TBO T Shirt Drama

[Rob Voska]

Every year for TBO we try to create a new event T-shirt and every year I have to say that it is one royal pain in the ass. For two guys who have absolutely no artistic ability the challenge of creating a shirt design is totally outside of our wheelhouse.

The first step in the design is to come up with some type of mental image that we can agree upon that we think might look good on a shirt. You need a basic direction to move in at the very beginning or you will be making too many changes and you will never get anything achieved.

Now that we have a design direction agreed upon it is time to draw up the shirt with the basics of our agreed mental designs to get to a view of how the shirt might look. This part is very difficult and it really requires quite a imagination to grab ahold of how the finished product should look. Keep in mind that both Rob and I have the artistic ability of a three year old with a crayon in his nose so to say that the initial drawings are "not so good" are a understatement as the photo below illustrates.



Believe it or not we both liked what we saw in the mock up drawing, it looked like a good foundation for the shirt so now it was time to locate the images and lettering that we wanted to use. Most of the images were sourced from the internet and the lettering was supplied by a professional pinstriper out of Dayton Ohio.







Alright, we got our design finalized, we got our images finalized now its off to the T-shirt printer so his artist can put all the pieces to the puzzle in place and show us what the final product will actually look like that will be printed on the shirts. Sometimes a little tweeking is needed but this time we liked what we saw so we had them printed.

Below is the 2024 TBO shirt.

[Larry Brown]

Rob and Bob- I know how much work goes into a project like this, been there before, and will say that you have created a great design. It should be well received and would expect to see a big demand.
Congratulations on a Coool shirt!

- Larry Brown -

[REAR]

Thanks for the compliment Larry. It is always good to hear opinions from others because Rob and I are probably our worse critics so to have someone appreciate our efforts is a feather in the cap .

A couple of other things that play into making a shirt is the cost of the finished product. We don't really purchase a large amount of shirts so their kind of a limited edition but with that comes no discount for a bulk purchase. We also try to do as much as we can on our end so the printer has minimal work however after covid the price of the shirts themselves plus printing costs have darn near doubled. The amount of different colors used on the shirt also plays into the cost factor.

2025 is right around the corner so were already tossing around a few ideas for the next shirt and its already starting to get painful.

R.E.A.R.