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:
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:
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.
