Fallopoly printing on RIPT Apparel!

Fallopoly will be printing on RIPT Apparel Friday Oct. 26! This marks my second published design on a Daily T-shirt site. Again, it is a simple design and based on Fallout, much like my Shirt.Woot design, Condition Fleshwound. I had the idea after seeing a different Chance card spoof somewhere on the internet. 

So I've taken the Monopoly Chance card, "Go directly to Jail," and swapped it with characters from the popular series Fallout. So my first thought of course is the Deathclaw. Anyone who has played this game and accidentally run into one (especially at a low level) know what I'm talking about... DEATH. So I changed the cop to the Deathclaw and the Monopoly man to the beloved Vault Boy. Luckily the Vault Boy and Monopoly man share a very similar art style, so it was an easy transition. I did however have a more difficult time with the Deathclaw. The head went through many revisions before I got it just right. I originally wanted to put it on an orange card, that way it would work any almost any color shirt. But RIPT has a deep orange color shirt, so I thought it would look best with one screen printed directly on the shirt.

Call of Duty: Zombie's Perk-A-Cola's

Jugger-Nog Soda, Based of Coca-Cola.

So my latest designs are based on the Call of Duty: Nazi Zombie mini-game. So basically your goal in the game is to survive as long as you can against waives and waives of zombies. As they added new levels to this mini-game, they added new features, like a mystery box that could give you a super awesome weapon, like a ray gun or a dud, like a sniper rifle. They also added Perk-A-Cola's, they are vending machines that you spend  your hard earned zombie killin' points on which give you perks similar to those from the multiplayer side of Call of Duty. Anyway, that is where all of this is coming from...

The concept.

The inspiration for the zombie hand.

I wanted to do a design that looked like an ad. The original CoD: Zombies was in the CoD: World at War which was a WW2 game. So the time period was set to the late 40's. I happen to love that time period so the designs where a lot of fun for me. I started with Jugger-Nog, a perk that gives you double health. I decided to start looking for Coca-Cola reference art, the vending machine in-game looked like an old school Coke machine. I found lots of material to work from, including this hand ripping through paper holding an ice cold Coke. I said to my self, PERFECT! That was the hand I needed to really sell this idea. Now I just had to "zombify" it. So after drawing the initial hand, I realized I had to figure out the wrist and arm. So I starting thinking back to my high school anatomy class... yeah that didn't get retained, so I found some good images of the forearm bones and went from there. I really wanted the bones to look like they are in the right place, so I drew the bones first, then the wrist over top. I left some detail of the bone on the wrist, but most of it got covered up later by the banner.

The inspiration for the Juggernog sign.

Once I got the hand and bottle just right it was time to thing about the sign to use. I found this classic Coke sign. It was also PERFECT! It was ornate, had the price in the corners and just overall looked the part. So I drew this up and simplified it a bit. The cool part is I only drew the top left corner and copy and pasted it in illustrator so it would look nice and symmetrical. Then I dirtied the whole thing up in photoshop to give it that vintage look. I was pumped at this point. So I challenged myself to do a design for each of the 7 remaining Perk-A-Colas.

Cdn: Fleshwound

This is my first design to be picked  up by a daily shirt site. Ironically it is the one I spent the least amount of time on. I was shooting around ideas with my buddies one day while having lunch. I had recently started a new character in Fallout: New Vegas and was talking about how terribly I had set up the character and was getting beat up by cazadors. We then started with ideas for Fallout themed shirts. We had seen a lot of Monty Python themed shirts as of late, and then it hit me. I've always thought about the Black Knight when one of my limbs is crippled in Fallout and you keep on fighting, most likely because you found some rare item and don't want to lose it by dying. "Tis but a scratch." 

Original Crude Sketch

When I pitched the idea, my friends said absolutley! I have to give props to fellow artist and friend, Ben Smith aka The Bensanity. He helped prod my mind to get this idea out.

After I got the sketch out, I got it into illustrator and did my thing. I also found a screen shot of the actual pipboy to mimic the status screen. There are also several easter eggs hidden within the status screen. Normally on a pipboy screen  you will find your S.P.E.C.I.A.L, but to keep away from copyright issues, and to tie it in more with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I changed it to I.N.V.I.N.V.I.N.C.I.B.L.E. Also changed RADs to NI! and the experience points are actually dates, 1975 when The Holy Grail was released, and 2012 when this shirt was printed.

This shirt will be available for $12 plus free shipping Tuesday July 10 only. After Tuesday, it will be $15 and only for a limited time. 

Click here to buy it today!

The Great Banana in the Sky

"Yummy, me want big giant sky nanner!"

So I was sitting with my wife and baby just having a regular conversation on Saturday. Out of no where this idea popped into my head to have Donkey Kong flying in one of those barrels from the DK Country series to get at the moon, which he believes to be a big 'ol banana. I ran and grabbed my sketch book and doodled it out. The first one was super crude, and I even put a glass bowl on his head, like a space helmet.

Here is the second sketch I did after thinking it out a bit more. I decided to add Diddy Kong in there too. After looking at this I decided to try a different style this time. Instead of my usual think line art, I decided to do a flat color design.

For the background I used a navy shirt for the night time backdrop. I did all of the background stuff in photoshop and all of the character art in Illustrator.

Originally it did not have the lighter blue fade either. To make this a 6 color shirt, I had to get creative with the colors. I had 3 browns, one being for the barrels. I instead used the lightest and darkest browns halftoned together which freed up the lighter blue. I think this really sells the idea.

There was a lot of talk about the moon when I showed this to people. I originally had it as a full crescent moon. But the majority ruled and I modified it a bit, I rounded the bottom, and kind of flattened the top some to make it more banana-like. Currently I have submitted this to Shirt.Woot, and it has made it to the editorial meeting. Cross your fingers for me!

Coff-E-Tank

Mega Man enjoys his morning Coff-E-Tank.

I'm a huge fan of the Mega Man game series. So of course I had to do some T-Shirt designs to reflect this. I had this idea because I'm a new coffee drinker. I started drinking coffee about a year and a half ago. I had never made the connection before, but I was googling for ideas for a new shirt, and saw a coffee mug with the E-Tank logo on it. Then I started thinking about how funny it would be to see Mega Man drinking from it.

Original Sketch

Above is my original sketch. After I was done, I realized that the proportions were way off and Megs was way too tall. Rush didn't change at all from the original though.

New scale sketch

While I was at work I doodled this to get the body language right. He had to look tired, not just in his face. I started with a curved line in the middle, and branched out from there. As you can see, all it takes to draw Mega Man is a bunch of shapes.

Sketch with robe

Then I decided to take it a step further and add a morning robe. So above is the finished vector line art, I then printed it out and drew on top of it with a red pen and scanned it. I referenced an old 50's ad that had a man in a robe to get the pattern. I did all of that free hand in illustrator.

After I got the principle characters just right, I added the finishing touches. I made a simple kitchen out of easy shapes and did a halftone backdrop. I have shopped it around to the daily shirt sites but haven't had any luck. But if you have a ton of disposable income, feel free to take a look at the finished product here.

Duncan Hills Coffee

Duncan Hills Coffee by Loco Robo Co.

Here is my latest T-Shirt design. I have seen a lot of other Starbucks spoofs floating around. The newest season of Metalocalypse is running, so I've been watching it and listening to a lot of Dethklok lately. I was surprised to find that this concept hadn't been done before. I jumped on the idea immediately!

Original concept sketch.

So I had the idea floating around in my head for a while, and finally had a second to sketch it out (above). I first sketched out a really rough version of the actual Starbucks logo. Then I drew the new design of Nathan Explosion over. I used a Sharpie to see if the black and white shapes would work out well.

I had a lot of trouble doing the devil horns, every time I drew the hand it just didn't look right. So I took a photo of my own hand at the exact angle I wanted and referenced that. I decided to swap it to the right arm (left of design) and add Nathan's trademark microphone.

Finally I took the original stars on the Starbucks logo and flipped them upside down and outlined them into pentagrams. I have thought about doing a version for each member of the band, similar to the coffee mug episode. If I find the time, I probably will. That way people can wear their favorite Dethklok member.

(June 2016 Update: I apologize for the water marks on the image, people keep stealing my design and trying to sell it as their own.)