WB Nostalgia

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.

Repurposing Oldies

In 2004 I branded a Middle School girl's camp called Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. I tried for an 80's New Wave feel since the graphic styles of the 80's had been resurfacing and it seemed appropriate for a fun girl's church camp. I also did one for the boys at the time called Boyz Will Be Boyz but that one had a distinctly different look and doesn't apply to this post.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Postcard

Fast forward to 2007 when I started posting designs to sell on Zazzle. I was looking through my archives and came across this art which was probably not going to be used again and I decided to repurpose it on various merchandise starting with a tee. Some of the items are shown below including the shirt, a square button, coffee mug and iPhone 5 case.

Various Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Merchandise

By no means have I made a lot of money on any of these items as I only get 10% of the sale price but it's been fun to see them sell to people all over the world. It always surprises me when someone finds them and orders considering the massive amount of stuff to choose from on Zazzle. Here are some of the sales totals to date just for kicks. 34 Tee shirts, 295 Buttons, 4 mugs and 35 various other items. I consider my efforts toward these sales as a fun hobby and nothing more. If you think this looks fun and you are a creative person then maybe you should look through your old art that you are sure you own and that's collecting dust on your hard drive and give it a shot.

Play Posters

My teenage son enjoys acting and is pretty darn good at it so when he got his first role in a real play in late 2009 with SKIT Theatre I volunteered to donate my graphic design skills to the production. He is now working on his fourth play for SKIT Theatre and so I just finished posters and t-shirts for this production as I have the others that he has participated in. It's been fun but also a challenge. Each play is based on an already recognizable movie so creating my own unique graphic that still reminds the viewer of the story and takes advantage of the brand equity is tricky. Sometimes the limitations put on me have been hard to work with but I feel good about the end results.

The newest one is A Christmas Story and this is a good example of the challenge I'm speaking of. Not only is this a period piece so I couldn't make the graphics look too modern but it also had to feel like a fun Christmas production. I wanted to break away from the use of the iconic leg lamp because it has been used so much by others who have created designs for this story. The problem was that if I told someone that the play was A Christmas Story most of them didn't know what I meant until I said, "you know the one with Ralphie, the Red Ryder BB Gun, and the leg lamp?". So I thought it needed to have one of those key elements and so I chose the leg lamp because I wasn't sure what Ralphie was going to look like and putting a gun of any kind on promotions for a kids event could be trouble.

Below are the previous three posters I created.

Thanks to my friend and awesome photographer, Mike Bartlett for the use of the football photo I used in the Facing The Giants graphics.

And here are two of the t-shirt designs I designed to go with the posters.

If you would like to use any of these graphics for your own production use the contact form on my About page to ask me about it. For a small fee I would be willing to send you the artwork in whatever format you need.

Nissen Coffee Gift

Last Christmas I had the idea of making my parents a special gift by adapting their favorite coffee brand and making it unique to them. I started with a photo that I had of them that just happened to be sitting on a shelf behind my desk chair. I drew from that photo a high contrast version of them. I tried to make it simple and logo-like with out getting too hung up on making it look like a knock-off of the siren image. I knew that once a black and white image of them was placed inside the iconic green ring that they would probably be really happy with it.

Here you can see the original photo and the final basket of goodies that I put together for them. I put aprons on them because it seemed appropriate and I added a hand and arm holding a cup of coffee to fill a weird space that was created at the bottom of the circle.

The most important part of the gift for me was the mugs which I had printed through Costco. I also thought it would be neat to give them a Christmas ornament with the logo on it which I sourced through Zazzle. The rest of the items where modified by me to add to the overall effect. I bought candy and coffee that had similar packaging colors and added the logo to the labels. I also printed the logo on a card that I wrote in.

Below are my parents opening the basket. They thought at first glance that it was a basket of Starbucks stuff and then were very surprised to see that it was actually them on the items.  It was fun to see them open it.