If at first you don't succeed..

Been very busy over the last few days. Derby 185 spawned a slew of ideas, and so I spent all day Friday slogging away at my initial design below.

Tertiary tea party, complete with Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, and a Thrinaxodon in a teapot.
This may be a design worth revisiting and printing later. 

Lo and behold, as the derby started accepting submissions it was run over with Tyrannosaurs, ceratopsians, and tea-themed entries. Curses! Well, onto another.

My first derby design was very simple and minimalist, and while it garnered a lot of attention, it seems the strong preference for the community is for very detailed designs. So-- I set about experimenting with halftones.

First, an initial sketch done in Painter (which I'm quickly warming up to).

Then, colors roughed out. Since I wanted the tengu to emerge from the shadows
I played around with only pulling out the highlights

Sigh, and then onto halftones and a final design. I'm really not happy with how the design came out, but I've learned a lot-- and you never know what fantastic tips the shirt.woot community might have.

Vote here!

In short, I think next time around I'm going to take a slightly different path. I always get these really grandiose, intricate design ideas that I just don't have the skills to implement. So, next time I'll focus on short, simple cell shaded designs (black outline, shirt color shadow/dark ink shadow, base color). Since voting is per person and not per day there's no incentive to get designs out ASAP-- so Thursday night will be spent churning out thumbnails and color keys for potential designs. It's better to do something simple well than to try something really dynamic and fail miserably. n__n;;