Baby don’t herd me

I had fun designing this t-shirt last year for a pub crawl known as “the herd”. Fun folks from what I can gather. A mate of mind had seen my drawing challenge sketches and asked if I’d mind designing the shirt. Had a lot of fun working on my rusty graphic design skills 🙂

hey big fella. I need a weird drawing done for free that will go on a pub crawl t-shirt and you are the only dude i know that knows how to draw. It’s an interesting concept that you may be interested in as I’m sure you won’t have drawn this before. Let me know if you’re keen to assist!

The brief

I’m after a sheep with both hands in the air with a beer glass or jug or whatever in each hand, pouring beer into it’s own mouth and the whole thing has to be in the shape of a love heart
and the flavour text will be “What is love?” up the top, with “Baby don’t herd me” next to the picture

Here’s the finished image and a t-shirt:

Sketching concepts

First comment would be I think the idea is that the body and arms of the sheep and the beer falling out of the mugs would form the border of the heart shape as opposed to actually having a drawn heart, although im not sure how realistic that is to achieve

That actually was rather tricky! 🙂

Yeah I think you are right, the head needs to be tipped back and the beer coming from bottles, that should create more of an uninterrupted “heart shape”. Also, I am really liking the two sheep back to back each having a beer… I am thinking maybe they could have the farmer tied up to the side, fridge open, bottles scattered… thoughts?

I think the main focus is making sure the final markup makes a very noticeable heart shape, whether that be with the one sheep both arms or two sheep back to back, the heart shape is core to the message “baby don’t herd me” so everything should point to that

Digital design work

All in inkscape. It’s my favourite 🙂

Initial tracing

I call this one Got Milk?
Getting close at this point. The core silhouette is good, but the bottles, arms and liquid details don’t feel right.

Ta-da! Thin arms really worked, hearts instead of splashes matches the “love” theme and that’s a nicer bottle shape. In fact, it’s a 340mL buderim ginger beer bottle shape 😉 My favourite!

h3. Adding the text

I had an idea with working a bit more of a heart theme in there – as you guys are aware, the tag line is “What is love? Baby don’t HERD me..”
I’m thinking we can use the words to form the outline of the heart around the two sheep? Does that make sense?
With emphasis on the HERD as its the name of the group etc etc.

Another concept sketch

To go with the love and herd themes I searched for love romance, fluffy, cloudy, etc and you can see the results.
I tried out a few and worked on the weighting so the words would be easy to read and match the theme.
Best font name award goes to ‘Times New Romance’—but that required a licence.

The final fonts are ‘Fool for love‘ and ‘AlphaSmoke‘. Both are free for non-commercial use.

Here’s the finished image and a t-shirt again:

You can tell from the quotes above the clients were lovely to work for—nice clear feedback. I think everyone is happy with the result 🙂

Cheers for the chance to make something fun! As my mate said—I’d never drawn anything like it before 😉

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