This year my brother decided to take on the challenge of running the Chicago Marathon. The last time he planned to run it he broke his ankle several months before the race (ouch!). I had only been to a marathon once before and had a great time supporting not only my friend Ashley but the other runners as well. This year since a whole slew of my family members were planning on coming out I decided to design shirts and print them myself. I figured it would be fun for everyone involved.

The first step was to get the design done. After talking to Ashley about it she suggested I do something with cowbells since she had bought cowbells for her support team when she ran the Philadelphia Marathon last year. I had worked on several ideas along the Christopher Walken SNL skit theme (if you haven’t seen it, you are missing out on a classic), talked to my brother about it and he [being the excellent artist/illustrator/(insert other creative things here) that he is] came up with the idea of a cow coming at you with a bell bopping it over the head. He is a much better illustrator when it comes to things like this so he did the sketch and sent it to me (last minute).

My brother’s sketch for the t-shirts

As much as I loved the sketch of the cow that my brother sent me, I wanted to sharpen it up and smooth out the lines. I have come to realize that I really love vectorizing (don’t think that’s a real word) files and making all of the lines nice and smooth, point by point. It’s probably something that other people find tedious and time consuming but I find it calming and therapeutic in some strange way. Here it is below all cleaned up. The screen-printing project will be coming up next . . .

My vectorized touched up version of the t-shirt design (notice that is says MMVII and not MMVIII . . . a mistake I almost missed too late)

Screen shot of the vector points