New Design preview

Just so you all don't think I've been sitting around playing Gears of War and the new Crackdown demo, I swear I've been busy on fresh new designs. Here's the latest one 'Sleeping Giant' being printed now.

I have a couple of more I'll be previewing soon, and I'm hard at work on a whole new Enclothe site and all kinds of other great stuff. Stay tuned.

Making a Shirt Pt. II


With my inspiration in place and a solid idea of where I wanted to go with the design, I was ready to start some loose sketching.
I couldn't find everything I had sketched up for Destroyer, some of my drawings were probably lost under the avalanche of paper and sketchbooks I have stacked around the place.

This is certainly one of my first thumbnails for the Destroyer design...

Pretty loose but i already have the anchors and the lines in there, which turned out to be a nice addition. I had done a bunch of other thumbnails and doodles for quite awhile and was making alright progress.
There was still some issues to resolve however, like how do I get a good perspective on the city? and how will the whale really fit in amongst the buildings? I decided to turn to some high tech visualization.


Since I'm currently studying 3D animation, it was pretty simple to drop into Maya and whip this up real quick. And it gave me the freedom of looking at the scene from multiple angles to find the one that would work best. Eventually I stuck with the three quarter isometric type of perspective i had touched on in my thumbnails.

Well that was enough brainstorming (or creative procrastination) and I had to just sit down and get serious. Eventually I came out with a pencil sketch I was pretty happy with.

It was working pretty well, I had birds and anchors and buildings and a big ass whale. I wasn't super happy with his right flipper though, it looked a little weird, and his face was still kinda funky. Obviously I ironed those all out, and begun to ink the whole thing...


I'm not sure why I took a picture of my desktop when I was working on this, but I did and now it seems to have come in useful for a blog post.
So that's basically it. I took the inked drawing into Illustrator and spent way too long messing with little details. I set up the blocks of color and played around with a few different palettes before I decided on the blue / grey scheme.

Since this was a pretty detail heavy multi-colored design I sent it off to my best printer and they delivered some of the sharpest cleanest screen prints I've ever seen.

The shirt is Enclothe's top seller and was also picked up by Defunker and sold very well over there as well.
I also got a lot of email from eagle eyed customers tipping me off that Defunker had ripped me off. That was really nice to know I had customers watching my back and letting me know of any fishy activity. But I assured them Defunker was totally legit and on the up and up.

Destroyer is on it's last run now. There's still plenty of stock but I don't imagine it will get another reprint after this. So if you haven't bought it yet, you should probably get one before you never have the chance again!

Save your necks with a Tshirt Rack

Folding shirts is a drag, and sometimes hanging your shirts with crappy wire hangers and mess up your neckhole. What to do what to do?

How about you spend some time and energy building your very own shirt rack out of PVC?

Instructables shows you how.

Making A Shirt.
I thought an interesting new feature to cover in this blog might be my working process. Since Destroyer is one of Enclothe's most popular shirts, I'll detail the creation of this T in a multi-part series.
If it gets a good response, maybe I'll do more about some of the upcoming shirts I have in development.

Part 1. Inspiration

The initial idea came from the concept of the flying whale. I'm a huge fan of the comic book series The Maxx by Sam Keith, which features flying whales in Pangaea. Powerful and beautiful at the same time.
I thought a shirt of the whale flying over an outback type scene would be really cool. But after some exploration and sketches (coming in part II) I wasn't really finding the power in the image that I wanted. So I sat on the idea for awhile.
In the meantime I can do some Google searches for Whale references...




Good Stuff. Reference is really important to me, and I seek it out for just about everything I draw. That last whale definitely looks like he's flying. But now I need something for him to fly through.
Since the outback environment didn't work for me, I began to look around for something else.
When you commute by bus everyday and your view looks something like this;

I guess eventually you can't help but put two and two together.

Yes, my creative process is mysterious and arcane, I know. None of the above is actually true, the reality is I had a vision after drinking a bottle of Absinthe and passing out at an aquarium.

Next week: I'll buck up and present some of the embarrassing sketches and early concepts.

If you haven't already you can buy Destroyer T at the enclothe store.

Hidden message in American clothing sold in France

Clicky Clicky

Even our clothing is apologizing for our horrible president.