Anatomy of an Eimertoon...Team Chaos

Soooo, about two months ago, my brother gave me a ring and asked me to create a t-shirt design for his team at his place of work.

His team (dubbed Team Chaos), works at a warehouse for a major food chain where they load and unload product onto four-wheelers to be shipped to stores around the world.

As it turns out, there are a lot of accidents in his line of work. He runs a forklift and the pace, so I'm told, is extremely fast. Think ants working in a ant hill, but replace the ants with humans and the hill with a warehouse.

As it also turns out, going 180 days without an accident is a big thing.

Being a senior copywriter in Northeast Ohio, the most dangerous thing I come in contact with is strugging with the perfect 'actionable' word to complement the product I'm trying to sell. There have been a couple scaldings at the Water Cooler, which - at times - is set on hot.

Ahh, the life of The Deadliest Copywriter.

But I digress. To celebrate Team Chaos's success, the team decided to forgo a great meal at a local food chain and, instead, get t-shirts made.

Which is where I came in.

As I sat down to talk to my brother about the t-shirt design, I thought about the name Team Chaos. Having just watched 'How to Train Your Dragon, I was very eager to draw a Viking in some sort of cartoon. Then I started thinking about Vikings. Then Braveheart. Then I pictured a group of Road Warriors running full speed towards the viewer.

I told my brother my idea and he loved it.

"Sounds great," he said. "But you have to make sure to include the forklifts somehow."

It all came together in my head. I quickly sat down and sketched the following drawings:

"Awesome," my brother said. "But..."

"But what?" I interjected, expected the worst.

"No, no, no, I like it. Don't get me wrong," he said. "But you have to be sure to have a mixed crowd."

"Mixed crowd?" I asked.

"You know," my brother said. "We have women and not just white dudes."

Point taken. Make it a little more diverse.

"Another thing," he said. "Can you have them throwing like toilet paper, 2-liter bottles of soda, potato chips and jars of pickles in the air...."

"Like grenades." I said.

"Exactly like grenades," he concurred.

Lo, and behold, my brother was taking on the role of Creative Director.

"Done," I said.

The next day I sketched out the more intricate drawing you see below:

After getting my brother's thumbs up, I filled in the details and added the Team Chaos name (the font is called Top Secret which was pulled from the kick-ass website DaFont.com) and 'Voila!', you have a t-shirt design...

Usually, this is how I approach most of my traditional cartoons for the web including my Christmas Eimertoons.

The cool thing is I haven't created a t-shirt design in some time, so this was a lot of fun.

Thanks for thinking of me, bro!

Also, my viking guy made it into the design, which was even more worth the blood, sweat and tears.