Merch Behind the Scenes - Game Gyaru Pop☆Star (Patreon)

Hello, Lovelies!

I’m Eric, the head of merch at Game Grumps! We’ve been wanting to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how a piece of merch comes together at Game Grumps, and Patreon is the perfect place to do it! Every piece of merch has its own journey from start to finish, but this post is about how the Game Gyaru Pop☆Star design came together!

Step One: Concept -

Merch concepts can come from anybody in the office, and I’m proud to say this one came from me!

Digging back in my notes, I wrote “Gyaru Pop Star Tee?” back on March 9th 2021.

(cropped screenshot from my notes app here)

I pitched it in our weekly meeting that day and got a big thumbs up from the team!

Step Two: Reference/Reach out to Artist -

Later that day, I reached out to the artist we decided on, Ellen Alsop! Ellen is both an incredible artist and always great to work with. (Follow her @space_ellien on Twitter and Instagram!)

I described the idea to her as ”a fun design for [Game Gyaru] in the vein of vocaloid characters, like Hatsune Miku, or K-Pop looks like you might see Blackpink, or that fake League of Legends K-Pop band wear.”

I sent over a few images as visual reference:

As well as a quick suggestion for the layout. Some of my finest work:

Step 3~?: Art, notes, art, notes

We go back and forth a few times, as I put sketches in front of the team, go back to the artist with the feedback. General Art Direction type shit.

Here are some of the designs Ellen sent over based on my description and reference images:

One of the hardest choices we’ve had to make. Just look at Arina’s B design! And we *had* to request the Galaxy hair from Daniella’s G design for the final. Maybe there’s a costume change in store for the girls in the future?

Next were color comps!

We decided to go with color comp 1 since we were working our way towards a shirt, and screenprinting has some color limitations. That and it was our favorite anyway :)

And the sketch composition!

You might recognize B from my incredible sketch earlier. They’re basically the same image. We decided to stick with it since it shows off their outfits the most!

Next comes everything all together! Almost!

Ellen sent this over, unsure of what my scribbles and stars would really translate to for the final image. Getting art like this back is one of the best parts of my job. I love seeing everything come together, but with just a little more brainstorming before it becomes the final image. You mean I get to collaborate just a little more with a great artist like Ellen? I live for this stuff.

So I took a stab at it with a quick sketch in Procreate for iPad

I also sent along this Easter Egg to include for the music notes:

Shoutouts to OngakuConcept, Joshua Taipale and Reddit for posting this! Slipping in little easter eggs and hidden treasures is something I really love doing too (Have you read the Magnet Poetry Box out loud? Have you counted the syllables?)

And now we have the final!

Wow! I’m so happy to have gotten to share this all with you! I’m a big fan of in-process work, sketchbooks, and rough concepts, so breaking this all down was such a blast! Of course, the work is not done here - there’s also choosing a garment to print the design on, getting test prints, designing the lanyard/backstage pass, and getting photoshoots done for social media/the store page. But there’s not too much fun stuff to show from any of those - well, the photos are fun, but you get to see those already.

All in all, this design took around 5½ months to pull together from the first meeting to the day we launched it on gamegrumps.com/merch. It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it every time.

Any designs you’d like to see behind the scenes of in the future? Drop a comment below! ‘Til next time! -Eric