Wow! The time is officially here. My final semester in the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design's BFA design program has come to an end. The past few years taught me incredible discipline, patience, and humility, and I'm proud to be alumni of such a great program. I definitely have seen tremendous growth in my design skills, and I owe it all to the awesome professors at the school who mentored me in the arts.

So, below is a recap of the work completed in Stan's class.

Final crit in college. Needed an image for my post thumbnail.

HOLY COW! My designs have made it to Canada!

The Basset Hound Rescue of Georgia referred me to The Boston Terrier and Pug Rescue of Southern Manitoba in Canada, who recently contacted me for a shirt commission. The shirt was for their annual Manitoba Basset Hound Walk, with all shirt proceeds going to the rescue, which is another 501(c)(3) organization.

The client did not have specifications for the event further other than that the event name needed to be present on the shirt. Wanting to further the illustrative directions I've explored with the past few shirt commissions I've done, I decided early on I wanted to explore character development styles. The biggest concern that I had in doing another basset shirt was how do I create another basset character that does not look like characters I developed for other clients? That was really important to me, that I did not recreate the same design for similar organizations.

After a few sketches and color schemes, I finalized the design!

While working on the various basset sketches, I realized that in order to create harmony and repetition within the design, that even though the bassets were in different poses, it was important they all had the same faces, otherwise the design would not have been as strong (in my sketches below, the running sketch of the basset has a profile of the face, which you can use as reference for what I based my decision on).

I love working on shirts for rescues! Design should always inspire and better the community!

Below is process and exploration.

     

The Basset Hound Rescue of Georgia, a non-profit in the metro-Atlanta area, commissioned me to design two fundraising shirts back-to-back, so the shirts get a combined blog! First off, to visit the BHRG's website, click here. They are a great 501-(c)(3) organization that can really use your help!

For both of the shirts, the client heavily dictated the content of the design and had a solid idea of what they wanted. For the first shirt, the client wanted a design where the bassets were doing the exact opposite of the tricks they were being commanded to do (for those who don't know, bassets are incredibly stubborn dogs and frequently march to their own tune). Since in my illustration class the power of silhouettes were heavily stressed, I wanted to make sure that the audience viewing the shirt would have no doubt in their mind about what the dog was doing, and I definitely did not want there to be a question of the dog's form structurally. I created silos for each trick based upon real-life imagery, and had to tweak/splice them together as necessary to ensure the silos appeared realistic. 

In the end, the shirt was highly successful at the fundraiser, and the bash raised almost 4 times more in funding than their original goal! I was thrilled to help the rescue raise that much money! Below is the art for the shirt, a screenshot of the fundraising website announcing shirts sold and money raised, as well as a picture of some of the adopted rescue dogs sporting the lime-green version of the shirt!

Courtesy of the BHRG Facebook page

The next shirt I design was for the rescue's annual Basset Bash event that takes place in October. The Bash is essentially an outdoor festival with activities for dogs, adoption opportunities, raffles with prizes for owners and doggies, and is a great opportunity for all the rescue dogs that have been adopted to reunite. The client provided a sketch of the design they wanted on the shirt, to which I expanded upon and gave life to. The client originally asked me if it was okay for them to use the shirt design as the official logo to go on flyers, banners, and signs as well, so to polish off the design for them, I incorporated an emblem logo element into the design, which was received with much excitement from the rescue upon presentation. 

Progress prior to emblem

Adobe Illustrator progress

Crews Middle School commissioned me again for two summer-camp design shirts: one for the Bronco Bootcamp, and the other for the Bronco Tech Camp. Because the shirts were summer camp shirts, the designs could deviate from the school's branding. I decided to experiment with various illustration styles to practice what I learned in my illustration course. With both shirts, I wanted to experiment with the bronco's form to create broncos more personable than the one that I've design in the previous two shirts.

With the tech camp shirt, I wanted to combine the idea of the Apple Geniuses with the Best Buy GeekSquad. I chose the royal-blue shirts to represent the Geniuses, and I approached the bronco's character as if he were part of the GeekSquad. With the tech shirt, I pushed myself out of my comfort zone stylistically to try to create a more mainstream styled graphic. I learned a lot from this process and how different techniques can be used to solve design problems (especially in regards to color theory, particularly with the coloring of the bronco's glasses).

With the Bronco Bootcamp shirt, the client suggested shirts that looked like army bootcamp shirts. It was important to me to stay gender-neutral with the military shirts to appeal to the female students, and I also wanted to stay away from controversial imagery or messages that could be construed as pro-violence or pro-war. I decided having the bronco stand at attention would demonstrate that the students at Crews were "present and ready to learn" in a manner that was professional and respectful. The stars and red accent harken back to 1940's era army planes and the art painted on the side.

Crews Middle provided me with the images at the camps of the students in their shirts. I love seeing the kids in action!

A huge part of design is the process of design; to be a successful designer, you have to know how to brainstorm, edit, and scrap a wide variety of ideas in order to come up with the ideal solution to a design problem. Since I started this blog after I finished my entry portfolio, I wanted to share a small portion of the design process I went through that dictated some of my final project designs.