Tees

Billabong t-shirt design by wotto

I worked with Billabong’s Art Director for 3 years between 2010 – 2013 designing tees for their apparel lines. After many concepts and back and forthings my first design was selected. The design was called ‘La Playa’ which featured a very detailed illustrative surfing Day of the Dead character. This design was very successful and Billabong printed the artwork beautifully. It went on to feature on several colors and crossed the globe in several forms, ending in Australia as a kids seasonal tee in 2012. Most of the other pieces I created were in a similar style, on the back of the first one being such a success.

Eventually the company took a different graphic direction with a trend change and I moved on to other projects. This experience while painfully slow taught me a lot and put me in front of many other clients. La Playa is still a T-shirt I see around and definitely the one that people reference years later. It was worn by a few people on TV shows and Kevin from The Kevin & Bean Show wore it several times.

StarWars x wotto Apparel. How often can you cross something off your bucket list? Not very is the answer. Well recently I crossed off working with Lucas Films & Disney on StarWars merchandise! Pretty amazing. It was an opportunity that arose through Design By Humans. One design led to several and here we are. Having my art approved by these industry giants was mind-blowing. A lengthy process but worth every nail-biting moment of it. I completed and had five designs approved, each featuring iconic characters from the movie franchise.

I designed a really mixed bunch; a cute Boba Fett, if you’re going to restyle an iconic Starwars character best to start with Boba.  Next I did a piece called ‘Sketched Empire’. I wanted to do a very hand drawn looking piece. I drew several of my favorite elements and composed them together, probably the least ‘wotto’ piece but the best seller of the bunch. A vector design of my favorite villain, a portrait of Darth Maul.  A Tie Fighter pilot with day of the dead style was my fourth tee. Finally I wanted to tackle the Ewoks, one of my favorite sets of characters. I wanted to make them ridiculously cute but also kind naughty. I came up with the idea that these cheeky little critters were graffiti-ing up a tree in the forest with the rebel symbol.

You can read a lot more about it here and get links to the products too.

Shirt.woot and I go back quite far, I have had several tees printed there. More recently they have branched out into other product lines, like journals, aprons and sublimated all over printed t-shirts. These sublimated tees are pretty cool, not just because the art can be printed all over the garment but also because they are on trend right now!

I’ve always felt my doodle art style lends itself well to this kind of all over printing because of the level of detail in my work. Woot opened their doors to all over submissions and my design ‘The Dirty Doodler’ was picked up. It was printed and made available for a short period of time, I was lucky enough to get a free sample. The tee is printed ridiculously well, with almost 100% front and back coverage! The images don’t really do it justice but I am one happy camper. Click “View Full Post” to see images >

Threadless has played a pretty big role in my life. I got my start in t-shirt design there, I met some great contacts through them and most importantly Threadless bought my wife and I together! So when they offered me an exclusive store to showcase my art I was super pleased.

I decided to showcase some of my most popular pieces but also feature three exclusive-to-Threadless designs.  ‘The Scoundrels’, ‘A World Without Humans’ & ‘Con Gusano’ are only available in this store.  Threadless also pay amazing commissions on every sale here so you can genuinely know that your purchase is really helping the artist. It’s not a token payment, it’s everything about Threadless’s bottom line!

Dirty Shirty is a provocative apparel company with style roots in the L.A scene. They commissioned me to design one of my well received sugar skulls that would fit both the male and female market. An alternative label, they wanted something that stood out and was deeply influenced by Los Angeles street style.

For the female version I choose bright neon colors to contrast the dark outline skull art. This was partnered with a version of the companies logo using the day of the dead style flowers. Pink, blues and a bold outline made the whole design pop. For the male version we went way more subtle with a tone on tone feel. The colors were dropped and the outline of dark grey was printed on a cool heather grey blank. A cool project with a lot of iconic Day of the Dead influences, which if you know me, you know I love to illustrate.

Imperial College London commissioned me to design their official 2015 Imperial Festival T-shirt. I mixed scientific events and fun nerdy icons in one large t-shirt doodle. The people at ICL were great to work with and gave me a very thorough brief. The tee was a big hit at the festival, selling out on day two.

Small character details were also used to make buttons for visitors. It’s always nice to work with an educational establishment but Imperial College London is highly respected worldwide so it was a real honor to work with them.

Design By Humans and Skelanimals teamed up a few months ago and hosted a Skelanimals tshirts design contest. Skelanimals offered up eight of their cute dead animal characters for designers to rework for a T-shirts. I choose Diego the bat character. I applied a hand drawn Day of the Dead style using lines and icons from the Mexican Art style.

I won first place with my ‘Diego The Dead’ design. I also had a second design selected to be featured in this exclusive collection ‘Jack a Doodle’. This design features the Skelanimals bunny ‘Jack’ redrawn using my signature doodle style. Although I think Diego is a stronger design I also enjoyed working on Jack so I am glad he made it into the tshirt collection. Skelanimals was a cool brand contest to collaborate on that alligned well with my style.

About the brand : Skelanimals are adorable animals who have met an untimely end, mostly due to their own reckless and ill-advised behavior. Edgy but lovable, playful and irreverent, dark but not morbid–Skelanimals are so fun and adventurous that you just might forget they are no longer living.

Diego The Dead – Available here

Jack a Doodle – Available here

Formamentees approached me last year for some designs for their new brand. I sold them a set of designs that they went on to feature. More recently I discovered they have started making all over printed versions of their tees. Two of my designs have been made available in this huge printed style and they look really cool.

It’s always nice to see companies take your art and produce new and exciting products. I really like how they printed the ‘Dreamer’ design off the sleeve, looks very cool.  The only down side to these kind of things is that the companies rarely tell you it’s happening. Annoying, considering you can blog and talk about their new product.