"T" Time

So there was this idea I had a long time ago. I originally planned for it to be a t-shirt design but I wanted to do the art in my preferred working style, which is not screen-print friendly. The concept of the design revolved around a tee, within a tee, within a tee but with a twist. I wanted to have some characters characters having tea time (drinking), while golfing (tee time), on a tee shirt. Then I thought about how this would be rather boring with people and brought animals into the process. Call it inspired, or WTF, but I thought about how it would be awesome to have whales playing golf. How could they do this? With mechanized exo-suits of course. What would they use for a club? Why not a giraffe. Since we are now in Africa, a pangolin would also make a nice ball. Plus the animal club and ball would be a bonus reference to Alice in Wonderland.

 Here is the original sketch.

Once I had an idea and sketch put together I researched some whale, giraffe, and pangolin images, then drew the whole thing into a composition. Okay, fact-check reality is the drawing was so huge that the two whales on the left were on one sheet of paper and the whale on the right was on another sheet, and the composition came together in Photoshop.

 Original composite drawing.

 Detail of whales on the left.

 Detail of Whale on the right.

After the drawing phase was complete, I set about finding textures that would work for all the different elements. For the whales, giraffes, and cephalopods, I referenced actual photos of the animals but altered the color and manipulated the shapes to fit within the drawing. I found other textures to fill in the nonorganic areas which were also color and shape manipulated. I then added shadows and highlights to all of the elements. Finally, I found and manipulated background elements to work in the composition.

 The art at this point.

I removed the pencil lines here so you can see what

the texture/color looks like without the pencil work.

Color/texture Progress from pencil to completion.

At this point I was really happy with the results. The problem was that this would not print well on a t-shirt. The idea was scrapped, as far as shirts go, and the image was added to my portfolio. 

On a whim, and mostly to see how it would score on Threadless, I submitted another design called "Speed is Relative" (see previous post) in this same non-print friendly style. It was my highest scoring design and it ended up printing months after it was submitted. They managed to print it beautifully. 

For this reason, I started considering submitting "T time" for scoring. I had to make the design blend into the tee better so I used a nice Photoshop brush to round and fade the bottom on the composition a little. It also made the composition more vertical, and less square, and brought more emphasis to the characters.

Design to be submitted?

I have not submitted the design. I was thinking it might work well in a drawing contest. I think I will get some feedback before I decide.

Thanks for looking and let me know what you think.