Delayed Post: Shirts for Boyfriend!

This last summer and every summer for the past seven years or so, Kerry and I have visited each other.  This last summer in 2010 I got crafty and made him some shirts!  All shirts were given an inscription with fabric markers on the back-bottom-right of the shirt <3.

One I made as a Mario shirt.  Unfortunately in my first attempt I used up all the white matte paint stuff (that sticky kind of raised paint that the use on things like PE clothes or other school lettering), so I got to make a Dark Mario version.  I spread the paint as evenly and bestestly as I could.

Another I modeled after a black ink splat iron-on decal we found at the craft store:

We found a tiny but cute cat iron on patch that got a whole blue shirt all to itself!

Finally, I got some letters and an iron-on crab I thought was adorable.  In case you're not up on the World of Warcraft Blue Posters, Ghostcrawler was a very prominant Blizzard employee poster who fielded questions by the masses on the WoW forums.  Since making this shirt I think he quit or changed jobs (?) but I thought the shirt was an awesome idea anyway.

White Mage (by Abyss Wolf) Perler Bead + Painting

I have since improved my bead ironing skills immensely, but I was too proud of this sprite to redo it.  It was my first sprite on 4 boards, after all!  The simpler style of painting, compared to my harvest moon one, made the background much faster to do.

As a personal side-note, I love the white mage.  I always play a support class, if I can help it, in World of Warcraft or any other team-based game.  I get to stay away from the rabid dick-waving competition of the DPS-type characters and get to simply help people.  It feels good to help people, even if they're 98% jerks and idiots.

Phew!  All I can think of now is that I can work on sprites for my brother and friends.  I've been getting a lot of gift ideas, and I think it's time I started sharing the love!

Here are the work-in-progress photos:

Harvest Moon Perler Bead + Painting

The idea for how to do this was inspired by ShampooTeacher (as I've seen him on spritestitch).

The background is painted with acrylic paint, hand-graphed 1cm by 1cm from a screenshot from inside the coop of the SNES Harvest Moon.  The colors are far more realistic than I intended them... kind of looks pretty drab compared to the POP of the perler beads.  But oh well!

The chick is a simple chicken sprite from the game, done in 2x2 bead fashion to match the 1cm squares.  The chick is simply glued on top of the center of the screenshot. 

This was my first experiment with painting on canvas, and it was pretty annoying!  It took a good 3 coats for the color to stick, and for the more plentiful squares, if I didn't mix enough of the same color, I was pretty screwed.  ShampooTeacher did a much better job with having his Mario on a solid background, not having to worry too much about lining the pegs up with the grid perfectly.