Giraffe, Tortoise? Girtoise!

Two Girtoises about to feast on cloud-rooted Bananeries on the plains of the seastern continent. These animals are also known as Toraffes or by their scientific name: Giradinoides. In German, they have the even better name Schiraffen. The Bananeries contain valuable vitamins and minerals which help the animals in maintaining smooth fur and strong shells.

Detail at full resolution:

Available printed on apparel, as poster and a few other forms.

Technical notes

This is a completely tablet-drawn work. With my trusty serial Wacom Intuos, still working as I keep compiling the module after every kernel update. Originally, I wanted to use Krita for the nice paintbrush engine and the canvas rotation. I found the later to be critical in achieving the smoothest curves, which is a lot easier in a horizontal direction. With what ended up being a 10000 x 10200 resolution and only 4 GiB RAM, I ran into performance problems. Where Krita failed, GIMP still worked, though I had to switch to the development version to have canvas rotation. At the end, GIMP’s PNG export failed due to it not being able to fork a process with no memory left! Flattening the few layers to save memory led to GIMP being killed. Luckily, there’s the package xcftools with xcf2png, so I could get my final PNGs via command line!

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“Hobby harder; it’ll stunt!” RC-car T-shirt design

Backstory

In 2016, RC-car company Arrma released the Outcast, calling it a stunt truck. That label lead to some joking around in the UltimateRC forum. One member had trouble getting his Outcast to stunt. Utrak said “The stunt car didn’t stunt do hobby to it, it’ll stunt “. frystomer went: “If it still doesn’t stunt, hobby harder.” and finally stewwdog was like: “I now want a shirt that reads ‘Hobby harder, it’ll stunt’.” He wasn’t alone, so I created a first, very rough sketch.

Process

After a positive response, I decided to make it look like more of a stunt in another sketch:

Meanwhile, talk went to onesies and related practical considerations. Pink was also mentioned, thus I suddenly found myself confronted with a mental image that I just had to get out:

To find the right alignment and perspective, I created a Blender scene with just the text and boxes and cylinders to represent the car. The result served as template for drawing the actual image in Krita, using my trusty Wacom Intuos tablet.

Result

This design is now available for print on T-shirts, other apparel, stickers and a few other things, via Redbubble.