Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Boo Got Caught

Got a design done while I was vising my folks in Indiana, and this one was done totally digitally: no sketch. Just me and the tablet. Although yesterday was Halloween, I still had ghosts on the brain. So here it is. Click on the image to go to the voting page if you read this before Thursday.

Monday, October 24, 2011

New Derby Entry- Scuba Fish

Not many ideas as of late- family issues have prevented me from doing much more than managing my teaching, research, and travel time. So this is a major milestone in that I got one done for the derby this week. Click the image to go to the vote page.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Spiritgreen does it again

This guy constantly amazes me. The stuff just keeps getting better and better, and this time he comes up with an amazing design, within two days, that totally blows out everyone else from the water. The detail is impeccable, the concepts are spot on, and everything about it is done just right (though i must say that the moon behind the design looks more like a watermelon since it's a bit too wide).

If you get a chance, check it out here.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Bag of Fish

This week is a derby for the shirt.woot bags. We haven't had one of these for over 100 derbies, so this is fun.

Voting link here.


Friday, August 19, 2011

Are you going outside?

This is a mild repurpose of an early (mid 50's) shirt derby entry. I really liked the idea of sad puppy eyes, so I tweaked it a bunch and this is what's left. Hopefully it'll resonate with the voters, but I've kinda lost the ability to predict what will be good or not. Has been a while since I had a design score >200 votes, that is.


Sunday, July 31, 2011

Three shirt designs this week on shirt.woot

I have been busy. While on vacation, I got three designs done. Two are not my best, but I do like the pill one.

Vote for Pill
Vote for Covalent Love



The other one isn't that good, so I'm not gonna post it.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Working on mexico idea

This is a draft of one idea- an Aztec owl.


Sunday, June 19, 2011

Trying out mobile blogger

Well, trying it out. If this works i will try to post more inspirations as i have them.

For now, celebrating dads day with the boys at the pool.


Two designs for book derby

Hi whomever reads this, prolly no-one. I have two designs up for the derby. Please give them a vote, or if you don't have a vote, some kind comments in the blog would be good. I'm not sure if I want to keep doing this blog if there's noone reading it but me :).

Here's the first. Walk the Plank (Click here to vote)


Here's the second: How to Live Forever (click here to vote)

Monday, June 13, 2011

1.. 2.. 3..

This week's derby is "Red", and as usual, with two kid b'day parties to go to (not my kids), I frittered the weekend away doing dumb things like watching kids have fun, grading, and prepping for summer classes this week. So I was late to the derby contest. I was working on several ideas, but they never gelled right. This one I just bit the bullet and finished to get it in the derby. Not my best, but it's good enough, and hopefully it will get over 100 votes before it is done. Or is rejected. But since Woot has made a mint off of a cookie monster design, I think it's also relatively safe in the realm of parodies. But I never know.

So it is up for votes here.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Another great derby design

I should post more often. Especially when I come up with iconic, good looking designs that aren't retreads of some old half-baked idea. This one is for a anthropomorphic food derby, which going into it sounded like one where I'd get my ass kicked pretty soundly from the designer gods that are now regular entrants into the derbies. While I consider myself having decent skills for what I do for a living (neuroscience/animal behavior), I am nowhere close to the level of such woot greats as Bassanimation, Walmazan, SpiritGreen, and Patrick Spens.

So I take it as a great success when I can do something that stays in the top 20 in a derby. This one was a take on the Reservoir Dogs movie. However, there are a lot (and I mean a LOT) of hot dog designs out there, which rendered my first concept undoable. However, I thought of another iconic way to play it out, so here it is. It's early in the movie, when Mr. Pink and Mr. White go at each other, with Mr. Blonde looking on.

The reason Mr. White has a red splotch on his shirt is because in the movie, Mr. White has helped Mr. Orange into the warehouse after getting shot. So he has blood on him. Should I have swapped the bottles of condiments to make it seem like Mr. Pink has already gotten some ketchup on Mr. White? Sure. But it makes less sense since it would also appear I was "Lucasing" the movie and having Mr. Han Solo Pink shoot first, which didn't happen. So I left it. Also, I got calls asking for a light silver shirt, since people don't like white shirts, but that also looked silly since the nice thing about this concept was the stark B&W nature of the design. Plus, if I had made it on any other color, I'd have to color the hot dogs at least white, which would have been an extra ink color. I like it as it is. It's up for votes, but if you're reading this blog, you prolly already voted for it. But I'll take any comments you might have!

Voting can be done by clicking here.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

The Silver Spectre

I have a new shirt design on woot that I rather like, though it is skirting the theme by a thread...

Vote here.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Kingfisher rules over fishes

Well, it's been a long time since my last post. I've been doing designs, but none worth advertising up until now. I just did one for Shirt.woot's Royalty derby, and it makes fun of kingfishers. I love birds, I am a bird biologist, so this one is really fun to show off. Click on the image to vote for it.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Flynn Lives shirt on redbubble.

I have been a big fan of the ARG for Tron Legacy called Flynn Lives. It's a project by 42 Entertainment, who won an ARG award for the campaign. In the last installment, a short film on the Tron Legacy DVD/BluRay shows the "background" to the mythos that is the ARG. At the end, Sam wears a distressed Flynn Lives shirt. This is that shirt.  The link is a sales link in case you like the design.

Derby Entry- Jersey Devil

This week's theme is woodcuts. My favorite is a childrens book called Earl the Squirrel. Really well done. So I decided to repurpose an old design I liked, with a woodcut pattern.  Plus did some good tweaking in the design as well. Here's the link to the voting site.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Shirt in the do-over derby this week!

Can't believe I forgot to push this- It's a derby where they give honorable mentions from previous derbies one more chance to get printed. I'm doing OK but need all the votes I can get. I'm hoping that the clean lines will get it an Editor's choice, but votes are always nice.  Comments too!

Vote by clicking this link. Thanks!

Saturday, February 19, 2011

This is SOOOOO True!

Nuff said. Hot sauce rocks.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Cassette Roadkill

You know the derby's really competitive when you crank out one of your best designs ever, and it's still consigned to being a 20th place finisher or so.  But that doesn't dissuade me, no sirree... but it could use votes if you read this soon...

Vote here.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Two new designs for the Oddball Shirt.woot derby

I have two entries up for votes this week. One is a cool snowflake among less cool droplets. The other is a late entry celebrating the best kids' game Duck Duck Goose. Apologies to all those Canadians who played Duck Duck Gray Duck...

Vote here for cool flake
Vote here for duck


Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Flynn Lives- Other poster versions

Wow, I forgot to post the other designs I was working on. Here they are.

Flynn Lives- Tank version

Another ARG (alternate reality game) poster recreation. This time, it's a tank design that someone saw at a Comic Con.  Took me about an hour and a half, with a lot of time trying to preserve the gradients while still knocking out the black lines to make it look clean. Still some work to do, but overall, I think it's spot on.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Turtle T-shirt Jealousy

A silly entry that kinda sends up the tons of turtle designs out there. People may hate what is popular, but I'm embracing it.

Vote here.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Two Emperor tamarin designs submitted to Shirt.Woot

I was intrigued by the emperor tamarin monkey, so I drew this out this morning. I submitted one colored version, and one grayscale version.  Not sure which one is better...

Click here to vote for grayscale tamarin.
Click here to vote for colored tamarin.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Tie Fighter Tesseract

This week's Shirt Woot derby is things beginning with the letter T, so here's my idea of combining pop culture with four-dimensional space.

Voting like will be here when submitted

Monday, January 31, 2011

RatBot

Something I doodled cuz I can't sleep. I always liked mechanical animals, so here's a ratbot. I don't know if it'll ever get on a design, but at least it's moderately done in case I need something for a theme. Perhaps gonna add it looking at a robotic cat. Or something.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

The Good Luck Rat of Karni Mata

Based on the rats of Karni Mata, finding one of a very few number of albino rats among the normal black rats is considered good luck. In addition, you have to go barefoot into the temple, so having a rat run across your foot is also considered good luck. Vote here!

Friday, January 28, 2011

Mandala of Life

A more ambitious, abstract derby entry. A mandala is a sacred circle in hindi art, where patterns and images radiate out in concentric rings. I decided to imitate one form, that of sand, by making the elements sand-like.


Vote here

Friday, January 21, 2011

New design for the Star Derby

Here I have tried to capture stars DOING something, rather than just a pretty picture with halftones. It's silly, but it's what I do best (cartoon illustration). Tried also to do variation in the background as well to give it more visual interest. Link for voting to be added after submission.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Two designs for the Fire Shirt Woot Derby

Here are two designs I will be subbing in the Fire derby starting on Friday. Click the images to vote!

The first is called "Dances With Fire" and the second is obvious, "Meteor Shower"

Monday, January 10, 2011

01/11 Mouse Tron

A random drawing at the doctor's office led to this. I wasn't trying to do a Tron design, it just came out that way. All of this was done in Photoshop using my new Bamboo Tablet. Currently 5 colors: gray, blue, white, red, and pink. Black is the shirt color. I still need to give the mouse in the middle a gray treatment and invert the front wheel colors (red/black). But overall a nice sketch almost fully realized.  Tron Mouse finds a new way to keep other mice away from his cheese.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

New Recognizer

The original Tron movie, one of my favorites, had the iconic Recognizer symbol. But there wasn't a similar vectorized version of the new Recognizer.  I proudly have an old-school Reco on my MacBook Pro, so it looks like it is capturing the lit up Mac logo on the lid when opened.  So I made one for the new Reco as well.  It's a vectorized file, so it reproduces razor sharp. The gif below has been sampled so it doesn't look as good.

01/02 VelociTron shirt

This didn't win. Heck, it barely broke 90 votes, while the other entry that was similar won it all. I think it's superior in every way to the winner, but that's the nature of the derby. The first shirt always wins, and I was driving from Chicago to Philly.  So I figured I would share it on the blog, since it was so good.  Note I dated the above entry to when I actually submitted it.


Only one kid soul commented on the shirt in the thread. If you want to do so (and make me feel good), feel free to go over and say so here.

01/09 Finding a way out.

Another year, another derby shirt. This is a new take on a classic joke shirt- the tux shirt. Only I replaced the flower with a bride, and had a circuitous pathway for the groom to get away. There is only one solution (though you can go through the bowtie two ways), but a hint: if you find yourself tracing the lower buttons, you're not getting away anymore :)

Voting link here