Behind the Scenes of A New Beginning

There was a lot of thought put into the “A New Beginning” shirt. I knew that the rebirth of Sotare had to be special. At the same time, I knew the rebirth was going to start off small and grow slowly. The first shirt needed to encompass everything the brand stood for, but not in a boring way. It had to be something intriguing, something captivating, something that held attention.

The original idea was to have a picture of Joey sitting on top of a mountain, looking over a valley of creatures, with UFOs in the air, the Washington Monument in the background, and more. The picture would be cropped to the shape of the Leaping Kangaroo logo. I realized that making the picture fit inside the kangaroo logo would detract from detail and create a frustrating image, so that idea was abandoned.

Then the idea come to create icons for the future Sotare releases, and arrange the icons to create the Leaping Kangaroo. This took a few hours to complete. First off, I took the icons and turned them into a font called Sotare Webdings, this way I had scalable versions of each icon.

Then was the painstaking process of arranging, scaling, and rotating all the icons in a fashion that would create the Leaping Kangaroo. I kept a hidden layer of the kangaroo outline so that I could check the progress from time to time.

After a few days, the design was basically finished. Once finished it was time to add color to all the icons. I kept things in a limited color pallet, the basic Sotare pink and blue, and then some green to make things less monotonous.

Then to prep for printing the design was flattened into three layers- one layer for each color. After this I emailed the design to my printer and a few weeks later had a box of rad shirts at my doorstep!

Any questions on the design process? Any way I can give you tips? Hit up the comments or shoot me an email!

Thanks,

Adrian