Morcegão Rashguard

Masaru Fight Co. are a UK based fightwear company that make fightwear and leisure wear for the grappling community. They recently began a custom rashguard design service and asked if I could test it out. I drew an evil looking vampire bat and tried various Illustrator elements, eg gradients and masking, to see if the printed version would stay faithful to my digital original.

Here's how I designed the bat artwork:

Morcegão is the nickname of a BJJ friend of mine. He explained he was given the name by an instructor when he was training in Brazil. It translates to Big Bat.
The sketchbook scan above shows my initial doodles on the design. I wanted a manic evil grin. Unusually for me, I felt I nailed that expression first time round, so I pretty much kept it as it was first drawn.

Step 1: Pen tool draw vector lines over the sketched original.

Step 2: place the bat over the front portion of the garment (given to me by Masaru), play with gradients and colours.

Step 3: Add some fill colour to the bat, a creamy moon and same colour keyline.

Step 4:Add a flock of bats to the background.

For the back panel, I just replicated the front design but cropped in tighter to the design and masked out the unused elements. I then designed some logos and bat shapes to complete the design.

Masaru took roughly a week to print and stitch the garment together. I'm pretty happy with the way it printed out. The black to dark blue gradient worked out nice but the grey tones of the bat body are a bit too warm for my liking. Not a major problem as it still works with the overall design nicely.

I will review the actual product and service over on my main Meerkatsu blog in a bit. For now, here's a goofy pic of me wearing the rashguard.