The Dapper Quail

A friend of mine recently had a birthday, and my gift to her was custom, designed on the spot t-shirt. :) I have yet to finalize the design and get it printed and sent to her, but I wanted to show you guys the design. :P With her right there giving input, we ended up with this. A purple quail (quail is her spirit animal) in a vest, monocle, and top hat. Because, as she often says, and as shall be printed on the back of the t-shirt, "Everything is better with a top hat."

What remains left to be done is to preserve translucency in the background of the image, since we're printing it on a gray shirt. It seems that Cafe Press's customization interface only creates translucency out of white spaces when the t-shirt is light colored, whereas this is a dark gray we're working with. So, I have to figure that out. We were thinking of just printing it with my lamely matched gray colored box around the bird, but I know I can do better, so I'm gonna figure this transparency issue out.

On Characters and Digital Art Programs...

Looks like a future awesomesauce adventure group to me! These are some kids from the cast of a short, practice my friend and I are writing. Names from the left: Syuma, Skander, Luwan, and Nobundo. 

It took me awhile to color this. @_@ I started it last night, and had to leave to program up all night and finish in the morning. Not being able to save layers isn't much fun. I use the program Sketchbook Express from Autodesk, which is basically a demo, so when I save images it merges all the layers. I'm thinking about now it would be worth the thirty bucks to get the full version, Sketchbook Pro. ^_^

A kitten and I drew this together. :)