Hey Hive!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
So last week, I shared about my first time printing a custom shirt with my art. I made a special custom shirt for Sean since he loves to play DDR and all the shirts he's used for it have become so discoloured.
So I drew a neon design for him based on my previous vapourwave arcade piece that I drew for him that he loved so much. And the result was this when I printed it onto a shirt:
It came out perfect and better than I expected! I was so happy with it and I'm glad Sean loved it so much; it's now become part of his DDR ensemble.
So that was my gift to him last year, and for this year I was stumped on what I could do to top that gift. One of the rough ideas I had was to make another design but more in the style of his favourite rooster shirt which looks like this:
He always jokes that this is his favourite new shirt even though it's clearly old and tattered so I figured I'd make one for him that is actually new! But I wanted it to be custom to him of course, so I thought of drawing the rooster playing DDR instead. That's when it hit me - DDR could stand for Dance Dance Rooster, to replace the Happy Rooster!
The front of his rooster shirt is pretty simple with just a small logo on the right chest area.
I was thinking of replacing the words of course and including the DDR arrows in there somehow, but my first thought was to draw a dancing rooster similar to our classic Asian bowls with the rooster on it. It's a pretty iconic bowl and I know it's one of Sean's favourite designs.
This was one of my first sketches before I thought of Dance Dance Rooster and I wanted to scrap the idea. It actually took me a long time to come up with that as dumb as it sounds.
After I changed the words it still didn't look right, so I tried making it simpler and just went with a rooster head in between the arrows and thought it was a lot better.
I went with a simple rooster head similar to some of the vectors I found but I made the comb a little different and it turned out to look like a 3 coincidentally which works for his birthday.
I tried to distort the words manually but I just couldn't get the angle and perspective right even after consulting some tutorials. Eventually the website I used for the font already had a curved function thankfully so I just used that and it turned out perfect! So that was the front done!
For the back, it was going to look pretty similar to his shirt but with the rooster on a DDR pad instead of a wooden pallet.
For the words I wanted Dance Dance Rooster on top of course, and the Chinese words on the side would say Dance Rooster (instead of Happy Rooster) and DDR in Chinese, which I learned is 熱舞革命 (re wu ge ming).
The rooster itself was the hardest part since the one I initially drew was way too goofy. I wanted a specific style similar to the black and white pieces I've done previously where it looks more like a detailed ink drawing.
Thankfully I found this very detailed rooster vector that looked great, if a bit too perfect. I thought of drawing the full machine then figured it would be too much and stuck with just the pad.
I didn't want to just use the vector so I tried tracing it but made it simpler and more to my style.
It was okay, but still missing something, then I thought of just tracing it first and seeing how I could get a middle ground.
Eventually I gave that up and just recolored the vector but it looked way too detailed.
In the end, I just went with my original ink drawing and just duplicated it until it the ink was dark enough. I added in the words and found a nice Chinese font that would match and it looked almost perfect!
For the bottom I wanted a frame around the words similar to the designs on ramen bowls since the rooster bowl didn't have a particular frame or repetitive design. And this was the final piece!
It turned out pretty perfect and I was kinda proud of it but Sean had received another shirt from his friend, and we also bought a few while on vacation that I was hesitant to print another for him since he has so many. But I made it this far and it would be a waste not to, so I promised this was the last shirt I was going to make.
I sent a mockup to a shirt printer I found online and about 10 days later (actually a few days after his birthday unfortunately) it arrived and looked great!
It was a new printing shop so I was kinda apprehensive about them but it was actually really good! The colours and design came out very clear and looks exactly like how I drew it.
When Sean saw it he was blown away! I think the fabric of this shirt was also better than the previous one since it's a little thinner and lighter so it's not so warm. I'm so glad the colours came out well! It's now one of Sean's favourite shirts and I couldn't be happier!
If you're interested, I do draw on stream sometimes and you can even claim free artwork if you get enough channel points! We also play lots of interactive games so come hang out with us on my Twitch channel!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!