Kaiju Groupie

Bear with me as today's needs a little backstory...

I take melatonin before bed to help with my insomnia and general lack of ability to fall asleep. Lately I have been feeling like it has not worked so well... the bottle does say that you can develop a tolerance to it. So I have stopped taking it for two days now. The difference is easy to see, to me anyway. With melatonin I have a 10-15 min fall asleep time, without is 45-1hr asleep time.

In that extra time I lie awake playing out whole conversations for upcoming events that make me nervous or anxious, which only serves to make me more so at the time of the actual event. I try breathing meditation and counting. Most of the time there are also a few lines of a song on a loop in my head. And I also think about upcoming things farther away than next week... like Halloween.

Night one of no melatonin, I forced myself to stop playing out a scene and think of something else. I thought about crochet and my new Otachi and how cute she is. And thought about a few posts from tumblr of a neat jacket and dress design based on her design. And how cool it would be to cosplay, and how I wish I knew how to pattern and sew. Which lead to thoughts of more simple outfits for conventions.

Thinking about Otachi and the movie, Pacific Rim in general the words "Kaiju groupie" start floating around in my head. I pulled out my phone and saw there are actually quite a few shirts and things with the phrase on it for sale online. Then as I was thinking about it all this image (insert angel chorus hallelujah!) popped into my mind, almost fully formed, for a t-shirt design. Since an uppercase "G" and an "e" can look mirrored and similar and they have rounded tops and the word kaiju has so many vertical elements... my typography and logo designing brain had it all worked out.

Of course thats when I fell asleep and forgot about it.

Night Two of no melatonin, I was laying there and suddenly remembered it again. Of course I went to sleep before sketching it out, but the second remembering forced it into my awake brain and today I went and put it to paper.

sketches

I haven't sketched in a while and it was really nice to do. Got out the graph paper, to help space and size the art, and a 5B pencil. I traced the rough sketch on to tracing paper. Then I scanned it as best I could.

I then took the scan into Illustrator. Made vector art out of it with the pen tool which took forever (about 2 hours). So now I am going to send this off to Zazzle and get one printed on a navy shirt.

Watermarked for internet safety.

If you want one, I have put the design up for sale on t-shirts and stickers on Zazzle as it is free to do.
Get one by clicking here!

I super duper love it and on the navy color the eyes are nice dark slits. The little decoration at the bottom is Otachi's nostrils, but also just looks cute...