Donkeyblog Donkeyshines is the Land of Absurd T-shirts!

August 5, 2009

Married

Filed under: Donkeyshines Announcements,Donkeyshines Origins — Tags: — Ryan Klemek @ 10:13 am

As many of you know, Vanessa and I had our big family wedding in Pittsburgh back in May. It was an amazing time for us and for our family, with tons of good food and dancing and more food. One thing we didn’t have was an officiator present with the power to make the marriage legal. While we will always think of the ceremony in Pittsburgh as our real wedding, we still needed to tie up that loose end so we could get all those benefits and tax breaks and stuff that the government likes to give married people. We decided to do something small, intimate and unique. We had our friend Jeff get ordained as a Justice of the Peace for a day, and we had a little gathering in our living room. There was a total of seven of us, and we all wore pajamas. Here’s a picture of Vanessa and I:

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Vanessa is wearing her usual monkey-in-the-bathtub pajamas, complete with the button-down top. She would later add a tiara which says “Princess for a Day”. I am wearing Super Friends bottoms and my Friends for Life t-shirt that I blogged about a few months ago. Here is Jeff, the JoP:

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Since he was the officiator, he got to wear the nightcap. It is too bad we did not have a candlestick for him to hold.  Here is another picture of the lucky couple, along with another lucky couple:

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That other couple is Jon and Loretta, who you might recognize from my Monkey and Bulldog painting. They are actually getting married in September, but I will probably not wear my pajamas to that wedding. Next, we have a photo of just the ladies who were present:

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From left to right, there’s Loretta, my sister Kim, Vanessa (you can see the tiara in this one) and my good friend Shelley.

The lil’ ceremony began with a short procession from our bedroom into the living room to music from The Mummy soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith. Jeff then had us all watch a clip of the finale from Revenge of the Nerds on Vanessa’s laptop. Jeff did not completely explain the relevance of this clip, nor did he need to. He then played a short congratulatory video made by our friend Jesse, who lives in Florida and was unable to attend the festivities. It was a parody of a Youtube video featuring a stoned Harrison Ford trying to congratulate a friend on receiving some film award. My mom, who was joining us via speaker phone could be heard laughing rancorously, although I am sure she was not familiar with the reference. After this, readings were delivered by Shelley, Jeff and Kim. Jeff chose these pieces randomly from a wedding website without first reading them himself . They were both amusing and moving. Jeff then brought the whole thing home with the standard “by the power vested in me” lines, and the deal was sealed. Vanessa and I are now able to share health insurance ! Hurray!  The seven of us then went out to celebrate at Tremont 647 in Boston’s South End. We had ribs and tater tots, and lobster mac and cheese. It was the perfect mini reception to our pajama wedding. While we will always think of May 24th in Pittsburgh as the day we were married, our little party in the living room will always have special meaning for us. Good stuff.

July 29, 2009

Tales from the San Diego ComiCon

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , — Ryan Klemek @ 1:57 pm

Kaiju has had a booth at the San Diego Comicon for many years now, but this year we finally did a live show for our fans. All things considered it was an extremely successful adventure.  We monsters arrived Friday afternoon, having already missed a day of the convention. Most of us were tired and hungry and didn’t really want to deal with the crowds and commotion. After a $17 burger at the Hard Rock (part of our hotel), I was the only one willing to get out there onto the floor. About an hour is all I had to walk around and explore. 20 minutes of that, I was trapped in the Hollywood section, unable to move through a sea of Boba Fetts and Storm Troopers and people taking their pictures. I didn’t mind, as the costumes were really impressive. Soon it was time for me to return to the Kaiju booth and promote the show.

pedrolouden

We eventually had some good Mexican food, and hung out for a while. Upon returning to the Hard Rock it was celebrity siting time. Apparently, Stan Lee was giving some sort of talk, and folks like Seth Green were in line to get in. At least I think they were in line, it was hard to tell what was going on. I was a party popper and just went to bed. We had a show to do the next day, and there was the jet lag and stuff. There more celebrity encounters, including a fight outside of Ron Jeremy’s room which happened to be right next door to one of ours. I missed most of this, as I was either wandering around San Diego, or napping. Or eating. I wish I could have spent more time at the Con itself, but we didn’t have enough badges for everyone and they were hard to track down. I also didn’t want to get stuck handing out show post cards for hours either. Speaking of postcards, I think Louden Noxious handed one to Alice Copper, but I don’t think he came to the show.

The show itself was the most satisfying part of the trip for me. It went down in this big poorly ventilated former Wonder Bread warehouse, appropriately called Wonderhaus. It was big and poorly-ventilated. The ring was set up by noon, and we were all in there going over our matches, getting a feel for things. As usual, they fed us way too close to showtime, but we were greatful to be fed at all. The rest, you need to see for yourself. Eventually, Kaiju will release a bootleg DVD of the entire show. Until then, we’ll have to settle for fan footage that shows up on YouTube.

July 28, 2009

Barrel of Donkeys: New Uneetee Submission

Filed under: Donkeyshines Announcements — Tags: , — Ryan Klemek @ 9:31 am

It took many weeks, but Uneetee has finally put up my Barrel of Donkeys design for voting. Check it out.

barreldonkeysuni

I don’t usually wear yellow shirts, but I thought the yellow sort of worked with this design. It goes with the banana, because bananas are also yellow. If you like it, go vote. If not, then you can at least help me out by not voting for anyone else’s designs! Ha, just kidding. I actually voted for some other designs, too. I like neat t-shirts, whether or not I happen to have made them myself. Although, I do sorta like the ones I make.

July 22, 2009

Robot Penguin Hoodies- Coming Soon

Filed under: Donkeyshines Announcements — Tags: , , , — Ryan Klemek @ 12:24 pm

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The most popular Donkeyshines T-shirt is soon to be a full-zip hoodie as well. Living in the northeast USA, a person can only really show off a t-shirt for about 2 months out of the year. If you live here and you want people to know how you feel about penguins and their robot friends, you need to display it on something with sleeves and, preferably, a hood! I’m going to do an extremely limited run of about 100 unisex style fleeces. I’m going to use stylish Continental blanks. I’m going to sell them at redonkulously low prices, by high-end hoodie standards. Something in the ballpark of $35!

Note: When I initially decided to call this company Donkeyshines, I promised myself I would never use the word “redonkulous” to describe my products. That was a promise I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep forever. But here it is a year and a half after I launched, and I’m using the word for the very first time!

July 14, 2009

Happy Bastille Day!!

Filed under: Artwork,Donkeyshines Announcements — Tags: , , , — Ryan Klemek @ 8:16 am

Here is an illustration I made for a Bastille Day card a couple years ago:

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In case it isn’t clear, that’s Zombie King Louis XVI and Zombie Marie Antoinette enjoying some champagne and a Bastille Day fireworks celebration. They’re such good sports about that whole execution thing. Vive La Revolution!

July 7, 2009

Story Premises

Filed under: Story Premises — Tags: — Ryan Klemek @ 1:56 pm

As I mentioned in my last post, when my wife and I were first getting to know each other, we planned on working on a fictional story together. Before we decided to tackle the Snowflake saga, we played around with some other story ideas. I recently found that list of abandoned story concepts, and actually think they are much more entertaining as fragments. Here are some of my favorites:

  1. A were-chimpanzee is terrorizing a small Nebraskan town – stealing bananas from supermarkets, gobbling up little children at night, etc. A world-famous hunter is brought in to kill it, but he eventually learns that the were-chimpanzee is actually his long-lost brother. To further complicate matters, the brother takes a liking to the hunter’s wife and turns her into a were-chimpanzee also. The entire state of Nebraska is in mortal danger of being overrun by demon chimps unless the hunter does something to stop them..
  2. A man falls into a swamp down in the Florida Everglades. Hungry gators approach, but when they get close, they suddenly turn around and swim quickly away. Why are the gators afraid of him? The man desperately tries to find out, but will his curiosity be his undoing?
  3. A man tries to pilot a helicopter through a McDonald’s drive-through. A couple of heads get chopped off
  4. A dentist has a nervous breakdown and starts giving everyone in town vampire-like fangs. The people are too polite to complain, so tourists passing through are afraid they are in Vampire Town (which is actually 20 miles south of this town)
  5. A girl actually befriends a diamond because of the cultural stereotype. Turns out the diamond was just using her cuz she had a car. Did I mention the diamond was from outer space and can talk?
  6. Mobsters just can’t seem to knock off this one squealer. They’ve tried everything: shooting him in the head, cementing his feet and throwing him into the river, putting an ignition-triggered bomb in his car, lighting him on fire…various coincidences allow for the squealer to pull through each time. It turns out, a rival mob family keeps saving this guy to make the other mobsters believe he is Lazarus.
  7. Scandal breaks out in the Catholic Church when a mysterious document surfaces which suggests that St. Patrick was murdered by leprechauns.
  8. A mad scientist becomes the laughing stock of the mad scientist community when the spider that he enlarged to be 1,000,000 x its normal size can’t even walk due to the physics involved.
  9. A man gets stranded on a desert island with his ex-wife, his 5th grade math teacher, a depressed clown, a flesh-eating squirrel, and 438 cans of tomato soup.
  10. A ghost learns of a way to come back to corporeal life but to do so, he must track down all of the organs he donated from the various recipients and return then to his body. He faces two challenges. First of all, the spell only works if he takes his organs without doing permanent damage to the recipients. in other words, he has to find them new organs. The other challenge is that he can not really move solid things, so he needs to learn how to possess people. When he possesses a nurse in a morgue, he ends up falling in love with her.
  11. Research indicates that teleportation is theoretically possible. However, matter isn’t actually transmitted, it is copied. On one end, an object is scanned and the information is transmitted. This process actually destroys the original object. On the other end, the object is recreated. A scientist is able to make a machine to do this, and decides to be the guinea pig. However the copy of him on the other side that materializes is a completely soulless thing…who happens to be nicer, smarter, better at sports and overall more fun. This is all fine and good until he starts to feel badly for is former self and he has an identity crisis.
  12. A cat burglar suddenly loses her game when she comes down with chronic hiccups.Her friends tell her she should retire, but she decides to make on last score. She knows she can make millions on eBay by selling a heavily guarded secret recipe for chicken gumbo. The only problem is that the chef is married to the doctor that is working to cure her hiccups. In addition to the logistic difficulties of the job, she has a moral crisis. How can she steal from someone who is trying to help her?

I think I might start coming up with more premises like these. It is really fun. Especially if you are a lazy story-teller who doesn’t have the wherewithal to work past the initial spark of inspiration!

July 1, 2009

Snowflake

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , , , — Ryan Klemek @ 2:16 pm

While I am not really happy with how it’s coming so far, I thought I would post the progress of my new experiment:

snowflakeprogress

Yes, what you are looking at is an anthropomorphic white tiger, holding a rose, grieving at the grave of  a deceased loved-one. There is actually a complicated back-story which I’ve played around with over a period of about 10 years. It originally began as the story of a werewolf who attacked a lion at a zoo, only to be eaten by the lion. But since werewolves can only be killed by silver bullets, its essence combined with the lion to make a lion/werewolf. Well, by day he was a lion/human, and then became a lion/wolfman during a full moon. The first incarnation of this tale was a short story I turned in as an assignment for a creative writing class. That draft was a really off-the-wall narrative with no grounding or internally consistent reality. The story was not well received, nor should it have been. Prose is not my expertise, and I was pretty lazy about trying to make it cohesive. Years later, I tried to revisit the story in graphic novel form, changing the main protagonist from a lion to a white tiger because they were cooler and more fun to draw. Here’s a conceptual painting that I thought I might use for the cover:

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Aside from this painting, I never got around to doing more than a couple sketches for the first and second. I can’t explain why I stopped working on it, but perhaps it seemed to much of a big project to write a graphic novel at the time. I never let it go completely, though, if for no other reason than that I hate not finishing things. When I met my (eventual) wife, my past writer aspirations came up during my courtship of her. We decided we would finish the story together, and fleshed out some of the plot. The name Snowflake comes from one of our brainstorming sessions. You see, the zoo held a promotional contest for third-graders to choose a name for the newly arrived white tiger. Anyway, there are more details regarding his past, his motivation, and who it was he is visiting at the grave. Well, I am not getting into any of that.  It all seems like a lot of information to communicate on a t-shirt, doesn’t it? As I mentioned in my last post, the point of my new experiment is to tell a partial story with a single graphic, and have both the wearer of the shirt and everyone who sees it fill in the rest using their imaginations. So far I am not digging this image, as something about this style just doesn’t feel right. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes over the next couple of days. I may start over, and I may put this story away for another bunch of years until I get more inspiration.

June 22, 2009

New Concept for T-shirts

Filed under: Artwork,Donkeyshines Origins — Tags: , , — Ryan Klemek @ 2:05 pm

On Sunday I was able to work on the painting for about 37 minutes, and there wasn’t enough of a difference to bother posting the progress. Hopefully I’ll be able to finally finish it once I am moved and settled into my new apartment. In the mean time, I think I’ll be able to work on some T-shirt designs. This one is based on one of my old greeting card designs:

barrelofdonkeydraft

It is different than the usual Donkeyshines one-color designs, so I might submit it first to Uneetee and see how well it does there. I am working on a new style which will fit with a new concept I’m developing. The current Donkeyshines line mostly draws inspiration from two places: 1) 1980’s toy logos, and  2) the coat-of-arms logos worn by the people of Krypton in the 1979 Superman movie. I really do like the simple, single-color designs, and don’t plan on discontinuing this theme any time soon. But I also want to work on this other idea I have rattling around in my brain. I have always been fascinated by the idea of giving people part of a story and having them fill in the rest with their imagination. That is, I give people an image of a scene with lots of unexplained details, and they need to figure out what is going on. Sometimes I have something specific in mind, and sometimes there is room for individual interpretation. This is what I did with my greeting card illustrations, and in fact I plan to go back to more of them for t-shirt ideas. The  Barrel of Donkeys is a good place to start, I think, because it is still a pretty simple concept, while at the same time suggesting a full story. It could be sort of a bridge between my two styles. Eventually I want to get into more complicated scenes such as this one:

officevdaysurprise

I still want to limit the designs to 5 or 6 colors, which is going to be challenging. I am expecting it will take me some time to come up with a style I like. I am not satisfied with the Barrel of Donkeys yet. I’m not sure what it needs or what it is missing, but it’s just not quite “right”. I will post my progress , so stay tuned n’ stuff.

June 16, 2009

Painting Progress

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , — Ryan Klemek @ 1:24 pm

It has been a crazy month or so. I got married, found an apartment, began moving, and took on a freelance project, all while maintaining my capoeira training and obsessive workout regimen. While it has all been very exciting, I have found that, during all this, I have had very little time to work on my current painting- The Black Cats t-shirt models. I started this in mid-May, and here is all I’ve done so far:

blackcatpaint1

I am liking how its coming out, which is a good thing. When I don’t like how a painting is looking, then I don’t have  fun working on it. When I am not having fun, then it is extremely difficult to stay motivated.  As it is, my painting endurance is lagging these days. That means, even when I have the time, I can only sit and paint for about an hour before getting distracted and/or mentally drained. The part of my brain responsible for attention span needs exercise just like the rest of my body, and it hasn’t been getting it. Having so many things going on at once is sort of an excuse not to be focused. I secretly love having an excuse not to focus, and I find it difficult to fight this urge. I’ve been telling myself that once I am in my new  apartment, I will be able to get back into this painting. It is all about momentum. Eventually, I hope I reach a point where I don’t want to wash my brushes after 3 strokes of paint have been applied. I bought a new Bob-o-pedic bed, so maybe I’ll start getting better sleep. I hear sleep is good for helping you concentrate and stuff.

June 8, 2009

Donkeyshines Anniversary

Filed under: Donkeyshines Announcements — Tags: , — Ryan Klemek @ 1:24 pm

As I mentioned last week, it has been about a year since Donkeyshines launched, and so it is time for some reflection. Sales have been growing slowly, but steadily, and I have high hopes for the future. One thing I am proud of is that I have made few compromises to my artistic vision. I’m not against letting trends inform my creative process, but I don’t want to lose site of why got into T-shirt design in the first place. I make shirts because I like to wear them. I know if a design is ready to print when I  feel excited about seeing it on my very own torso. I am aware that I don’t have mainstream tastes, but I always felt that there had to be at least SOME people out there who are amused by the same things that I am. The trick is finding those people, as it is a relatively small group who  shares that specific aesthetic. In the end, I like having a small, dedicated following. It makes it easier to interact with people. I answer every e-mail I receive directly, and have even been known to create personal coupons for loyal customers. Today, though, I have created a coupon for everyone. To celebrate Donkeyshines’ First Anniversary, I am giving everyone 35% off ALL orders with coupon code: donkey35. For those that don’t like doing arithmetic, that means you can get any of my super-soft bamboo shirts regularly priced at $24.99 for $16.24! That’s less than my Shirt of the Week price! This coupon is good for the rest of June, but I will stop advertising it after a week. Enjoy.

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