Jazzy T-Shirt

Let's get this sketch blog back up and running!

Here's a t-shirt design I drew for a jazz-related project at Ooligan Press:

It was deemed a little too folksy for a jazz t-shirt, and the style wasn't quite right for the target demographic, but it's a nice little composition. Someone brought up Michael Cera when talking about the design, which is a compliment of the highest order for me. I loved Juno. :)

The black and white drawing is below:

2014 Marching Band Tee Shirt

It's that time of the year again, my one regularly commissioned project! I've been doing the tee shirt for my high school marching band for the past few years, and it's been a fun challenge since the theme is completely different from year to year. To check out some of my previous tee designs, click here

This year's theme was "Goddess of Fire" and I was able to use 2 colors (plus the tee shirt color). Fancy!

The '70s psychedelia-inspired design (I looked at lots of music posters).

An idea of what the front and back of the tee shirt should look like. 

Super-Sized Squirrel

You may have noticed a trend on this blog (not in the last couple posts, but in a bunch of my cat drawings) that I love drawing really obese animals that look more like toys than anything living in the wild. The following is no exception.

I put together a t-shirt design for my peer mentoring program. We have a thing about squirrels (they're in all of our program newsletters), so it was a no-brainer to draw this up:

Embrace the squishiness!

Here's a picture of mentors wearing the shirt with my design on it:

Spaceman

Created for a high school color guard t-shirt. The theme this year was based on the movie "Sunshine."

Line art

Serve San Francisco T Shirts

My apologies for the lack of posts. I've been traveling a lot in the past month and I've been slacking on my art stuff. Here's something I worked on during the past week:

I am currently an AmeriCorps member, and I like to help my peers out when I can. When another member of my program needed help with t shirts, I volunteered my services. Her group is going on several alternative spring break trips, and they need to outfit everyone in t shirts. 

This is an idea from one of the students she works with. It was a basic design for their upcoming trip to San Francisco.

However, I wanted to try and give them something with a little more character than a city skyline. I find that it's really hard to distinguish city skylines from each other unless there are strong visual indicators (like the Eiffel Tower in Paris), so I wanted to do something else. I drew a cable car, since I associate them with San Francisco.

Above is the basic sketch for the cable car, based on some old travel posters I found on Google.

This is was what I submitted to them for the front of the t shirt.

I didn't veer very far from their original idea for the back.

So I submitted it, and none of the alternative spring break committee members preferred my cable car design to their idea of the city skyline. So I wound up going back and creating this for them:

Below is a rough idea of what the t shirt will look like:

So there you have it. I learned not to mess with a design idea they really liked, because it cost me time and energy (especially because it was all pro-bono stuff). Meh. I still like my cable car drawing.

Blue Moon

I just realized this post could have been very timely had I posted it the night of the blue moon. However I wasn't thinking about that, so you'll get this post now.

I had the pleasure of designing a t-shirt for my high school marching band this year (I also did it last year - I'll have to find those images for another entry). The theme for their show is "Shadows" and it features "A Night on Bald Mountain". I watched the Fantasia animated clip for that tune and had a pretty complicated idea in mind involving demons and witches and skeletons. Since I'm a lazy bum I didn't do much to flesh out the idea, which worked out to my favor, because the band director wanted something involving the moon. They have a backdrop for the field of a giant moon and clouds, so he wanted that idea to translate to the t-shirt.

I figured the idea would be super easy, and I'd whip something out in no time. Not the case my friends. I struggled for a bit before landing on a concept.

First I tried using a photograph of the moon and clouds, and I tooled around with it in Photoshop, but my digital skills are limited and I was frustrated with the results:

Mind you, this is the inverted image because it would be white ink printed on a black t-shirt. I spent way too much time trying to make it work, it was so uninspired. I was also concerned about how well the image would print on a t-shirt, because there are a lot of gray tones in that image that might not come through in a one color print (I took a screenprinting class in college so I have a little bit of experience with setting up silkscreens).

I was also unhappy that I used a photograph. It felt like cheating. I am an illustrator, so anything I do that isn't drawn out doesn't feel authentic to me. Cue design disaster number two:

Granted, this isn't terrible, but I knew the image wasn't going to translate too well to the screenprinting process. Plus there was no narrative - just a moon and some clouds. I didn't like this either, but at least I got some practice with Photoshop brushes.

Finally inspiration struck! I was looking at pictures of full moons and I really liked the effect of shadows of objects in front of the moon. It was a really nice framing device. Once I came up with that concept, the rough sketch came out easy peasy.

Visual inspiration.

This is the final result for the front of the t-shirt. I was very happy I was able to add a slightly creepy narrative to the illustration and figure out a way to "ground" the moon.

Here's the back:

Whew. That was a wordy post. Next time I'll just post doodles of kittens or something.

Oh yes, one more tidbit of information: all of the images for this shirt were drawn with my Wacom tablet. I almost always scan in a sketch and work on top of it, but this time I drew on blank layers in Photoshop while looking at my sketch. I saved a lot of time by cutting out that middle step. Perhaps I will start doodling on my tablet more often.