Our latest design "Monster Road" was the result of a collaborative effort between the two Tee Party masterminds, Crystal and Paul Lancaster. The spark of inspiration that lead to Monster Road came from browsing the Threadless' Kids photo stream, over at Flickr. Which lead me to wanting to paint a mural, on the wall of our daughters play room in our basement.

This was the photo in question, of the Threadless Kids store in Chicago...



From this original inspiration, I started to formulate the idea of a cute monster in the hills, where the monster was actually one of the hills come to life. Then it evolved into the monsters tongue actually being the road, winding through the hills. So, using my childlike sketching skills, I quickly sketched out a rough draft of what I had in my head...



Yeah, I never claimed to be able to draw! But I was able to pass this sketch along to Crystal, along with my description, and together we were able to come up with a real sketch of Monster Road. The one thing that we did differ on, was that she was going along the lines of snow capped mountains, whereas my original vision had been that of rolling green hills.



Before we knew it we realized that we had stumbled on our next great t-shirt design! So, I then took this pencil sketch, scanned it, imported it into Illustrator, and began to trace the lines with the pen tool. The monster then started to take shape. During the process though I realized 2 things. 1; the intended 3 colour printing process meant that we had to think more carefully about the configuration of the hills. And 2; that the dimensions of the original sketch didn't work well with the size and shape of a t-shirts prime printing real estate, the chest area. So I exported what I had from illustrator and loaded it up into Photoshop. Where Crystal laid over a digital sketch, changing the dimensions of the overall layout, repositioning the hills and adding the final clouds. And from that sketch the final design for Monster Road finally came to fruition. So finally, here is a quick animation of the illustration process...



Monster Road is now alive, and is in the shop. Available on guys tees, girls tees and hoodies. And soon to be available on KIDS TEES*.

If we do follow through with the original idea and put the mural on the wall, I'll be sure to post photos.

(*More on the Kids Tees section coming soon)