Sunday, July 31, 2011

ZOMBIE CAGE FIGHTER: ROUND 13






Here's another design I finished up for UFC fighter Nate "Rock" Quarry. He originally just wanted a new zombie head to drop into an already-existing design, but I insisted on redoing the entire design from scratch. I thought it would look awkward and inconsistent to have a BeastPop-style zombie head shoehorned into a design that did not match it stylistically. Anyway, I pitched a tantrum until Nate gave in and decided to trust my vision, and this is the result. I believe he's using it on shirts and stickers as of now. I gave the design two different color treatments: the first reflects the color scheme used in the horror movie poster shirt design I did for him, and the other utilizes the simple two-color bright red and green of the original design.

SHIRT MOCKUP


DESIGN INKS


ROUGH COLOR CONCEPTS


THIRD COLOR OPTION THAT WAS REJECTED

Thursday, July 28, 2011

ZOMBIE CAGE FIGHTER: THE MOVIE!









Recently got commissioned by UFC Fighter extraordinaire Nathan "Rock" Quarry to spice up his already existing ZOMBIE CAGE FIGHTER brand with a couple of designs. This is the first of those. After kicking around a few ideas, we decided to go with an old horror movie poster type design complete with the fighter hero, the beautiful woman and the monstrous menace. I had a lot of fun illustrating the figures and playing around with the halftones and weathering effects on this one -- scuffing up the image and giving it some torn, ragged borders and such (to try and reduce the "big ol' rectangle" feel as much as possible).
Anyway, the design was premiered at the San Diego Comic Con this past weekend, along with a second, simpler design, which I'll post here soon.



Wednesday, July 27, 2011

CLASSIC ARCADE revised!

Here's an update on my reworking of my CLASSIC ARCADE design. Substituted a gorilla skeleton for the T-Rex. Fits with my branding and the arcade theme.

As I said in the previous post, keeping the T-Rex skeleton in there just didn't seem to be working. I needed something that would more closely tie with the theme, yet still call back to the original iconic image this design is based on. Keeping the skeletal silhouette seemed to be essential, and using a gorilla skeleton should have been obvious to me from the get-go. It's only my chosen mascot animal, and it ties into the "Classic Arcade" theme through the fact that one of the most famous foundational arcade characters was a big ol' gorilla -- I'm talkin' about Donkey Kong! I feel foolish that this did not occur to me immediately!

New hotness...


Old and busted...

Monday, July 25, 2011

BEASTWRECK ATTACKS now available for preorder.





Finally got this shirt worked out the way I like it, and it's up on the BeastWreck shop site for preorder. Available in men's and women's style shirts.

BEASTWRECK SEASON 1, EPISODE 5: "BEASTWRECK ATTACKS"

A playful homage (read: "ripoff") to the waxpack art from the classic MARS ATTACKS trading card series from the swingin' 60's featuring (what else) brutish gorillas in place of bug-eyed martian invaders!

4-color design soft discharge screenprinted (no thick plastisol) on paprika Gildan Softstyle 4.5 oz 100% ringspun cotton, 1-color BeastWreck logo printed on back.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

ANGRY PENGUIN: HEAVILY ARMED color variations




Here's a couple of color variations I offered as options for my recent ANGRY PENGUIN shirt design, plus a black and white version.

CLASSIC ARCADE, First attempt...

I've been wanting to do something with the JURASSIC PARK logo for a while now, but I never really knew what. I fiddled around with a play on the title for a while and came up with a bit of a near-rhyme, "Classic Arcade", which builds on the "assic" and the "ark" sounds, and pays homage to that wonderful cultural highlight of my youth. It's no secret, if you know me, how much I miss the old-fashioned (or "classic", if you will) arcades with their rows of flickering, pulsating lights and blaring electronic repetitive noise. It creeps into much of my work, and that's the angle I wanted to take with it here.

Original "clean" version.


I thought I'd pixelate the image to give it more of an 8-bit arcade feel, but it still doesn't make it work fully, and I was worried it might just seem like I blew up and altered a low-quality jpeg of the logo.



This idea, however, is merely halfway there. After drawing and inking the entire logo, skeleton and arcade machine by hand and compositing the thing together in photoshop, I realized that the dinosaur skeleton really didn't fit. It clearly helps tie it to the original source material, but it doesn't need that. The iconic silhouette and framing shapes along with the distinctive font hammer that point home well enough. There is nothing "classic arcade" about keeping the dinosaur skeleton (though slightly altered), and it just seems too out of place with the theme. So, it's back to the drawing board, and I have a much better solution to this problem, which I'm working on right now and will be posting soon. I did want to go ahead and post these here as a work-in-progress sort of thing, and to expose a bit of the creative thinking process and how I sometimes get ahead of myself and don't take the necessary time to work out ideas properly before executing them. More soon...

Friday, July 22, 2011

New ANGRY PENGUIN design







I was recently commissioned by New York-based ANGRY PENGUIN to do another shirt design. They wanted a sort of multi-armed deity of destruction brandishing a wicked assortment of weaponry. No idea when exactly this will be on sale yet.


Wednesday, July 13, 2011

JAWS shirt for CREEPY-TEES





Recently wrapped up another fun color job for horror shirt company CREEPY-TEES. JAWS is one of my all-time favorite movies and it was a real blast to work on this. Black and white art was created by artist Chris Eisert, based on one of the foreign movie posters, and I colored it up purty. Available to order right here.