This rashguard design was inspired by the classic vintage tattoo work of artists such as Normal Keith Collins (aka Sailor Jerry), Amund Dietzel, Bert Grimm and many others, this rashguard features a human grappler literally fighting against his own demon. Look closer and you’ll spot I have added detail upon detail, such as tattoos within tattoos of mermaids, panthers, swallows, hearts, roses, snakes and many more.
You can buy it at the Meerkatsu store here.
The old School was created a little differently to my usual methods. Most projects are drawn entirely in vector programs – mainly Adobe Illustrator. But for this project I decided it needed a more organic look to the design, hence I drew everything in raster programs – mainly Adobe Photoshop but also some earlier work on my iPad Pro, using Procreate.
The pros to drawing in raster format is that you have much more flexibility in the digital painting process. You can paint using custom brushes, add filters, layer effects, shading, colour adjustments, photographic elements etc. Of course, you can do this too in Illustrator, but it’s a lot more natural in Photoshop. The cons however are mainly that one needs to paint on a very big digital canvas – as big as one can in order to print cleanly onto rashguard panels. We’re talking file sizes that are around 300-400MB in size.
The results I feel are worth the effort, for this particular project at least.
Finally, as a nice little early bird incentive, I had some temporary tattoos made to give to the first 50 buyers of the Old School. Sadly these were all snapped quickly on the first day so there aren’t any left (although I kept a few for myself so I might give them away as prizes on Instagram, stay tuned!)
