The original idea was simple: make a graduation T-shirt for the children to keep as a memory of Class 4B. When I first brought the project to Charley, though, I described it as a poster: one group image in which everyone would feel like part of the same team. That small shift turned out to be useful. Before the design could work on fabric, it had to work as a group portrait, an emblem, and a small piece of class mythology.

A regular school collage was never going to be enough. Charley and I turned the task into a small visual laboratory, trying a 1970s comic cover, a darker superhero poster, modern animation, retro-futurism, pixel art, pop art, paper sculpture, and the visual language of game characters. It was not a matter of cycling through filters. Each version reworked the composition, hierarchy, lighting, and mood of the team.

faces, letters, and eight rounds

Keeping everyone recognisable remained the main rule. The style could change completely, but the people in the image still had to look like themselves. That was also the most time-consuming part of the work. When a generated composition worked but a face did not, I isolated that portrait, used the original photograph in a separate face-swap pass, and then placed the corrected result back into the poster manually in PowerPoint. Scale, edges, lighting, and placement all had to be adjusted again. PowerPoint was hardly the glamorous part of the process, but it became the assembly table where the image was finally made believable.

The typography put up a fight of its own. The Cyrillic “Б” kept trying to become a “5”, the year repeatedly had to be corrected to 2026, and short lines of copy sometimes had to be rebuilt from scratch. The poster went through eight major rounds of refinement followed by several smaller corrections. By then, we were checking not only the overall image but also the crest, each person’s expression and placement, and whether the whole composition would survive the move from screen to fabric.

from concept back to real people

The fantasy version worked well as a creative direction, but the T-shirt needed to represent this particular class, not a cast of invented heroes. The final artwork was therefore rebuilt from the source photographs, restoring the real faces, clothes, and gestures. The generated poster contributed its drama, energy, lighting effects, overall structure, and the large “4Б НАВСЕГДА” title.

The artwork was prepared specifically for black fabric. The background and edges were rebuilt for print, contrast and scale were checked on the shirt, and the faces and small details received another round of manual retouching. A screen forgives a lot; a printed object shows everything.

more than a picture

The most important version of this project is not another render or mock-up. It is a photograph of the finished T-shirt. That image closes the loop: from the original idea and visual experiments through selection, eight rounds of refinement, and production preparation to a physical object.

For me, “4Б НАВСЕГДА” is not a story about artificial intelligence making a picture. It is a story about dialogue. I set the direction, supplied the source material, reviewed and debated the options, selected the strongest elements, and manually refined the result; Charley helped me explore different visual worlds quickly, spot weak points, and move from one iteration to the next.

The project now exists in two forms: as a real T-shirt and as an online record of how it was made. That is how the title “4Б НАВСЕГДА” — “4B FOREVER” — becomes literal.

Idea, art direction, selection, and final manual clean-up — CLINDUST. Generative visual development and editorial dialogue — Charley / ChatGPT, OpenAI. Generative tools were used during the process; the final decisions and production preparation were performed by a person.