Friday 17 June 2011

Boys Entering Anarchistic States Towards Internal Excellence


I don't think it's generally noted that the word 'BEASTIE' (at least in the case of The Beastie Boys) is in fact an acronym. No doubt a hastily assembled after thought from a time when many Hip-Hop artists were seeing what they could stretch out of their adopted monikers, but nevertheless, its full meaning now serves as an almost entirely unrelated title to this Blog post.

In December 2010 I designed a series of images intended for an imaginary children's t-shirt range for the style website WGSN. The 'LITTLE BEASTIE' collection served as inspiration to folks in the fashion biz who paid to subscribe to the subscription only website, and so I've been contracted not to show the images until now.. Six months after I drew them.

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It was really interesting to work on images intended for kids. I wanted to push the perceptions of what they'd be able to handle and not offer up something that was overly cutesy. This had its initial difficulties as my first attempt at this Multi-Coloured Tiger Snake was rejected by WGSN due to his teeth and the end of his tail being "too scary"..

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..so I yanked out the poor chuffer's fangs, replacing them with some child friendly, Goofy style teeth and brightened up his rattle a bit..

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The snake was finally accepted and next came this Unicorn Rhino guy with an onomatopoeic word describing him chowing down on his favourite plant snack..

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The next one was about as cutesy as it got, but hopefully it still retained some sort of mysteriousness. I was attempting a simplified interpretation of some kind of Big-Foot character, but I wasn't too concerned when that idea got a bit lost along the way..

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The last one's got this faceless dinosaur dude. Something around the 'Doyouthinkhesaurus' type vibe, but perhaps with a bit more abstraction about it. The use of all the colours in this project was quite a challenge for me. That was a big part of the brief that took me out of my usual "black & white n' red all over" comfort zone, so I'd be interested to see what people make of these.

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