OctJitsu Man and OctoDragon

I designed these for Guam-based fightwear company Competidor Brand. OctJitsu Man is a t-shirt on either white or black and OctoDragon is a desktop wallpaper.

3200x2400 size version here:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7001/6735814283_9ac993fcbf_o.jpg

They were both really fun projects to work on. Read on for more details on how I produced these...



OctJitsu Man
I sent Competidor five or size different tee concepts. It was a very loose brief, basically come up with anything but if one of those could be octopus related that would be cool. Out of my initial concept drafts, the one they liked the most was my take on the mythological character Cthulhu.

The guys at Competidor suggested I make him a little more jiu jitsu oriented and add a friendly 'shaka' gesture. Here's what I came up with:

I then scanned in the pencil sketch above and re-drew over it with Illustrator. This is my final result below, however Competidor added a little twist extra that was absolutely brilliant (following pic):

On the image above, the suckers on each tentacle took me ages to do. I basically drew each sucker one by one by copying and pasting a base sucker and altering the angle and shape of each one to fit the place where it would go.

The gold tooth and integrated branding is a brilliant touch in my opinion. The final t-shirt will actually use metallic ink on the keyline, text and tooth.

OctoDragon Wallpaper
One of the tee ideas I came up with was an octopus that had chinese dragons at the end of each of its tentacles. It was mean and nasty but probably would not have been easy to print effectively as a t-shirt. However I decided to pursue the idea and turn it into something that people could enjoy - hence a digital wallpaper piece for computers is the ideal platform in my opinion!

This is one of the original concept sketches:

I decided I would draw this using pigment fineliner pens on Bristol Board:

I then scanned the whole thing into Photoshop, cleaned up the lines, live traced it on Illustrator and coloured it back in Photoshop. The version below is one of the many colour variations I considered, but I felt it was a bit too gaudy:

So I took the design and coloured it a lot darker using various layer blends on Photoshop and some free grunge textures off the internet. The sunrays were done on illustrator using this tutorial, then placed onto the design in Photoshop.

The final image (as shown all the way at the top of this post) can be downloaded and used for free for personal use in two sizes:

Full 1600x1200 size version available here:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7034/6735815003_d7ae39287b_o.jpg

or huge 3200x2400 version here:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7001/6735814283_9ac993fcbf_o.jpg

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