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I'm not going to go on about Don't Panic. I've lost, it's over and I've already made all the "time to panic..." kind of jokes too many times.

Instead I've decided to enter another unwinnable internet competition: this time the ongoing one for international T-shirt printers Threadless (or as I call them, "Fredless"). They pay you in money at least and not roached up old flyers.

I had had this idea whilst at work, where I stumbled across an almost identical design down the back of the internet.* For it I've basically developed this new set of characters by slicing the ears off Alfie and Betty, stars of my dormant Inappropriate Alphabet project, to create general vaguely sweet but not too cliched creatures, just like those guys did with Animaniacs all those years ago.

I struggled with the colourways with this quite a bit. Originally I was thinking light blue because it's kind of icey and so the reflections seem more likely:



But for t-shirts I seem to think red and white is always a good idea:



And ended up going for something more like this:



Perhaps it's because I stared at it for several hours late into the night, but something about it looked a bit off to me. Maybe it's their white eyes like cataracts, but at the time I thought it may be the order of things. Because, I reasoned, when looking at a picture one scans from left to right and since this has a kind of "punch-line", namely that the reflections aren't actually reflections but are in fact being painted onto the ground by one of the rabbit-things, that that should be seen last. So I flipped it all horizontally. Now this looks weird to me, but I'm not sure if that's just because it contradicts the original version which I have burnished onto my retina by staring at it too intently for too long.



If you're wondering how I did the subtle fur texturing on the bodies (which only really worked on the light blue version), I used a light box: a new method I'm experimenting with. My dad actually made me the box for my eighth birthday. Good ol' dad. Because that's how things worked when I was a kid, in the nineties. When your birthday rolled round you didn't get an X-box 360 stuffed with cash, your dad had to spend hours toiling over a drawing tool at the kitchen table, and to deftly make it look exactly like a kitchen drawer to avoid arousing suspicions from the recipient to be. Here it is on our glass sixteen-seater dining table:



So I drew the main lines, and then on a seperate sheet drew some fur, resulting in this kind of thing which actually looks a lot more interesting than the finished picture.



If you want to vote, and I'm sure you do, I'm going to put the link up as soon as I get it.

*Not really of course, I am one hundred percent original.

EDIT: It got approved so you can vote now. You're not too busy are you?