Designing Formal Penguins - New Humorous T-Shirt Art by TET (Part 1)

It's been a few weeks since I posted my first Amazon Merch T-Shirt design, Crocodile Rock. With my neck injury seemingly on the mend I decided it was time to begin work on a new, exclusive design for the platform.

I'm my own biggest fan when it comes to my Bored Yeti skateboard designs. Particularly the Mark II version that I filmed myself creating, and bought the design on an actual skateboard just to include in the video.



However, rather than just create another Bored Yeti design, this time around I thought I'd focus on just the two penguin characters. To my mind I felt more people would likely to wear a humorous penguin design than those who would wear one where my Yeti character was the main focus.

My initial thought was to play on the idea that the Tuxedo is sometimes referred to as a 'penguin suit'. The first idea that came to mind was to have the two penguins comparing the merits of the bow tie to the longer neck tie (and maybe even one considering a comedy fish tie).

I certainly could imagine the tie concept but then I thought about pushing the idea of penguin suits even further, suggesting that penguins actually do wear suits, specifically black, formal jackets. In my head I saw one penguin as a fine gentleman being assisted by his butler to put on his jacket. Which is what I ended up drawing (as you can see from the final sketch image at the top of this blog post.

Having one penguin wear a top hat was not part of the concept from the beginning. I added it later as I thought it would help to create a bit of a class difference between the two penguins, and maybe suggest the butler idea - a more common job back in the days of Top hat wearing gentry.

Below you can watch a video of me developing my ideas and the design.



From here the next step is to create a line art version, add some kind of background, and then color. If you've watched the video my initial idea was to put a blue circle (sky) behind them with some snow packed ice elements to suggest their winter environment. I may still do that but, towards the end of the final sketch, I was also thinking of possibly a curved triangle of some kind too.

I'll document all that in a future post.

For now, if you're interested in browsing (and maybe buying) more of my art click the banner to my Redbubble store below. My Crocodile Rock T-Shirts are exclusively available only on Amazon. Click the link to go to their page.