – encouraged me to include the arms and hands. After a lot of trial and error and about 70 Photoshop layers I was proud of the finished project.

I knew it was going to be a challenge, but I am really happy I followed through. If you know something has the potential to be awesome, why not give it your all? Kevin challenges us to own our designs and this experience helped me do just that.

Check out the article that accompanied the illustration here.

PJ Hairston front

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