Qwertee Design: Ren & Stimpy

I've been looking into doing some designs for Qwertee, to practice my character design, illustration skills, and m ability to reach an audience. Since I'm not a popular artist by any means, I wanted to see how well my designs could reach audiences, because I've always felt there was kind of a popularity contest in this environment; and Qwertee basically picks and chooses which new designs get featured, and they're always the designs that are likely to win. Otherwise, the only way to get enough votes to be printed on a shirt is if you were popular enough for people to vote for it if you asked them too. I figured I would still put a lot of effort into each one because while I am rather cynical towards the system of Qwertee being that the most noticed design wins, I still want to learn new skills, and I might actually get lucky for a change too.

My first design is based on a rather popular scene from The Ren & Stimpy Show, where Ren Hoek gets so mad at Stimpy that he very calmly, but angrily, describes in detail how he's going to kill him. It was a really funny scene that most fans of the show talk about when the series is brought up. I chose to design a shirt based on Ren & Stimpy because it seemed that there were no designs for that show, which was strange because it has enough of a following for people to buy shirts and there is quite a bit of potential for possible shirt designs. I guess it's one of those shows you have to be reminded of before realising you enjoy it. I figured this shirt would stand out, since it's the only design based on Ren & Stimpy, and I might make a few more based on this cartoon in the future.

I first wondered which part of the scene I chose I could develop into the design. It had to be a key part, with a quote that people would recognise. I decided, in the end, that it should be the moment Ren says "I'm so angry", because first of all, that line along with the keyframe summed up the whole scene perfectly; secondly, it has a very specific key frame for Ren as he's saying the line that stands out incredibly well and could work as the image used for the design.

This is how it turned out in the end, and for my first time designing a t-shirt, and being not the most confident about my illustration skills, I think it holds up extremely well. As you can probably tell, I took the frame I mentioned and traced over it, but added a lot more detail to it, since just drawing the same frame without adding anything would be kind of boring. I developed a rather neat shading technique from this, by using heavy black shadow giving it a very edgy look. I tried to make the imagery edgy and comedic to make this memorable and cool looking. I think this has convinced me to continue submitting Qwertee designs, among other designs for sites like this.