I don't like starting a blog post apologetically but ... pardon my lack of posts? I started freelancing to fund my stay at home, make a game lifestyle. It took up a lot of time but there was a lull in production so I decided to shift gears and enter a T-shirt contest again. Ehem, designing a t-shirt that is! Design by Humans was running a Halloween contest that was nearly over so I jumped in with 1 or 2 days left. So I'm going to press pause on the progress of the new ID to take you on a wonderful adventure of how I did my last T-shirt design.
A few nights ago, when I decided to work on a design for DBH, I had 3 designs in mind. One was going to be of a cute bear. The other had something to do with a bucket. The third one was of some sort of person coming out of the water with stuff on them. Yea, they sound pretty simple but it's the visual composition in my head that made them interesting to me.
The next day I started working on the cute bear idea. It was cute and all but the lack of it being a good idea was starting to kill my inspiration. I was losing my fire on that bear so I checked the DBH to fuel it. That's when I remembered there was a Halloween contest going on. It went perfectly with my other idea of the figure coming out of water. I didn't have a lot of time left so I let myself create what I love drawing. Tentacles. Zombie. Girl. Detail will make it awesome. Ok, so here's how my first sketch looked.
She was topless at first because I couldn't think of what she would wear. I did have clear thoughts on other aspects of the illustration. At this point I knew I wanted these tentacles to flow nicely around her. I also wanted one of them to have slipped in side a mortal wound and slowly pull out her intestines. I was thinking about color too. I knew that I wanted the inside of the tentacles to be bright red and actually be the focus of the picture. If not the focus, a strong part of the whole image.
So this is after some polishing. I randomly asked a friend what he would put on a zombie lady coming out of the water. He said two genius things. Polka-dot dress and 1950's one piece swimsuit. I went with a 1950's inspired top because trying to figure out a nice way to have the dress or swimsuit break open (from the tentacle) was going to take more time and I was pressed for it.
My two initial color mock ups:
In this one the red on the tentacles really pops but I was scared the rest would be too weak. So I tried something different.
I messed with the outlines. I made her hair reddish orange and the tentacle outlines were white. This is different from what I'm used to trying but I love messing with small design elements like this. I asked 2 friends what they liked better and they both liked the first one with black lines on the silver shirt. I was excited about the second one but at the same time I do think her orange hair competes for attention with the red bellied tentacles. I just went with numero uno.
So then I arived at this. It's close to finished but not quite there. I got cold feet about my color selection so I started messing with colors. It was fun but ended up being a waste of time 'cause I didn't use any.
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Do you like any of these?I ended up spending time on a hi res version of O. Agian, I reviewed it with some friends but they liked the original better so that's why this color adventure side quest led to little reward. Normally I might have continued and picked an
print alternate color from here but I only had 1 day left! Thankfully
DBH is located on the
west side and I had until 3am to submit to them instead of 12 am.
Here's my finished mock up.
Hurray!
Here's the linkAs of right now it's at 57 votes! Not too shabby and it makes me a happy kitty. It's also popular on the front page of
Emptee's! That makes me a happy kitty
tripp'n on some really good catnip. It almost feels as if it's only front page on my computer and no one
else's!
Well that concludes the adventure thus far. Next week I'll find out if it gets printed or not.
OK back to making game art!
