Triangle Girl

This T-shirt is my latest tee design. It is available here at my store.

The design began life as a charity poster and T-shirt for the 2018 Bristol Grapplethon event. Here's a look at how the design evolved over time...

I first sketched out a concept - the female jiu jitsu combatant is sitting in mounted position and has the demon foe under double arm/wristlock control. 

Adding in text layers to flesh out the poster design, but I felt the characters looked awkward and the technique being used unrealistic, so I changed it to a mounted triangle position.

The Grapplethon version of the design in finished form. above.

@tacerob and her son with their Grapplethon t-shirts

I liked the drawing I made enough to consider making it into a retail t-shirt for sale at my store. But in order to do so, the design needed a bit of a facelift. The image below shows the same illustration as the Grapplethon tee but I tweaked some of the body proportions and altered the shading. I also added some chinese style clouds and new text. This wasn't a difficult facelift, it only took one evening to do.

New version of the mounted triangle girl

I decided the retail tee needed a back design. What better than to turn the drawing upside down and call it the triangle from guard. The triangle choke whether applied from mount or from guard is more or less similar in execution, however there are a lot of details that differ. This meant I had to pretty much draw most of the guard version from scratch. I still used the rotated mounted version as a base reference point.

Triangle from the guard version

Adding lines using Manga Studio Pro

The finished version of the triangle choke from guard position

As you can see, I tried to keep the feel and the style of the new version as close to the original mounted version as possible. All that was left was to add a few small graphic details to the rest of the t-shirt and get it screenprinted.