When I was searching for the Bugs Bunny designs in the last post I came across a lot of other licensed character designs that I did in the early 90's. I set aside a few of my favorites to show here. So, here are some Jetsons designs and one Rocky and Bullwinkle. Of the many licensed t-shirts I did back then I preferred The Jetsons because it was one of my favorite cartoons as a kid.

Our work on these jobs at Sun Sportswear consisted of coming up with a concept and writing the copy and looking through style guides to find poses that then we redrew or tweaked to fit the purpose. We would mock the idea up and color it to present to our Art Director who would then either approve it or reject it. If the Art Director approved it then it would be shown to the company that owned the license to get their blessing on the design. If it got approved by them then we would take the steps to clean up the art and make it camera ready and do the color separations. Usually the Buyers for the stores wouldn't see them until they were printed on shirt samples but some times they would see the original mock-ups first. If a design got rejected by the Art Director or by the holder of the license or by all the Buyers it would be cursed for all time and if we tried to resubmit it in the future it was an immediate rejection again. We learned to just put them away forever, never to see the light of day. The designs above are some that made it to the printed sample stage at least so I'm pretty sure they were sold in stores but I can't remember for sure. In any case, they were really fun to work on.

Maybe it's because I was just at Warner Bros. Studios less than two weeks ago to see the Conan O'brien Show or maybe I've just been nostalgic for the "good old days" when I first started as a designer but I remembered these Bugs Bunny designs I did in the early 90's and had to try to find them. It took searching through a pile of test prints from my first job at Sun Sportswear that were shoved in a box in my garage to dig them up but it was kind of fun looking at all the old designs.

These are all screen printed samples and since they are too big to fit on my scanner I had to lay them on my coffee table and shoot them with my camera while I stood above them. The inconsistencies in the ink coverage are from the flash glaring off of the plastisol inks. I thought it would be fun to show these here since I have no other real use for them. I may be posting some other designs I found so you can see where I started as a designer. I feel very fortunate to have started my career at a sportswear company because it forced me to draw more than I think most entry level jobs would of. That was important to my development as an artist since I didn't consider myself the strongest illustrator and definitely not a cartoonist back in art school. I still struggle with cartooning but having to do it taught me some tricks. I think the top two which were a front and back of a shirt are the funniest since I tried to draw Bugs in the fashions of that early 90's time period and the wording is just so stupid.