Patch design: "DogHulk"

Meet 'DogHulk'. He's seriously badass. He also took me an age to create, see how I did it here...


So I get this really cool email from Wilson Junior - Head Instructor at the Carlson Gracie Academy Team London and in the email Wilson asks me if I can come up with a design for a gi patch. Now I have to explain that Wilson is a man of few words, so when I quizzed him about what he wanted, he just said to come up with something suitable for the Carlson Gracie Team image...eeek!


It took me a while to think of something, after all, the original Carlson Gracie bulldog logo is an absolute classic BJJ image:

And then I saw this...

And I thought, yeah! Dog + Hulk = DogHulk. Perfect for Carlson's. Okay, I know, as you'll see at the end, so I cheated a little. I based DogHulk's body fairly heavily on the image above. However I hope that my additions and tweaks can be considered fair use by the copyright police. The image above is also terribly low resolution so I had to guess and interpret a lot of the definition within the image.

Despite Mr Hulk above providing me with a nice template, there was still a ton of work to do.

Here's my opening sketch:

 

Now have a closer look at the sketch of the dog's face in the middle. The right side of his face is much shorter and narrower than the left half (as you look at it). When I sat down to sketch it, I had no idea it was so badly unsymmetrical until I scanned it and popped up the grid. That'll be my severe astigmatism - causing me to see and draw a circle, when actually I've drawn an oval.  So now that I spotted my error, I traced one half of the original on tracing paper and re-drew it as two halves joined together - bottom left corner. I also made the jaws open a little wider. Once happy, I scanned in the trace and powered up Illustrator.
Thank goodness for computers.

A zillion night hours later, and voila...

If I am doing a logo for you...don't worry, I am on the case. It might take me a while, but I will get round to it. If I haven't drawn you a logo and you want one...hey, I charge very reasonable rates, honest!
Least of all I hope you enjoy these posts about photos and artworks, cos there's gonna be more...much more LOL.


:)