Sunday, 27 October 2013

Chinese Phoenix snapback


Following my excursion painting designs onto canvas shoes I bought a blank snapback from Ebay with the intention of drawing something on this too. I never got round to it and left the hat on my bookshelf for ages until a chance conversation with one of my customers gave me the inspiration to draw a phoenix on the hat.

Wednesday, 16 October 2013

Pug sticker


I recently asked my Facebook followers ideas for something cool to draw for a sticker design. I received hundreds of ideas but one that really caught my attention was the pug. There's nothing special about this idea more than any other, but when it was mentioned, I instantly wanted to draw the pug's face. Here's a brief rundown for my work process, which was quick by my standards.


Wednesday, 9 October 2013

White Tiger


I was commissioned by Swedish fightwear brand Kenka to draw a series of rashguards celebrating the four mythological animals that represent the seasons in ancient Chinese and Japanese folklore. The White Tiger is the symbol for autumn and of the west.

I began with a quick layout idea:


I wanted to evoke the flavour of some really amazing tattoo artwork I have observed of tigers and cherry blossoms, but with the twist of drawing it in my own personal style.

I chose to draw the tiger in pen first:


Then I scanned this into Photoshop, cleaned it up a little, then worked on it some more in Illustrator.

This is the bare bones tiger in vector form:


The branches bit was easy, but the cherry flowers were fiddly. I first drew some basic cherry flowers that were intact and attached to the tree branches:


Then I went to town with 3 or 4 different petal shapes, each one with a nice pink to red colour gradient, then copy and pasted them at random places:


The front panel was simpler, I reprised the tiger and played around with mirroring him along with logo placement. Same again with the sleeves.

The final result is a really neat piece of garment making in my opinion!