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!