The making of a T-shirt design for Eggnog Games / Maze Dog

Eggnog Games has been making "wacky animal games since 2017."

Andrew contacted me through Mastodon about creating a T-shirt design. The inspiration/theme were to be from the Maze Dog game, specifically.

Here’s a link to Maze Dog on itch.io and Eggnog Games' account with a bunch of other games. Go play some!

Some of my sketches which follow aren’t going to make any sense unless you make note of the instruction to use "X to Bark and Read", which I thought was hilarious.

Note the mailboxes, little yellow bird, and the bulldog. In the game, you can read mail, bark at the birds to make them go home, and push the bulldog around to help solve puzzles.

Based purely on the elements of the game, I gave myself permission to go nuts in my sketchbook. As you can see, I believe in the "no bad ideas" school of initial creative brainstorming. Also, if I’m chuckling to myself, the process is going well.

Andrew’s feedback was absolutely perfect, taking elements from the sketches and providing concrete ideas. I was thrilled that he chose the least likely (but most visually interesting) sketch. And I loved the idea of adding the freaked-out birds to the foliage.

I made this rough sketch to incorporate the various ideas:

And then it occurred to me that the woman could be a bulldog from the game:

(This hideous "bulldog" reminds me a bit of the cow head makeup from Troma’s Tromeo and Juliet from 1996. Which was directed by James Gunn, by the way.)

And then a slightly more refined version with everything in its place. This is basically the finished design in terms of placement. Note that I’ve now changed the hand to a paw and the bulldog head is much better:

Then I made a new image in Krita with my sketch as a reference and started doing the "final" drawing in a corner picked at random:

Then the bulldog and the rest of the border:

Here you can see how I used the low-resolution sketch underneath my "final" drawing. I often toggled the sketch off and on depending on whether it was guiding or distracting me:

I went pretty nuts with the details. This was not intentional at all. I just couldn’t help myself when I was zoomed in on this big image:

More details filled in. It’ll be hard to tell, but I was going back and refining things in the older parts of the drawing to match my "better" new parts:

Almost there. Everything but the actual Maze Dog is in there now. Note that I’ve cleaned up the Eggnog Games text in this one:

Last work-in-progress image. Unfortunately, I wasn’t happy with the big blank space in the background and I had been trying to figure out how to get a maze in there. So I decided to "bite the bullet" and just go ahead and draw a dang hedge maze. Here you can see the outline of the maze:

This is the completed image. As you can see, I decided the maze looked best if I actually shaded it in with individual leaves. I also kept coming back to the bulldog’s hair. Between looking at it from across the room and asking my family for feedback, I got it to the point where nothing was really bothering me anymore:

Here’s what the full 3000 x 3000 pixel image looks like when zoomed in to 100%. That’s what I was looking at most of the time. And yes, as you can see, I drew thousands of little leaves in that hedge maze. It doesn’t take as long as you might think to fill in an area. Music helps.

When you view the whole image zoomed in like this, you’ll see that the drawing is absolutely full of flaws. There are tons of things that are obviously wrong all over it. I could have easily spent another week polishing everything. But I think it’s good to embrace the flaws because that’s part of what makes it the product of a human hand. I hope you agree.

Thanks for (barking and) reading!