Apparel design

» Written on March 29, 2009 at 5:56 PM «

Is something that I’m still really kind of new to, despite my previous experience with Zazzle. Most of the time, I was mainly fooling around with bullshit ideas that I really wanted to sketch out in vectors rather than with pen/pencil and paper.

Recently, though, I’ve been in a design rut of late (no thanks to my current stint in the Army), and after receiving some inspiration from several sources, I’ve decided to start again at a steady pace.

So I loaded up Illustrator and got to work. Here’s a small sampling of what I’ve come up with so far.

Bearborne Rangers

Firstly, something everyone should know: there are few things more terrible or deadly than parachuting bears. This is a fact confirmed by the fact that if you don’t agree these beasts will land on top of your ugly, misshapen hunk and proceed to chew/rip your brains out, depending if they land with their mouths poised to attach themselves to your dumb head.

F1 VS Tank

Next up is a piece inspired by my fellow driver compadres from the army, with their obsession with F1 racing and their contempt unconditional love for their assigned armoured vehicles. I had real fun designing the aftermath on the back of the shirt.

And to round off this post, here’s a titular illustration showing the classic example of why I should stop playing Day of Defeat with the only guy I know of who still plays it for some reason. Interesting tidbit: I actually wanted the back of the shirt to be a top-down/isometric view of Omaha Beach, sort of RPG-iconic style, but I was trying to look for reference photos of how the defenses on Omaha, or hell, any of the Normandy beaches were arranged, and my search wasn’t very promising. So I decided to go with my classic protagonist/antagonist approach.

I learned a little about using less colours and working with shapes instead to convey more information, very much contrary to what I’ve been mostly doing. Hopefully it’s working, though I think I’m putting in way too much details in certain areas for shirt design. Oh well. At least they make great wallpapers.

Also, when I say detail, I mean-

tankcloseupcloseupdetail

-level of detail. Yeah. For reference, some of those strokes will be apparently printed at 0.5 points on the shirt.

I don’t even think the tracks will be visible when the shirt is printed out, let alone the ventilation grilles. Call it OCD, but I like the way I did T-72 a lot. I just shiver when looking at those ventilation grilles.

This is far from being over, though. I have a couple ideas for a totally different series which I’m fleshing out right now. And no, they won’t involve the military/guns anymore. At least, not for now.

   

Search

Extended Life

On the tubes

Archives

By date

By category

View all