Trailer Park Boys Shirt Project

I'm going to do my best to be neutral about this one. It drove me crazy for nearly three weeks and the result is...pathetic at best. Oh damn...well, there goes my neutral stance, and we're not even three sentences in! I'll make up for it by making you look at all the sketches, because I scanned them, so you have to see them.

First of all, a little backstory. Some members of the Karma Incarnate team (not me) are going to see the Trailer Park Boys perform live in the coming weeks. As is becoming our custom, they wanted shirts they could wear to help spread the brand. Now, I'm not a fan of the series, though when this began I had seen several episodes, so I was somewhat at a loss at first.

They told me what they wanted - more of the same stuff. Them as characters from the show. Since I didn't have enough of a knowledge base to come up with a scene, I started with how I wanted the characters to look.

Sketches of the look

 So at first I was going to go somewhat realistic with them...well, actually the first thing I was going to do was make them take photos dressed up and then vectorize them...but that was somewhat unrealistic.

So the next step was the sketch on the left, which is somewhat close to my normal manga style of characters (at this point, I was working off memory of what they looked like, so the drawing is far off, but I was working at the time) but after staring at it a few days, I really didn't think it would give the best sort of result for this...

So I came to the style on the right. It's a bit more cartoonish, and somewhat inspired by the Haunted Mansion shirt design I didn't use. I thought maybe it would be a good way to convey the idea...and since time was quickly running out, I couldn't afford to spend hours upon hours attempting realistic coloring which would ultimately turn out shitty.

Next then came the layout design. This was...problematic, again, because I didn't really know enough about the show to make it look natural.

Layout sketches

So I ended up doing something a little simplistic. Sue me. This ended up being a little better than it might have been, because at least I got to use all primary characters which was almost not the case. The trailer in the right image would end up saving my butt in the end since Ricky's car (which is featured in both) ended up being cut.

Ricky and Julian sketches

Once I had the style I wanted down, it was a matter of posing and merging the characters' looks with those of the people going. You'll no-doubt recognize some of the people from my other shirt designs, but two of them were new.

Additionally problematic in this was that those additional two had very similar facial structures to the characters they were supposed to be represented by. This was especially a problem with 'Julian' because essentially the only thing that separated the two of them was the hairline.

Gentleman Jim Layhe sketches

It was at this point that I began forcing myself to watch the show. I made it through 4 complete seasons by the end of this, and while I still don't enjoy it, I was able to get a better feel for the characters which I think ultimately comes through in the final poses and designs for them.

Jim Layhe, the alcoholic trailer park supervisor was the one I really sort of went wild with. his design for awhile and had to pull it back a few times. He's a drunk and an ass, but he's not really a psycho...and even when he is, it's a quieter drunker sort of psychosis which generally means waving a gun around in his underwear.

So how did they come out? Well....

Ricky

Julian

Bubbles (yes those are Jakes real cats)

Layhe

In the end the simpler, more cartoony look worked out for me (and saved the coloring stage entirely). The line art isn't as strong as I'd like, but the inking process was remarkably smooth for a change.

Final design

Custom back

The typeface and look is meant to mimic the logo of the show, which you can find easily enough online. I got pretty close, I think.
The trailer in the background is a quick vector I made off a photograph of an actual trailer...which may be cheating, I suppose, but it makes for a nice background, I think. Simple yet effective?

Trailer vector

Sadly, as I mentioned above, Ricky's Car did not make the cut... the reason for this is that I am something of an idiot. When making this piece, I did each character and background element separate so I could color them more easily. Unfortunately I used the same pen to ink each of them...for consistency...but obviously the characters ended up being much smaller than the car, which meant that the line weight of the car made it the dominant object in the drawing instead of the characters. I could have fixed this...but not in the time I had. While this meant I would need to redraw Layhe, it ended up being simpler in the long run, even if I think the initial drawing was a little more...dynamic.

Ricky's car (unused)

Layhe (unused)

The hell of it is, that's one of the better cars I've ever drawn...yes, I'm aware that's not saying much.

So there you go, I hope you've enjoyed this exhaustive look into something that a competent artist could have crapped out in a few hours.

"It's a shitnami, Randy..."