Designing "The Most Evil Man in the Universe" Jacket in Adobe Photoshop

Jacket with a Skull
After a lot of time-consuming searches in Google Images for "Most Evil Man in the Universe, jacket, skull, coiled serpent", I came up empty. The best sample I found was at Ed Hardy Men Apparel Online Store. They had a "Men's Hooded Leather Jacket Punk Skull in Olive" priced at $658, on sale for $329. However this 2.75"x4" image was too small to add a coiled serpent plus "The Most Evil Man in the Universe" type. Also the slim jacket didn't have the bulky feel of the one worn by the "The Most Evil Man in the Universe" I met at Safeway on March 15, 2009.

Retro Jacket Back" with a lion
When I found this "Retro Jacket Back" with a lion, the 6"x7" image size was large enough to work with. So I decided to create my own jacket design in Adobe Photoshop. The clone stamp was used to erase the lion image on the jacket.

Finding a Skull that Looks Evil
A search for "skull" in Google Images gave 8,530,000 results. However most of them are of the medical textbook variety and did not look at all menacing or threatening. Finally on page 6, there was a skull with lots of horns that looked quite scary. It was from Perfection Dermagraphics Tattoo, but this 400x400 animated gif image with flashing eyes had profanity surrounding the skull. The animated gif was converted to jpg and profanity words at right removed (see left). Lasso Tool was used to erase "Have a great" so the background is totally black. The Magic Wand Tool was used to select the black background. Applying Select-Inverse the "horned skull" was pulled out for pasting to the jacket.

Finding a Coiled Serpent
Searches for "coiled serpenet" and "coiled snake" in Google Images gave 7500 and 9800 results respectively. Ten pages of the "coiled serpent" images were mostly jewlery and coins with no menacing snake for the jacket. On page 3 of "coiled snake" was the "Don't Thread on Me" motto from the Gadsden flag (1775) from Sleevage music cover art on Metallica. However this rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike had a green patch of grass and needed to be removed. On page 5, I found "Coiled Snake" from Silver International Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring, MD. This black & white image was colorized red-yellow in Image-Adjustment-Color Balance. It was pulled by applying Select-Inverse for pasting to the jacket.

"The Most Evil Man in the Universe" Type
A 24-pt font size of Hobo Standard Medium was use to type "THE MOST EVIL MAN IN THE UNIVERSE" and arranged in two lines centered so it can fit on the jacket at the top above the coiled-serpent and skull.

Skull, Serpent, and Type Arranged in Three Layers in Adobe Photoshop

Fig. 1 Jacket with Skull

Fig. 2 Jacket with Skull & Serpent

Fig. 3 Jacket: Skull, Serpent, & Type

Using the Edit-Transform-Scale menu in Photoshop, the Skull was resized to fit in "Jacket with Skull" (Fig. 1). Using the Edit-Transform-Scale menu, the Serpent was resized to fit in "Jacket with Skull & Serpent" (Fig. 2). Using the Edit-Transform-Scale menu, the Type was resized to fit in "Jacket with Skull, Serpent & Type" (Fig. 3). While the jacket has a slight rotation to the right, no attempt was made to rotate the skull, serpent, and type for a better perspective fitting. After these three images were positioned on the back jacket, the layers were flattened. The small patch of red, white, blue from the jacket's front was filled gray to blend with the back jacket. The white background was filled with the pale lemon-yellow color to blend with the web page.

"The Most Evil Man in the Universe" Jacket with Skull & Serpent

Jacket design was done in an hour and half on June 8, 2009 at Stanford Art Library.