What Would Macgyver Do?
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Gingerbread Nightmares
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Calling Home
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The War against Work
I had always wanted to do a paper dart design, I played around with this for a while trying to find a good mix of aircraft carrier and desktop layout – I think this was probably version 3 0r 4. I like the idea of people seeing the carrier first, then seeing the desktop elements/darts when you look a bit closer, I tried it using colour but the carrier concept was lost, so it was important to stick to the grey palette.
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Swiss Army
I thought about this idea on a rainy sunday morning while I was making a coffee. (there was a swiss army knife in my kitchen) by lunchtime this was finished except for the soldier. the original design just had an open manhole but after leaving it for a day I added the little guy and sent it in. One of those ones you dont have to think too hard about thats why I think it was pretty easy to resolve the design, it’s one my favourites too.
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Prehistoric Freak
This is another one of those designs that completely changed over the course of concepting it. Originally it was a purple t rex eating children, which I like but this came to me as a better solution for the parody. I like the thought of these cartoon/puppet creatures we’ve grown up with having skeletons etc. and because of the dinosaur theme linking it to a museum setting seemed like the obvious thing to do.
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Potato Head is Dead
This just seemed like a simple, easily understood concept to me. I like to try to add the ingredients but let the person looking at the shirt fill in the blanks. This still remains one of my favourites. This was a Threadless 12 Month Club shirt so don’t think it will ever be up for sale again. Hope that’s not the case.
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Paperboy
This is definitely one that went through a few versions over the space of about 18 months. Basically the idea was about having a paperboy made of paper and originally it was made out of newspaper covered in text. That just made for a confusing design and was hard to understand what was going on. I redrew it quite quickly and until recently I wasn’t sure if this could actually work out of an A4 sheet. You can download a pdf of it off my site and make it too.
The design available at Threadless
Paper Cranes
Paper things are a reoccuring theme in my designs. I had a go at a karate kid design early on here but again it just seemed like a really simple and obvious concept that would work well on a shirt
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Legendary Design Failure
The trojan horse is fairly fertile ground for a design ideas. This one originally started as a trojan zebra, which over the course of an afternoon became a trojan seahorse. the soldiers were added right at the end but were required to add scale which I think was needed to more closely link it to the trojan horse
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Homework Evidence
Don’t really need to say much about this design, just one of those obvious themes that I hadnt thought about before but beacuse its so obvious thats why it works I guess. It was just important that the colour palette stayed as close to xray film as possible. A suggestion was made in the comments about using luminous ink with this which I think could add to the theme.
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Go Japan!
This was where it all began for me. It was around the time of the olympics in 2004 and I was watching the sprinting events, Im not really sure where the sumo idea came from but I liked the idea of the big guy running his heart out in amongst the finely tuned athletes! This was back in the day when only 4 colours were available. I subbed the design on grey but threadless printed it on red and added the extra colour to the print, which I think was a good choice!
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GE Salmon
This is another one where I had an idea and a setting (Salmon eating Bear) but had to go through a couple of different versions before I got to this. Originally a huge salmon was in a pool behind the bear, but the bear was too small, then there was a waterfall infront of the bear, with pirahna like salmon jumping all over the bear, but that seemed a bit confusing. So I got to this in the end, Simplicity! – I think the colours work really well on this shirt colour.
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Defend the Kingdom
This one just started with a sandcastle, I thought it was a good theme to start with but wasnt sure what to add to it. First I added the bucket which instantly strengthened the sandcastle theme. then after drawing the beach ball as a seperate element it just seemed like an obvious idea to have archers and a joust weilding knight trying to pop it. Just one of those designs that fell into place as I drew it
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Mob Musicians
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Cowboys and Indians
I had always wanted to create this design, but up until select with 8 colours available I had never worked out a way to make the colours work for animals, people and shadows. Its definitely one of my favourite designs and one I spent a bit more time than ussual. The elephant grabbing the horses tail was a last minute change, but I think it makes the design and helps bring the design elements together. Until then I had struggled with trying to tie everything togther, this was the original reason for the large sunset in the background
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Happy Thoughts
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