Process for Blood Dumpster Tee

Today I was working on the first T-shirt for my artist collective, The Blood Dumpster. I took a bunch of screenshots during the process so I thought I'd share.

Here's the first sketch. I tend to go pretty literal with things, so i drew bloody things coming out of a dumpster. (I assure you the collective isn't all about drawing dumpsters and blood. Mostly. )

Pretty fun, but I wanted to push it farther and add some detail. After some feedback from the group and several attempts at refining the sketch I came up with this draft.

I scanned it and opened the file in illustrator. I rotated it a little because I sorta drew it on a slant and i wanted teh dumpster to be more upright. Here as some of my initial "inking" lines.

I'm generally using  a single custom brush with he Brush tool. You can see I'm ready planning out some of the colors.

We're planning on doing it on a black or red shirt, most likely. Therefore, I wanted to create a white backing/border so all the black lines would still read on a black background.

Here I started doing some fills with a halftone pattern to get some depth out of the limited palette.

Cleaned up the shading shapes. Looks pretty awesome on white background, but we want to print on a black shirt...

...and that border looks a lot sloppier in high-contrast.

So i went in a made it a lot tighter, and dropped it from the blood splashes and smaller parts that didn't quite need the outline. Last, I added The Blood Dumpster logo and my ol' siggy on a skull. Also the nipple is squirting. That way, you know, it looks more nippley.