The task was to create a clothing line for a sport's wear company. I was given some references to go of but was left to my own devices pretty much from the get go. Noticing that the references provided were very character heavy, I decided to go a similar route but with fully fleshed out characters, rather than characters created simply for the merchandise. I got the green light and began production on what is to become a 5 design clothing collection. This post chronicles the process of the first design.
I began by researching what could be an interesting way to flesh out these characters whilst still making it a wearable design, so I thought it'd be cool if I could tell the story on the actual clothing.
After the story was written, development of one of the characters started, her name is Checyl- The Jewel Thief. Seeing as she's a fox, I sketched up a ton of different fox designs.
Quickly I learned that I don't actually know how to draw a fox or anything close to a fox, so I took to google for references. I drew real foxes, other artist's renditions and sometimes just studied dog like creature anatomy.
Once I felt I was happy with what I was drawing, I jumped into actually designing the clothes.
I knew I wanted a comic in there somehow, I also knew I wanted to illustrate a cover of a children's book. I roughed out the ideas for the 3 illustrations I needed to create, then I started researching poses, clothing and body types.
Once the research was done, I got the the images into Photoshop, made a template of them and printed them.
I went over those images with pencil, creating the final sketches for the illustrations.
Scanned those into Photoshop and painted away.
I tried to focus on the colors for the cover image, tell an interesting story with the comic, and have something that would look cool on the sleeves of the shirt, all whilst still applying the knowledge I gained during the summer, I'm still having trouble with stuff like, cast shadows, and which plane I'm on, but I'm rather happy with the images. Personally I think they are leaps and bounds away from anything I've made in a while.I really liked the process and seeing that I learned so much while doing it, I decided to carry it on towards my other projects, that way I can both learn while I work and create imagery that I can say I am truly proud of.
