I worked at the screen printing and athletic wear facility, M. J. Soffe Co. in Fayetteville, NC from 1995 to 2004 where I first learned to use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
Most projects involved working with college mascots for a variety of schools or designs for military bases and gift stores. Occasionally, I would have the chance to design some freehand character work which would be scanned and then cleaned up and colorized in Adobe software for color separation.
This is from one of my favorite projects at M. J. Soffe. This must have been around the late 90’s / early 2000’s when Coca-Cola® released a line of Beanie Baby stuffed animals. I got to create the character designs seen here based on the some of the dolls in the product line.
Another design, one of three, done for the Coca-Cola® Christmas Beanie Baby line. The client provided some rough sketches to convey how they wanted the beanies to be acting in each design, such as the ‘Christmas Tree’ pyramid stance above, beanies popping out of a gift box (not shown), and up on the rooftop as seen here.
Sadly, this is the one of the three designs which never printed.
This was a fun project. I had Da Vinci’s sketches in the back of my mind when deciding how to depict the major cities. I’d heard that the client was very pleased with the design and had considered getting it printed not just on apparel but also other gift items. (Not sure if that happened. Ah, well.)
Apparently, the mosquitos and snakes were challenging for troops in some locations as determined by this unique request. Designs like this could be printed along with the name of different military bases and sold in different gift shops.
Here, the client requested their ‘Gators’ mascots along with manatees and a turtle at a football game party. Right down my alley!
(The cartoon animals, I mean. Not football.)