S&F Extra - July 2024 (Patreon)

It's S&F Extra time! Here's a behind-the-scenes look at what I've been up to lately.

Neutral Chaos Archipelago
I've included a timelapse GIF for this piece in the gallery up top! I had a lot of fun with this one. I really like this combination of thin lines, flat character shading, and psuedo-painted backgrounds. You can definitely expect to see me play around with this more in the future!

SHIRT ENGINEERING
The summer convention season is upon us, which means my last month has been heavily focused on designing new swag. I thought it would be fun to take a look at the process behind it all, both for the stuff I made and the stuff I didn't!

DOG PERSON
For a while now, I've wanted to make a shirt design that has a bunch of different kinds of dogs on it. "Dog Person" wound up being that shirt! Initially, I envisioned it as a light beige, and mocked up this sketch of how it might look:

Unfortunately, this proved to be a pretty difficult color of shirt to get, especially in womens sizes. So, I did a bunch of tests of what it might look like in different colors:

 Ultimately, I decided to go with the light blue... both because I liked the look of it, and also because I don't have any existing shirts that colour! So, I went ahead and made this final design:

 As you can see, I added a bunch of additional dogs compared to the original sketch, and made some adjustments to the lettering, too. I'm particularly happy with how this shirt could include Poppy, Dipper, Baker, and President Dog. The gang's all here!

DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE
And for my second new shirt of the season... it's the legend of Zeldog! I initially sketched it out on navy blue...

 ...but ultimately decided to pivot to black instead, because I felt it read a little better that way.

 I decided to use a Dipper-esque corgi for this one rather than Baker, because I thought his face colouring and grumpy attitude would look a little more cool for a warrior dog.

Unlike the real Dipper, though, this corgi has a full tail! When I got Dipper 9 years ago, I was under the mistaken impression that corgi tails were naturally short... but they actually used to dock them! (I'm sorry, Dipper... I didn't know!) Corgi tail docking generally isn't done anymore, which means my tail-less cartoon corgis are increasingly anachronistic looking. So for these two new shirts, I gave the little guy a tail so he would better represent the average modern corgi. (While Baker continues to represent the older docked corgis on the Dog Person shirt.)

UNUSED SHIRT IDEAS:
During the shirt brainstorming phase I also came up with a few other ideas that I decided not to move forward with for various reasons. Here's a peak at them!

 With the big Sonic 3 movie coming out later this year, I thought it might be fun to revist my old hedgehog shirt and do a Sonic and Shadow version. I may well still do this at some point later this year, but decided to backburner it for now. I'm not sure if I want to just play it relatively straight, like the sketch above, or if I want to work in some kind of text or joke. I'll ponder it!

 When I was considering ideas for designs that could feature a lot of different kinds of dogs, I kicked around doing a pool party type image. I think this is fun, but ultimately I think it might be more appropriate as a print or a comic. The limited colour pallet just felt... well, too limiting!

 This was probably my favourite of the unused ideas, but I never quite settled on the text. It also felt like it maybe overlapped too much with some of my other designs. I've already got a corgi shirt that says SICK AS HELL on it, after all, and another one with Dipper brandishing a weapon. Haha!

PIN 'EM
All right... time for one last exercise in merch design! This time around, I wanted to make a pin version of my classic "So Excited About Whatever" design.

Stage one: updating the artwork! The original design (on the left) is from 2012, and is one of my earliest drawings of Baker! So I felt like for the new pin, I should update the art to match his current design.

Once I had the art itself sorted out, I played around with different ways I could style and colour the lettering in pin form:

 And in the end, I settled on this version:

 So, now it's all ready for the summer cons! And of course, after that it'll all be headed to my online store, too. Woo!

Ruby Chel
Last but not least, here's a look at the making of one of my recent pin-ups! This one features Ruby dressed as Chel from the Road to El Dorado, and was inspired by a backer request. For the pose, I decided to reference this particular scene from the film...

 ...which meant she needed an armadillo! So, Trevor got to join in on the cosplay. Here's a timelapse GIF of the drawing process:

 And here's the finished piece!

Whew! That's all for now, team. But I'll be back soon with more goodies! See you then.