Up We Go

I've gotten a number of offers to do T-shirt designs for various companies and I've been able to take a crack at a few of them. One offer was from a small clothing store that contacts artists to design their shirts, and while browsing their catalog I noticed that none of the shirts really had a joke like the ones I usually make, but instead were purely design driven. I have yet to hear what they thought of this design, but it has been a long time since I've drawn something just because it looked cool and didn't necessarily have to mean something or be a reference to anything.



This started with wanting to do a drawing of an old-timey pipe organ just because I like how they look, with all those keys and different colored buttons. The idea obviously took off quite a bit from that point. The version I've posted here is a bit more "finished" than the actual version I submitted for the shirt; I added some brush effects on the balloon and sky that can't be recreated very well with a normal silkscreen process. The detail above is to show how I used a halftone effect to achieve the illusion of different colors while still sticking to only the five colors that I picked for printing.

In case you don't "get it," well, really, there's nothing to get. I just wanted something visually interesting. I suppose a literal description would be that a guy is playing an organ on a hot air balloon, and when the music comes out of the pipes it physically manifests itself into those girly ghost figures, which then fill the balloon and pull it upward. I don't do many "artsy" art pieces, so you can indulge me this once. :)