YOU LOSE
You lose. Ya blew it.
Remember how I always said don’t give up on projects? Proof is in this dead pudding.
Drew this cheesy little skull in my sketchbook and abandoned it for half a year. Hit a complete creativity block this past weekend and decided to expand on it. Used a ton of different pens to fill in this sucker’s cloak. It’s pretty calming mindlessly filling in gaps with a brush pen, I’ll tell you. Scope the sketch ripped straight from the book to the left.
Not 100% sure why I put “You Lose” in here, but I wanted to portray something to the effect of a “GAME OVER” video game screen. Guess that works. Kind of wish my hand-made typography got a little wackier. That’s something I’m going to work on in the future.
Digitally, I wanted to make this simple but graphically appealing. Vector based with a slight touch of texture and roughness. Slight dinginess if you will. Very slight.
I simplified it down to 3 layers, cutting the skull, cloak folds, lettering, and hands out of the black shape of the cloak itself. Put a white layer of color for the face and hands. Then finally threw down a background color behind it. This would be an easy one to screen print if I ever wanted to. Already did the prep work.
To give it a bit of a weathered feel, I took the vector into Photoshop and added a layer mask of textured brush strokes to subtly eat away at the cloak. I’m pretty happy with how that worked out.
Kind of got inspired by Queens of the Stone Age’s …Like Clockwork album cover by Bone Face (dude is so amazing). Used a similar color palette to that.
This particular design looks pretty solid on all the products I’ve tried putting it on at Redbubble. It’s pretty translatable. Particularly enjoy how it’s being displayed on the variety of shirts they offer.
Check out You Lose on Redbubble and Design By Humans now. Think it looks pretty sweet. Scope it on some RB products below.
Follow @strangethingsa