One thing that Donkeyshines does differently than other t-shirt companies is uses paintings of models wearing the shirts rather than the usual photographs. There are several reasons why I wanted to do this. First of all, I wanted to do all of the creative work for this venture myself, and I didn’t want to bring in someone else to do the pictures. I don’t have a great camera, and am not a very good photographer, but I had recently done a painting of my girlfriend Vanessa that came out pretty well. She happened to be wearing one of my t-shirts, so it gave me the idea to do all of my product pictures in this way. I had also wanted there to be a mysterious, fantastic feeling to my site, and felt paintings would be the ideal way to express this. Vanessa happens to look pretty good in my shirts, and I thought it would be kind of a nice tribute to her if I made her the sole model for the women’s shirts. This is her in her favorite, the Gorilla and Duck t-shirt.
Since I use my girlfriend for the women’s shirts, it just made sense for me to use myself for the men’s shirts:
As you can see, I’m not working from the greatest photos. This is deliberate, as I want the painting to have a life of it’s own, and less detail in the photos forces me to be more creative. If the painting is going to look too much like a photo, then you might as well just use a photo. For the Robot Penguin design, I wanted the models to look like they were made of ice because I thought it fit with the arctic theme. I do try for a certain level of realism, but I don’t worry too much about facial likeness. Especially since I’m using the same two models for every painting. The one important thing I make sure to capture is the fit of the shirt and placement of the image so that customers know what they are getting when they buy one. I realize that even seeing a photo of one person wearing a shirt doesn’t tell you that much about how it will look on you, and I therefore think the painting gives you just as much information. In the future, I want to ad a gallery page to this site featuring photos sent in by customers of themselves modeling the shirts. Then you’ll be able to see a variety of different people in different situations wearing different sized shirts.
