I’m going to participate in the Disney/Threadless Muppets T-shirt Design Challenge (10 days left to submit!) for the upcoming Muppets feature film. Since it’s kind of modern to let people in on the creative process, I thought I’d post my way through the progression. Here we go.

The theme of the challenge is friendship. I picked two of my favorite muppets, Zoot (my fellow saxophone player) and the Swedish Chef (my fellow Swede). Perhaps not the obvious choice of muppet friends, but everyone else is going to do something on Kermit, Fozzie, Piggy, Gonzo and Animal, so why not? 🙂

I envisioned something fish eye-ish, that looked a bit like a record cover. Found this on the world wide web:

I used it as a starting point for skecthing.

I usually make a bunch of doodles before getting into the nit and grit of “real” sketch work.

The final sketch.  The reason it’s mirrored is that I use a light board and flip the drawing back and forth a couple of times, going over stuff several times to get the shapes I want.

I put ink paper on the light board on top of the sketch. In this case I used a steel nib for inking.

Next step is coloring. Stay tuned…