Red's Revenge and Twilight Omoplata

I released two new rashguards over on my Meerkatsu Store today. Both feature freshly updated versions of older artworks of mine. Here is more information:



Red's Revenge
I first created a Red Riding Hood themed piece in 2015 and decided to adapt it for rashguard use.

The original drawing was too horizontally formatted for rashguard use, plus I thought the base drawing needed a lot of improvements. I liked the fiery cape a lot, and considered it for the final version:

Re-drawn Red and Wolf lineart

But the problem I found was that the cape did not look like a cape and it just looked like Red herself was on fire. Not an effect I wanted to convey.

So I drew a simpler cape:

I was much happier with this version, so next came to colouring and then formatting along with some text graphics for rashguard use:

The back panel was tricker in that I had to create a completely fresh visual. My very first sketch came out like this:

I wondered if it might be too bloodthirsty for younger viewers? So I asked on social media. My followers were overwhelmingly supportive. One good suggestion was to swap the knife for a hatchet, which actually is more in keeping with the woodcutter story.

Once the prelim sketch got a satisfactory response, I set to work drawing the final version. As you can see above, it looked a little plain so I added in a forest background. Usually I like to draw every element of all my designs but in this case it made sense to purchase some stock vectors of forest trees. It would save a lot of time and since it was only used as a background, wouldn't be cheating too much ;)

Here's the finished version:

Twilight Omoplata
This rashguard features a freshly re-drawn version of the Gentle Omoplata piece I created way back in 2012. Here's the original:

Trying to use the original drawing for a rashguard presented a similar problem to my Red Riding Hood piece, it was too horizontal for my purposes. So it was a good excuse to re-draw and refresh the entire concept.

Here is a screengrab of the 2017 edition, you can see how I used my older design as a base and drew new lines while also tracing over some of the older stuff:

With the line art completed, the next stage would be the colouring. It was a more complex piece than the Red's Revenge as there were many more elements to colour in. I knew I wanted a sunset feel to the piece.

Here is one colour version:

It's okay, not brilliant though. I felt it would reproduce a bit too dark on the rashguard. So I tried another colour combination, and the result was much better.

Here is the final product: