Designing a new shirt is either surprisingly easy or a serious amount of unforgiving hell. The new "Black Label" shirt fell into the latter category. But it's the type of hell we absolutely love being punished with, because it's always exciting to come up with new items for our store.
While I did know what type of shirt I wanted, I had no idea how it'd turn out, visually. Creating the "Vulgar Display of Mosher" shirt? Easy, just fit Mosher Pete into the character. The same happened with the "Sons of Moshery" artwork. Designing a new one, from scratch? Not so fast...
Yes; of course they're Pantera and Sons of Anarchy references. ;)
I teamed with André Coelho, once again, and aimed to have an original artwork that would be the sum of several smaller pieces of art, yet work fine as whole piece. This included:
- our mascot
- an inverted pentagram made with v-shaped guitars
- a dripping look to the elements, Mark Riddick-style (we will definitely work with this guy, one day)
- an old-school vibe to the typographic elements
- bones instead of floral ornaments
The biggest influence for the artwork was the graphic approach by the labels of alcoholic drinks (bourbon, gin, etc). I sent André the following pictures of doodles of unmeasurable artistic value, for reference:
This is why we hire artists.
Being the awesome artist André is, he caught up with my vision real quick, and suggested a couple of scythes to work as a frame for the artwork. He emailed me back with a really rough sketch, but it was clear that he was on the right track from the get go.
André advised me to have a more iconic approach to Pete's face. I agreed; I had always envisioned an eventual artwork with Mosher Pete's face in the vein of the Misfits' Crimson Ghost, Converge's Jane Doe, Phil Anselmo's face on Down's Nola, etc. - this seemed like the perfect timing to make it happen.
We went through a few revisions and when we reached this near-final prototype, it was time to make a choice...
...should we adapt the lettering to the artwork? We agreed to drop this idea, and when André showed me the final artwork (with another batch of small tweaks here and there), it just felt right.
Phew, it was done.
We really hope you guys like it. It's our ninth mascot shirt! The "Black Label" shirt is now available for pre-order through our store, to be shipped in the first week of October.
Get it here, or we'll keep posting LOTR references on our blog.
Yours truly,
Rui Alexandre
Mosher Clothing founder