Lebfest '07 T-shirts in Action

Last weekend marked the 2nd annual Lebfest. Around 60 of us gathered in the "Friendly City" of Lebanon, Indiana to celebrate Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Friendliness. We gathered beneath the friendly city water tower for opening ceremonies then competed in sports at the park, hung out, challenged each other to ridiculous competitions, and partied until the wee hours of the morning. We split into two teams that honor the two most popular forms of lawn ornamentation embraced by the city, the Porch Geese and the Garden Gnomes. As explained below, the t-shirts were designed to capture the energy and the "fest" aspect of Lebfest, while at the same time highlighting the team mascots and over-all spirit of patriotism that the town of Lebanon (and our beloved festival) prides itself on. Here are some shots of the shirts in action at Lebfest '07.

KeepMyTV.com

After several back and forths, name changes, and a spanish site translation the KeepMyTV.com site is under construction. It should launch Mondy, at which point I'll link the site to this blogpost. In the meantime, here's the updated design.

Aquaphobic Octopus or Supersoaker Sniper

Ok.... so the title is a groaner and could use some help, but here's a little colored pencil/sharpie drawing I threw together for an art swap we did here at work. I was in the mood to do something semi-colorful on a nice dark deep colored paper and this is what it evolved into. I love very organic twisty imagery and octopus legs just sort of formed from my squiggles as I was planning it out. Before I knew it I had a very terrified looking octopus and ended up adding the little fishy as his aggressor. The paper was textured, so I decided to work with it and see what kind of result I could get using the textured side. I couldn't quite get the colors of this scan representative of the original, but oh well, close enough.

Everyone who participated in our art swap brought in a piece of art. There was a ton of variety from quilts, to photography, to paintings, to re-purposed ready made art, to quick character sketches. We all drew numbers and swapped based on what we drew. It was a lot of fun, I ended up with a very cool "burner" that Dan did, and Frank Tai got this piece.

Other old sketches.

Speak Easy Invite Illustrations

Earlier this week our illustration/animation team started compiling a bunch of illustrations to put together an illustration reel. I bounce around between so many different things, I had to dig way back for some actual illustration work that I'd done and I came across this old Speak Easy invite that we put together for Suros. Mike Rendel, a fantastic print designer here, put together the layout.

The Penguin Monologues

Here are some penguin sketches I doodled recently. I developed one into a vector character that I began animating for fun. The animation isn't done yet, but here's the start.

T-shirt Fun

Over the past couple months I've dabbled in a t-shirt design here and there for various reasons, so I thought I'd include a couple of them in a post. More designs are in the works, maybe some day soon I'll actually put some little label together dedicated to wearable art. I dig t-shirt design, but it would be so fun to put together skirts, purses, etc. Hopefully things should slow down at home soon, and I'll be able to break out my new screen and do some experiments!

1. For The Cure Shirt: A shirt I put together to help raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. My purpose for designing this shirt was to create something that I personally would like to wear and hope that others would want to wear it as well. I like the idea of design that can benefit a cause without containing an image of a ribbon or helping hands. (I'm happy to get re-prints made if you are ever in need of a fund raising shirt for this organization. 100% of the profits will ALWAYS go to The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.)

2. Love is All Shirt: A shirt commissioned by Soul Sister for the Indy Pride festival. They requested a rainbow bullseye and the tagline "Love is All" I wanted to incorporate urban imagery since it was a Downtown Indy festival so I included the buildings and spray paint. I originally had a few prominent buildings from downtown, but I wasn't sure if I should be concerned about the companies that own the buildings since I might be associating those companies with an event without getting permission, so I ended up making the buildings more of a general representation of the city. I also wanted to use very saturated, bright colors that would pop off the shirt and decided to add a bit more interest by breaking up the bullseye. The placement of the buildings and the organic shapes reaching out from behind also implied that the bullseye was a representation of the entire world, re-enforcing the "love is all" tag line.

3. Lebfest '07: This shirt was designed for a mini-event that my friends and I have put together for the last 2 years. The opening ceremonies are held underneath the town's water tower which contains the town's nickname of "The Friendly City". I wanted to play up the "festival" part of Lebfest which drove the general idea behind the design. The geese and gnomes represent the two team names of "Porch Geese" and "Garden Gnomes (which can be found on NUMEROUS porches around the town of Lebanon... lawn ornaments are BIG here).

As a side note, PRN Graphics is a local apparel printing company who I love and trust to get my designs printed. Today I was browsing around their site (because I needed their phone number to call about the Lebfest shirts) and saw that they included my design in their portfolio section. It was surprising to see it on their site. They did a stellar job with the prints and they're really great to work with. If you're in need of a printer, these guys get two thumbs up!

Save My Set!

Animation requests have been a bit slow this week at Mediasauce so I'm helping out the design team with a web mock for Thomson. They're releasing a little converter device for sets that only accept analog signals. The demographic for the website is primarily older individuals who are looking for a way to keep their old tv with the switch of national broadcast signals from analog to digital, so it was important that it seemed friendly, bright, and had large text. It was also important that the majority of the text is html for search engines to spider through. I'll link the site to this post when/if it goes live. Dan Thomson, one of the illustrators I work with did the cute TV cartoon guy, and Dave Devries, another fabulous illustrator, did the comic illustrations in the center of the page.