CHIRP – The Chipmunk Relocation Program T-Shirt

What the heck? What does this have to do with arcade? Not too much. Only in relationship. It just so happens the guy who works on my game boards has a bit of a thing for saving Chipmunks and releasing them back into the wild. Chris and I felt that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up – so we had shirts made for Chris’ annual Halloween arcade party.

Goofy chipmunks and caricatures

I won’t be able to do the story justice, so hopefully Chris will comment on the exchange he had one night with Bill about chipmunks. All I know is that is was….interesting. Chris told me about it and wanted to print some shirts. I believe it started as wanting just the ‘CHIRP’ logo, but me being the designer I couldn’t let it sit at just that.

Right away I started to picture Bill in his van driving these woodland creatures back to the forest. Then it dawned on me to just use the Mystery Machine from Scooby Doo, and the rest just fell into place.

But before I finished the design, I started with a drawing of Bill. Here is an image of that.

I scanned it in, and traced over the artwork in Illustrator so I had a two color illustration, black for all of the artwork and then a greytone for all of the shading. The illustration is a decent representation of what he looks like, it certainly does look better at a smaller size.

We started to investigate getting the shirts printed at a ‘do it yourself’ virtual shop online, but the prices added up quick. So, I got with Rich Lint and he agreed to print the shirts in time for the party, which was in three weeks. Certainly, I had plenty of other things to do, but the deadline for this forced my hand. I reduced the illustration down to 4 colors and chose a tan tonal range because….the chipmunk was brown and looked best in that color.

Did the color separations and wala, the perfect party gift, a custom illustrated screened t-shirt for poking some fun. We had about 10 of them printed in various sizes and 4-5 of us put them on for the party, some of Bill’s collecting contacts, and handed a few out to his other friends.

Bill seemed to like the shirts, enough that the image is now his avatar.

Here are some similar arcade posts

• Screen printing / color seperations diagram of Defender marquee
• Rally-X overlay separations finished
• Fun arcade / console game themed illustrations
• Artwork for the A.P.B. seat – A simple but rare item
• Dig Dug Cabaret Control Panel Overlay Artwork

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