TOIL Collection Process

 As if I haven't got enough on my plate, but here it is, my stupid idea to start my own clothing company. I've worked on heaps of different things for bands, artists etc so I thought it was high time to do something for myself, the way I want to do it. After being disillusioned with the current state of 'street' wear, seeing the same boring logo of cliche gimmick I'm getting off my ass and making shirts that I would want to wear, something for everyone, you don't have to be part of a scene or into a specific band's music to wear it, it's for anyone who can dig it.

So to start off I thought i'd show some of my influences and process as to how I've gone about designing the first collection TOIL.

The original idea was to have the collection based on a theme and everything spring off that, each collection would have a main design, then a smaller design and possibly a logo for each collection. I like to keep things together like that, and to have ideas be informed by a uniform idea, so I'm not just picking random things out of the air to draw and also so that what I'm doing will hopefully standout in some way. I have a few other little ideas I'm still thinking about putting into practice, but that will have to wait until I've got more of the logistics sorted out.

I wanted to have a theme that could be personified, to make it almost like a pin-up style illustration focused on a single figure, with everything relating to the theme tying into the overall composition. It would help to give the designs across different collections a uniform approach and something that could also help to distinguish my stuff from the crowd and a way to easily tell it's a FWTBT design.

Since this was to be the first collection I thought the theme should be 'Emergence', much like I am doing right now, an emerging artist busting out into the sea of lameness, or whatever. It proved a hard concept to illustrate from, I could think of a few things that seemed relevant, flowers and cocoons were pretty standard, then I moved onto mummies in tombs and sea monsters emerging from black lagoons. But they all seemed to obvious and cheesy, I didn't want put all this effort into something that would make me cringe at the sight of it. You can see a few of the mummy sketches below, most of the others aren't worth seeing, trust me.

I finally decided to change the theme and I actually started to get excited again, the theme would now be 'Toil' something I will be doing a lot of I am to get this thing off the ground. I wanted to show some kind of Frazetta inspired warrior woman, using elements alluding to work in different ways. She carries a grim reaper like scythe much like death itself uses to harvest souls and she stands in a field of wheat, reaping from the land what she has sewn. She also wears the spoils of her kills, skulls and bones, as well as sporting the scars and injuries a warrior would face in the line of battle in a Hyborian age.

Below you can see the photo (found somewhere in the vastness of the internet, if i knew the details of the model or photographer I would post em) I used as a reference, once I had abandoned my idea of always keeping the entire figure in shot I embraced more realistic poses to help give the design some life. I changed her stance a little bit to make it slightly more dynamic with some exaggerated contraposto (see I learned something at art school!) and then keep tracing off the sketch to preserve the lines.

This is getting waaaaaaaaay to long so I'll post some more steez about my process and some stuff about my influences and whatever else I feel like.

Cheers
Roh