Ninjas! Luchadors! Zombies! Oh My!

Here's another installmet of self-indulgent attention-whoring on my part where I show off some of my favorite designs that I did back when I worked at my old T-shirt design company.

The last stuff we looked at were designs that never made it past the concept stage, but today's stuff not only made it into production, but apparently sold pretty well in Walmarts all over the country.

These designs were for a huge Halloween campaign where we were really trying to corner the market on "costume hoodies", a category that has become massively popular today. For this particular program (as we called them), I was assigned to do a series of "skeleton" themes. I came up with doing a skeleton luchador, a skeleton ninja and, one that borders on redundancy, a skeleton zombie.

I had an absolute blast with these and was thrilled one day when I saw them hanging on a rack in a store. We did both hoodies and what's called extended sleeve versions which came with matching gloves and mask beanie.

Anyway, just thought I'd share...

I was even able to dredge up one of my original pencil sketches for the Ninja design. This is what I woudl scan in and then trace over in Adobe Illustrator.

And digging back in my closet, I found a couple of the actual mask/beanies! I forgot I had these and don't remember how I got them, but they were in a box from when my work shut down and I cleaned out my desk to officially become a "tele-comuter".

So, thanks for indulging me. Hope you all enjoyed a little look into the bizarre world of what people have paid me to do.

My T-shirt Designs! The Junk Food Junkie Tattoo Series!

The other day, I was going through an external hard drive where I had stored every single art file I ever worked on while working for a local T-shirt design company a couple of years ago. As I was going through the designs, I noticed that the designs I loved the most were usually designs that never went into production (there were many reasons for this, including an unimaginative owner, sales agents that were scared to promote "risky" graphics and clients like Walmart who just want t-shirts with monster trucks on them).

Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of designs out there in stores and still come across them to this day (in stores like Khol's, JC Penny and the like), but I thought it would be fun to show off some of my designs that were a little too offbeat to make the cut.

Today's designs were born out of my Art Director's penchat for just riffing out crazy ideas and then setting us designers loose on them. It was one of these meetings where he was belting out stuff like "skateboarding robots" or "superhero dinosaurs" when he looked at me and said, "Okay, here it is... Make up some designs that are all junk food themed, but make them look like old-style tattoo designs."

I, loving a challenge like that, got right to work and came up with the following designs (click to view super sized)...

Needless to say, these were probably a little too weird for our sales people to even show to any store buyers, that's if they even made it past our company's owner, but to be honest, I don't really know how well these would have sold. Still, it was a fun assignment.

While I was looking through my old files, I even found my scans of my original drawings of the cheeseburger and fries...

Ha! Not a bad way to make a living, eh?

Anyway, I found a bunch of old artwork, so expect more moments of show-offy self-indulgence in future posts.

Dang, now I'm really hungry...

Kids' Rock-n-Roll T-shirts!

Here's a couple of t-shirt designs I did a while back. I really tried to break out of the usual style that my former employers produced, and unfortunately, that earned them a spot in concept limbo, never to be produced. Whatever, I still thought they were cool.

Skate Themed T-shirt Designs!

Just showing off a style I experimented with at my old job. I think that these designs sold and you can find them in boys' sizes in JC Penny. But don't quote me on that.

My Haunted House UV Shirt Goes to Print!

Just got to see this sample of one of my UV color-changing shirts! The ghosts show up really bright in UV light. It's hard to tell but there are even little ghosts peeking out through the broken windows. :)

WooooOOOOooOOOOoOOOOoooooo!!!!