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.)