Before and After

Recently a local insurance agent who has been a great customer at my day job for years asked us to print his new logo on shirts for kids to wear. To my surprise his new "logo" was a piece of art he bought from 5ive Minute Logo. If you don't know what that is you can click on the name and see it for yourself but basically it's a site where you can buy a logo for $5 that takes only 5 minutes to create. This would of been fine with me since the creator of 5ive Minute Logo is a long time good friend of mine, Von Glitschka, and the art was in vector form and would print really well. Not surprisingly though the customer wasn't completely happy with his cheapie cheap logo and wanted it changed a "little". Below is the art he sent me and a picture of his jeep which he wanted it to look more like.

The funny thing is that the art looks nothing like a jeep so I was going to have to start from scratch and draw a whole new image. The sad thing is that since the client had payed only $5 for his unusable art I knew I was going to have to draw the new one as fast as I could. Below is my version of the same basic style but done to look more like his actual vehicle.

I originally drew the jeep straight but he wanted it going up hill so for the shirt I put it on an incline. When I gave him the file of the art I gave him the straight version because I thought it would look better for most uses. 

My conclusion about this situation was that although it bugged me a little bit that 5ive Minute Logo devalued my work to a certain extent it also provided a cheap thumbnail sketch that made it easier for the customer to communicate to me what he wanted and I had a pretty good idea of what style of art would make him happy based on that thumbnail. So, I guess I won't have to punch Von the next time I see him.

Oliver Promo Pieces

In my spare time I've been working on designs for a production of Oliver that my son is acting in. I got the printed posters, tee shirts and the yard signs all last week.

The full poster

​My son modeling the shirt

I decided on the tee shirt and yard sign that I would not include the vintage texturing in the art but instead go with a more clean look. On the shirts I was concerned about the hands printing good anyway so I thought adding more texture to them could cause problems and make the hands look like they had lines on them like older or weathered hands. Since the hands are supposed to be those of a young boy I thought I better not risk the weathering making them look older. I think I made the right choice. With the yard signs I thought it would be better to keep them as simple as possible since they are supposed to be read from a car as it goes by.

​The yard sign

The printing on all three pieces turned out great and I'm pleased with how they came out. Now I just hope that they do their job and bring people out to see the show.

Current Projects

I've been working on a couple new freelance projects. I don't want to reveal too much about them yet but below is a little piece of one of them that I'm having fun with.

It's for an album cover that I'm designing and illustrating. I love creating album covers probably because music fuels so much of what I do with art. Whether the art is directly used in the music industry or I just have my favorite tunes playing while I work I feel a strong connection between the two.

I think it goes without saying that the cover art for an album is very important. A good album cover communicates a lot about the music before a person even hears it. On a few occasions, before previewing music was as easy as it is today, I purchased CDs without hearing a lick of the music. Usually I had read good reviews of it so I had some idea what I was getting myself into but I can think of at least one occasion when I took the $15 gamble on an album and scored a life-long favorite. From there I became a fan of the band and tried to get everything they produced within reason. Not that it matters to my story but that band was "Man or Astro-Man?" and I still dig their music about 19 years later. Here is that album cover.

I couldn't find this exact selection on iTunes but if you click the image you can sample another one from about the same era.

So, maybe other people aren't crazy enough to buy music based solely on the packaging like me but we are all effected in some way by the visual aspect of the whole package. My goal when working on this kind of project is to make the music stand out enough that people give it a listen and a fair chance. That's a tall order in our visually saturated world but I'll keep trying.

Licensed Nostalgia

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.