Hello once again all you fine collaboration journeymen and women, it's time for yet another way-too-lengthy addition of "Evan has a goofy concept, an artist draws something amazing, Evan adds some more ideas, they draw something even more amazing and then it's subbed" AKA "How We Collaborate"!

As with every one of these collaboration dissections, it'll start with the finished submission up top and then show the process from first to final draft, bringing the whole project full circle not unlike a blogging version of Fight Club...without the awesome soundtrack and Brad Pitt sweatily screaming out to his space monkeys, "YOU ARE NOT YOUR T-SHIRT!" Well, maybe we're all like 15 percent t-shirt.






Don Pak aka Pakpandir has impressed the living bejesus out of me, bursting onto the Threadless hemisphere with both hilarious concepts and gorgeously detailed single color masterworks that make biblical movie epics and Heavy Metal magazine images forget their sinful differences and shake hands to make our eyes ascend to shirt heaven.

Okay, no more overtly wordy paragraphs from me, just unintentionally wordy ones from now on!

The original concept:

Bad Reception Rainbow: Ever notice how the test bars on a television kind of look like a tiny rainbow? No? Well, go on over to tv land at 4 in the morning sometime and check it out or just take my word for it. Anywho, I'd love to make a sub where a nice view is being shown, from the extreme bottom of the tee rising up there would be a scenic forest, possibly a river running through it that might empty out into a sea or big body of water, and a dazzling sunset going down or coming up from behind the water, possibly with some half tone rays coming up. Over top of this reaching pretty high on the shirt would be a glorious rainbow, but this rainbow would be made out of stacked television sets, somehow stacked on top of the other and in a slant of a rainbow to the other side. Everything else on the shirt would be in olde-timey black and white colors. Even the half tones of the sun coming up or down would be in various grays. We might want to make a few trees in the scenery look like power lines, and possibly some flowers in the foreground of the nature scene would be poking up like rabbit ears on an old-time television.

Don's first ideas and sketches on the concept, which came to me faster than the speed of light, so like, light lite:









Amazing progress already just in Don's mind alone of how to pull the concept even further! All of these drawings got my mind reeling and I suggested (from here on in I'll italicize the ideas I suggested that actually got implemented into the final project for ease of reading reference) we put the bunny ears of a TV on a real rabbit, a mechanical frog saying "ribbit" in zeroes and ones, wires and metals just underneath the dirt of the natural grass, having the rays coming out of the sun turn into power lines for the power towers aka iron pine trees, turning the daffodil satellite pattern into a bigger bush for the foreground, combining natural fauna on top of television antennae to have flowers blooming out of the ends of it, making the sun more mechanical, the water coming out of the television could be cables that eventually turn into a stream that meets the ocean in the background, a robot boy/girl in the scene interacting with the environment, and other environmental pieces such as a run-down schoolbus being overtaken by nature and returning to it.

Don returned that email with this as the first sentence:

I was just ---$$CRITICAL PUNCHED$$----- in the face by a wall of text!

Hehehe, he's a funny dude. After Don digested all that random ideaness, we talked about taking the robot boy/girl concept one step further and turning it into a synthetic world that looks natural at first glance but is completely synthetic, as if the robot is trying to recreate a picture from long ago that no one in the robot's future time has ever seen outside of past picture relics, with Don talking about Blade Runner/Tron influences for the idea.

I loved his thoughts on tossing another layer on top of the concept, and Don ran with it for the next sketch:



Blown away now by the leap of awesome the project had taken, I suggested moving the robot to the left side of the piece so more attention could be paid to him as well as getting the concept of the picture he is holding in his hand more in focus and grander, altering the robot's appearance to a more "The Day The Earth Stood Still" styled robot, having a pile of tools, nuts, bolts and etc next to the robot to make sure people understood that the robot had constructed this scene, having some green rolling hills that on closer inspection would actually be a bunch of green glass & plastic bottles and cans piled high on top of one another, having the robot also use paint and swiping the ground around him to make it green like the grass in the picture, making metal birds poke out on sticks taped onto the television rainbow in perspective to the scene to look as thought they are flying away (this one came partially to fruition, but more on that later), and a smoke or several smoke machines to pump the clouds up into the air.

Don's next version:



There was an alternate robot Don drew for the scene as well:



Don asked me which robot I liked more, and I asked him if we could combine the face and body of the second robot and merge it with the head of the original, which Don agreed with.







So much advancement in such a short time by Don, I was awe(yeah!)struck! Another round of suggestions came, such as taking the central sun ray line out of the piece, the sun being a bunch of cogs and gears that look like the inside of a watch, with the larger outer one turning one way and the smaller inner ones turning the other, taking the bunny ears off the tv since it was redundant and taking away one of the robot bunnies, hanging the metal birds off the support beam just below the rainbow on strings like a diorama and adding them to the robot's photo, as well as adding some smoke machines on the power lines.

Don's next update:



Discussed this time was changing the bottles to look a bit more like they are piled on top of one another, with less detail in the background and a few bigger ones in the front to make the concept easier to understand when giving it a quick viewing. I also sent a couple pictures to Don of origami flower styles:



At this point the ordeal of coming up with the perfect name for this piece started. Don agreed with me that the original title "Bad Reception Rainbow" wasn't a good fit for the shape the concept had now taken on, plus it seemed a bit negative. As much as I brainstormed, I couldn't figure out an appropriate title for the design, which is usually something I have from the very beginning! As Don worked furiously away on the next version of the design, I had numerous head-bashing-against-the-wall sessions trying to come up with a name that would pull all the ideas in it together.



Don added a lot more flowers in the front than he was originally going to at the request of his girlfriend, who said it made the scene look a lot prettier, and she was certainly right about that so big props and thanks to her for her awesome insight!

At this point Don also sent me lots of pictures of the kind of coloring style he wanted, which was a bit steampunk-ish but a tad more realistic. Don tried a few color combos out (including the original concept's idea of having black and white for a lot of the scene and only bits and pieces such as the rainbow, sun rays, bottle green grass and picture in color), but found the baby blue tee and colorful background coming up against the cold, scarcely colored foreground was a nice contrast between the robot's imagined world and the reality he is living in now looks like:





Don was really hitting all kinds of nails on their heads at this point, and my only suggestion was to give a bit more detail still to the bottles in the background, making them pop out a bit more in back and having the idea a bit more clear in the front. Always one to go the extra mile no matter how many revisions he has done, Don added a bunch of broken bottles in the front and made the background additionally jagged twice more to further refine the concept, but doing so in a way that did not detract from that first glance at the scene, which made it seem like the colorful, warm world was completely natural when in fact it was the furthest away from that as one could get.

Oh, and still no fucking title had come to mind. Crap, it's almost done!

Don added some dark clouds above the rainbow scene to further give the sense of desolation and drabness around the beautiful, happy scene that the robot has constructed.



At long last after an exhaustive two week process with Don drawing night and day into another night which turned into yet another day, the final piece with the corrected bottle background and foreground:





Don went ahead and started with the presentation, which I asked him if we could have the sub fade in on just the sun in the center of the design, and then suddenly the sun's rays would come into the frame and burst into a flash of light to the main image, which Don took to another level all the while learning some new html skills practically overnight!

All that was left was the piece of the submission puzzle which wasn't even going to be something seen on the t-shirt: the title! A few that came to my head which i wasn't very happy with and Don wasn't too enthused either:

A Warm Reception
Warmer Receptions
Back To Nature
The Earth Is Beautiful Again

Don repeatedly gave me other key words to work with such as Receptors, Senses, etc, but nothing seemed to fit the theme while being all-encompassing and sound very eye-catching at the same time.

A night later I was at a friend's house who I showed the picture to, who suggested we brainstorm words and write them down to see what sparks. After a half-hour of word call role playing, my friend suggested the word "genesis" which intrigued me greatly. We looked up on a thesaurus program other words for genesis and "Renaissance" came up, which also means "rebirth". I looked back at the other words we had written down and as much as I didn't want to include the word "robot" in the title, "The Robot's Renaissance" FINALLY clicked together to solve our title problem!

It really hit upon the innovation of the human's first Renaissance art period as well as the "rebirth" to a world that was never known and creating a scene from the very things that helped destroy its natural beauty seemed to be fused into that one simple phrase! Thanks so much to Scott Pollock for suggesting the word brainstorm and saving me from any further head-bashing bruises.

So here we are again, with some additional technical help from Santo76, we really appreciated it good buddy!:






I used too many words again, didn't I? Thanks so much for reading and thanks a million and one to Pakpandir aka Don for riding with me on this amazing collaboration journey!

Whelp, here I am again.

I tried to stay away from the stuff, honest to god I did, but I could only last a mere four incredibly long days without going back on the slogan sauce. Let's face it, it's become a habit that I need to get a fix of every day now, even though I've been doing it daily for so long now that I need at least 2-4 of them a day to feel I made an accomplishment. You have to keep upping the amount to get the same high, but no matter, I'm knocking on the crack house (I mean, fun house) doors and I'm not leaving for another year! Will I be able to make it? Only my brain knows for sure, but I'd appreciate all the encouragement I can get before anyone stages a slogan intervention! And away we go.............

I ALSO MAKE IDEAS COME TO LIFE WITH SPLENDID ARTISTS IN THE FORM OF A COLLAB!


With Pakpandir:




Year Second Started On October 29th, 2000 of 9...


10/29
-Atoms Split When Their Relationships Are Going Nowhere.
-Getting A Good Education Is So Old-School.
-Give Me A Dollar And I'll Tell You A Great Way To Make Money.

10/30
-All Of The Funniest T-Shirts Weren't On Sale.
-I Assume All Bearded Men With Walking Sticks Are Wizards.
-The Only Vacation I Can Afford Is Changing Exotic Desktop Images.

10/31
-I Eat Three Square Meals A Day Because Other Shapes Taste Funny.
-Old Photographs Don't Die, They Just Fade Away.
-Attention Muggers: Person Wearing This Shirt Has $5 Or Less.

11/1
-My Mind: Open 24 Hours With Drive-Thru.
-Daylight Savings Is The Lamest Way To Time Travel.
-Sleepwalkers Are Just One Brain-Craving Away From Being Zombies.

11/2
-Kitchen Sinks Are Always Left Out Of The Best Fights.
-Gravity: The Force Is Strong With This One.
-I Just Gave You A Mind-Five.

11/3
-My Recent Home Improvement Was Zombie-Proofing The Windows.
-It's Pretty Easy To Pull The Wool Over A Sheep's Eyes.
-The Students of Ghost High Have Lots Of School Spirits.

11/4
-Music Notes Make So Much Noise When Taking Them.
-The Miss Universe Pageant Is Fixed, I Never See An Alien Win.

11/5
-Nowadays, Ghosts Only Haunt If There's A TV Crew Present.
-My Non-Verbal Communication Skills Seem To Be Working.

11/6
-Youtube Killed The TV Star.
-A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, A Frame Only An Ellipses.

11/7
-Cucumbers Tend To Lose Their Cool When Being Eaten.
-I Never Use A Compass Because I Don't Take Direction Well.

What a cool fucking idea! Some dude is putting together an entire version of Star Wars splitting the entire movie into 15 second sequences that anyone can recreate any way they wish! You can claim up to three pieces of the movie, I'm seriously thinking about grabbing a shitty camera and some shitty props with some shitty acting friends and doing it! I thought some animation gurus here would wanna get in on the 15 second action as well, can't wait to see the whole movie!

http://www.starwarsuncut.com/


Trailer:

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Like, delete them forever without going to each and every one and it saying "do you wish to delete this forever" and you going "i just fucking told you i did" and then it gets deleted forever even though you can actually find it again and bring it back.

Cause I ain't doing that for the 4,000 or so slogans I have festering in a rejected word pile that make visiting my slogan page to vote for something blowing up a person's computer 9 3/4ths out of 10 times.

HELP ME SLOGAN PEOPLE, YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE!





I also found this awesome tumbling video to show you I appreciate your future solving of this very important problem.

I remember a while back Liz Phair talking about her favorite music and "if it doesn't make a movie in my head, it doesn't interest me."

Which leads me to believe some people see images and scenes while listening to music, almost like their own video or Fantasia segment.

When i listen to music like something with lots of guitars and bass and electronic squeaks and squiggles, I usually picture the singer's voice kind of loosely floating above all the other music and dive-bombing into the picture when the singer gets very intense, instruments actually playing out their pieces with the sound bouncing around keeping up with the chord changes, visualize the bass line or rhythm, and when the music gets louder and louder I see different colored energy leaping out of my brain like a really brightly-layered music player. This is probably why electronic music (Chemical Brothers, Underworld) and electronic pop (Postal Service, Passion Pit) is one of my favorite genres.

Which leads me to wonder, what do you visualize when you listen to music?

Here's a few I think are even more amazing than the others, give em a high vote and comment won't you?




























You want more you say? ME TOO! WOOHOO!







And.....a little more subby goodness!
























Thank you all for so much recent mind's eye candy!

Hey all!

So, in the spirit of DFD's/ilovedoodle's immaculate collab and blog for the making of Whale Rider together, I have decided to jettison my usual million word march style on collaboration blogs to make four as-mini-as-possible versions of how four recent collabs went from big dreams to actually beautiful lines of things. I'm already writing too much here, so onward we go!


With MichaelBisparulz:



With bennyd302:



With Laser Bread:



With buko:






First Up:




The idea:

Piggybacks And Chicken Fights: This would take place in a barn scene, with possibly the traditional silhouettes or far-away sketches of a barn and an old-fashioned windmill, possibly a tractor as well. In the foreground would be two pigs standing upright, with chickens on their shoulders engaged in some playful shoving of each other. We would literally be having piggybacks from the chickens on top of the pig’s backs, and chicken fighting as well because the pigs are holding up the chickens while they are engaged in the eons-old tradition of girls in bikinis being held on the backs of college jocks playfully trying to make the other fall into the water. They would be doing this in a mud patch though since it would be on a farm and with pigs as the bottom level of the chicken fight. The characters would be drawn very cartoonishly and with a goofy atmosphere, we could even have a couple pigs, chickens or other farm animals around cheering them on.

Michael sent this to me, impressing me with how perfect he got the feel from the very first and nearly final draft:



I asked Michael if he thought he could fit a small farmhouse behind the scene to add to the farm idea of the design, which he tried to do but said it made the design too unbalanced. The next update was the final piece, nothing needing to be changed amazingly:



Man, that was a piece of cake! Bispa does indeed Rulz!




Next up!:



The idea:

Pinball Wizard: To pay homage to the Who song of the same name, a wizard playing a pinball game (possible title and theme: “Fantasy Frenzy!” complete with a unicorn possibly fighting a dinosaur decal on the side of it) from a 3/4ths perspective would be the main image. The person playing the game could be a variety of pop-cultural wizards, from Merlin-ish to Gandalf, complete with crazy hat on or laid on the side of the machine, and his staff, also titled against the game machine. He would be ranking up an amazingly insane and long score as he would be the ultimate pinball wizard player!

Ben's first version:



I suggested to Ben that we have the wizard more Gandalf-y, to change the dragon to little kids and then we decided on hobbits, to change the name of the game to "Fantasy Frenzy", to have a very high score on the board and to have a "high score!" sign as well lit up.

Ben's reply:



I made suggestions that we should move the hobbit away from the staff since it looked like he was now holding it, and having some hobbits on the other side of the pinball machine, one on top of the other one's back.

Ben asked if maybe we should do it in a more simple style with less details, and sent this version over to me:



I told Ben I preferred the more detailed version we were already working on, and Ben agreed to give it another go and sent me this:



Suggestions: chaging the wizard's facial expression by making him look more concentrated yet still seem pleased and warm, illuminating the face when we go to color, making the hobbit with glasses on face more excited and to change the glasses slightly, have a high score circle in red at the top of the pinball game, and adding some more zeroes and numbers to the high score.

Ben's next version:



More suggestions!: Putting just the FF instead of Fantasy Frenzy on the top of the machine and maybe putting a crest with swords around it to keep the medieval theme, having the wizard's face somewhere between the "blown away" version of the and the kinder, gentler face of the new wizard version, and possible elements for the left side of the piece: bringing a piece of the dragon back, a table with an energy drink and change on it, etc.



Ben and I decided there was no real reason to have something in the corner of the design, it was already crammed full of fun details so Ben started the coloring process:



Suggestions, what a surprise: Changing the distance between the wizard and the pinball machine, more light illuminating the energy coming off the wizard's hands, having the high score sign and light colors leaping off the shirt, giving a vine-y border (Dragons Lair inspired) to the top of the unit, and having even more smoke/sparks coming out of the back of the machine.

Ben's next version:



We're nearing the end! Suggestions included making the staff a bit thicker, adding more smoke/sparks once again, a tad more lighting to the high score sign, having another effect or symbol around the Fantasy Frenzy graphic on the side of the machine since it kind of competes with the energy style coming off the wizard's hands.

Another version:



So close to finished! I asked Ben if he could chip a few bits off the top of the staff leaning up against the machine, and taking a bit off the neck of the unicorn on the side of the pinball game as well as maybe having another idea around the unicorn or have some kind of pattern or effect behind it. I wasn't being as helpful as I wanted to but i knew it wasn't there yet and I was hoping Ben could decode what i couldn't express for the graphic, and he came through in spades:



Done and done!





Number three!:



The idea:

Rock Paper Scissor Peace March: What if all the rock, paper and scissors of the world got together and decided they didn’t want to fight one another any more? We could have a rally coming towards the viewer of the shirt, with lots of different kinds of rocks, paper and scissors mixed in with one another, the ones at the front holding a banner that goes above the rest of the crowd and flanks them which states “Rock/Paper/Scissor Peace March” or something like that. The instruments of so many finger battles could have their arms around one another, supporting one another and holding picket signs such as a rock holding “Rock Beats No One, Loves All”, paper holding “When Only One Of Us Wins, Everyone Loses”, scissor holding “End The Faceoffs” and whatever else we could think up for signs for them to hold!

After this Brock had a number of really specific and detail-oriented questions for me that really impressed me and made me feel like he was truly interested in my input, as if it was helping him formulate the final way he wanted to go with the idea before drawing one line of it. They ranged from where the banner should be in the design, what the banner should say and if we should punctuation in it, how diverse the papers and scissors should be, and sending him a bunch of banners for the RPS to hold, which I sent Brock these:

Paper:

-When Only One Of Us Wins, Everybody Loses

-Paper Hugs Rock

-Give Peace A Chance

Scissors:

-A sign that has two fingers held up in the peace/scissor sign of a v, with an equals sign pointing to a traditional graphic peace sign, and a circle with a crossed-out line in front of some bloody scissors or some other symbol that signifies war or the violence of the RPS game.

-1,2,3.....Peace!

-No More Cutting, Only Loving

Rock:

-End The Faceoffs

-Rock Beats No One, Loves All

-Make Friends, Not War


I also suggested at this time we have some of the rocks and scissors and such have their "arms" around one another, maybe a couple doodles of hearts and etc on a piece of paper, and baby versions of scissors or paper holding the adult's hand.

And finally, the first sketch came, almost completely formulated and nearly the completed version:



And another version of the first amazing sketch that had a few of Brock's notes on it:



And after I had NO suggestions whatsoever for the sketches Brock sent me, the nearly final version was sent on over in a couple days:



A few final suggestions from me were made, such as adding some clouds to the scene to make it gel more in the environment, to change some of the rock colors in front to make them more diverse, and to change the sign the scissor on the right was holding to a flower.

The next version would be the final piece from Brock!:






And last but certainly not least:



The idea (which most of the time I send a bunch of concepts to each artist to choose, but I only sent this one to Enkel hoping he would like to do it with me since i knew his style would be perfect for it):

Honey Moon: Taking the phrasing of that term quite literally, we would have a moon in the center of the design, but it would be textured with beehives and honeycombs. There would be giant bees going in and out of the moon, possibly a couple flying around in space as well. The honey on the moon would be flowing out of it, and dripping down towards earth or just space in general. I also imagine astronauts wearing beekeeper outfits roaming around the moon or where the moon is dripping below, trying to harness and catch as much of the honey as possible. We could also connect the stars in space with something of the honey floating around in space, making up the look of stars as well? We can work on more details...

Buko's first drawing of the idea:



Lots of suggestions abounded from here, with lots of them not making the final cut: having some spots of light shining out of the honeycomb moon, more honey drips coming out of the moon, some forming constellations and such, the bees being turned into space shuttles with mechanical wings, giving the astronauts beekeeper helmets and veils like this reference pic:



Enkel sent version two on over:



He also suggested after talking to a friend that we add Earth into the background to give the piece more of a grounding in space and for people to understand that this supposed to be the moon even quicker. I suggested a drop of honey turns into the earth below the moon or just have the Earth much smaller and below the moon way in the distance. I also asked if we could add the beekeeper hat to the second astronaut near the bottom as well, working the mechanical bee into a space shuttle with bee-like features, and taking a reference photo of the actual moon and putting that texture underneath the honeycomb texture so that the piece gives more of a bump, crater moon-like feel to it.

Enkel's next version:



The next round of suggestions included possibly bumping the texture of the moon to make it even more noticeable and the color to make it glow again, scraping the mechanical bee and just having all the bees look like giant normal versions of the real things, and having the beekeepernauts attached to one or two space shuttles.

Another update from Enkel:



We're nearly there now, I only asked Enkel to darken in the other beekeeper hat and to play around a bit with the size of the space shuttle and earth as they seemed a bit too intrusive to the main honey moon now.

SUCCESS! Enkel's final version:





Yippie!

It's about damned time you were recognized for your awesome ideas and drawing skillz, congrats on becoming alumni and for making a tee where people can just point to the beer in question in total silence instead of annoying the rest of us because they're super bored. Yeay man!

My friend at work wants to know what you have to do to post a blog on Threadless. She's not very impressed so far.

Please provide reasons for her to love the fine (and by that i mean completely fun-filled uselessness of it) art of blogging!

I know I'm late to the game seeing this like three weeks after it came out, but I saw it today before work in 3d and it was so much fun!

It's one of the few non-Pixar CGI films that really hits that sweet spot of fun storytelling, inventive visuals and humor that's for both adults and kids, but doesn't dumb down the humor on either side. There's a talking monkey not unlike the talking dog from Up, but it doesn't feel like a lame imitation.

In short, the movie does it's own thing while staying true to the original children book's spirit and crucial scenes, as well as adding some messages about overeating and the dangers of genetically modified food. It's like Food Inc in computer form!

Not really, but there's some very Simpson-esque touches to the writing, and it really wonderfully tweaks some conventional concepts in film and calls them out, all the while having awesome subtle details abounding around the screen (like during an ice cream storm, an overhead shot of neopolitan ice cream where only one kid is eating the strawberry...justl ike in real life!) and a Twilight Zone and Aliens homage sprinkled here and there.

Go see that shiznit before it's out of the theater's because DVD 3d sucks ass compared to the movie 3d new-fangled wonders! Plus, Mr. T's in it.