LAS Apparel: Women's Wild One Tee

I LOVE apparel design! One of my favorite shirts I have designed for LAS was this Women's Wild One Tee. Like most of my best apparel designs, this one began as a hand drawn sketch.

The goal was to create something feminine for the female archer/hunter. I spent a lot of time finding the right shirt sample-something feminine, flattering for many body types, and also a decent fit since so many women's shirts run small. For the sketch, I went in a floral/bohemian approach.

From there I brought the sketch into Illustrator and converted it to a vector file. It took a decent amount of touch ups and tweaks since the sketch was generally small and rough. I experimented with different colors and potential garments, before ultimately landing on the Anvil Women's Freedom Tee in rose with a white and black design. I added in the "Lancaster Archery Supply" text subtly below the right antler to add some LAS branding without taking away from the overall design feel.

The grey pictured above represents the knocked out pieces. Therefore, this could be screen printed with only black and white ink. The grey above will just be the rose garment color. Using the t-shirt colors is one of my favorite techniques. Not only does it create complexity to the design, but it also allows me to implement an additional color without adding an ink color which then adds cost.

Once we got this design produced, it became available to purchase on the Lancaster Archery website. Our in-house photographer took great photos of the shirt. You can currently purchase this shirt here: https://www.lancasterarchery.com/lancaster-archery-supply-womens-wild-one-tee.html

Crown Drawing

March has generally been a busier month with some traveling and a heavier workload. This past week I've managed to take on a side project to get a pencil back in my hand. It's easy for me to get caught up in the digital world and designing on the computer, so I really value breaks that involve paper and pencil. 

A friend came to me asking for a drawing project of two crowns. I was tasked with recreating each crown and adding some design elements to them. Initially both were to get a swirl design added, however, there was a need to make one of the crowns more masculine. I began by sketching out each crown on a 5"x7" piece of Rives BFK. From there I used microns to perfect the outlines. I cleaned up the sketch marks I initially had and then went in to do shading and detailing with various graphite pencils. With that looking well I added the extra design elements. To the queen crown I kept the swirls per request. The king crown provided a bit of a design challenge, but I ended up sketching several options where the client chose one he liked the best. I completed that with the same micron then graphite process to get the final drawings. Below is an animated gif of the progress made with the queen drawing.

Throughout the process I filmed the progress of each drawing with my GoPro Hero 5 Session. I've been experimenting with the time lapse settings and believe I have found the sweet spot. Stay tuned for a future post of time lapse footage. Below are the drawings along with some detail shots. 

Time Lapse Rose Drawing

First and foremost, GoPro's are awesome. I've been meaning to capture the progress of my drawings and paintings and finally purchased a GoPro to do so. I used the time lapse feature and began to mess with the speed settings. While this one is a little more choppy than I was initially going for, it certainly does the job. This drawing took about 30 minutes, and I did speed it up in post at 200%. The drawing is graphite pencil on Rives BFK.