Hey guys, I hope you don't mind me posting the following, although if you do then I'll delete it
To cut a long story short, Insert Coin influenced me to create some Shenmue-related clothing items. The reason for this is, although they had the official license to produce Shenmue clothing, I felt their design choices were so uninspired. Ryo's jacket = iconic. A great choice. A t-shirt with the tiger from said jacket on the front? Not so much, in my opinion.
And that was all they could come up with...
If you're a hardcore Shenmue fan - like I know you all are - then you know that there is a vast amount of material in the series to create countless amounts of designs. Obviously I understand Insert Coin is a business and a very good one at that, but I just feel they barely scraped the surface with their Shenmue items. To me, it looked like the designs were done by someone who wasn't a fan of the game. If you look at virtually all their other designs, they're clever references to the games that inspired them. With Shenmue, that just wasn't the case.
Which leads me onto why I'm posting all of this. Recently, I finally got around to finishing my first Shenmue-inspired t-shirt! As you will see, it is a recreation of the Heavens t-shirt you see various members wearing in the 2nd game. Not very original on my part I know! But hopefully a nice homage that you guys will enjoy. Below is a picture of it:
In an ideal world, I would've loved to have printed and produced this t-shirt myself. However, right now I'm just testing the waters to see how my designs are received before I decide on embarking on this type of work more seriously. Due to this, I've used customizable design websites as my platform for now. The advantages to this, however, is that it lets users select and choose their own colours and t-shirt styles to match their preference. And with the Heavens t-shirt, that is ideal because it is shown in various different styles in the game
Anyway, here are some links to purchase the t-shirt:
http://www.redbubble.com/people/dgomez2 ... ns-t-shirthttp://www.zazzle.com/shenmue_heavens_t ... 7944655892The differences with both platforms is that, with Redbubble, the design is bigger, whereas there are more customizable options with Zazzle. So you could, for example, recreate the design some Heavens members wear, where the sleeves are a different colour to the base of the tee. Personally, I like using Redbubble more but I guess it is always better to leave more options available!
By the way, I would love any feedback you guys may have or any design ideas you may have thought of (I have plenty!).
Thanks for your time