OBEY - YGOTAS Commission

Yaaaaay, “OBEY my Rod” shirts are now available on Shark Robot for preorder til December 5th.  So now I’m allowed to write up my overly pretentious (especially for Yugioh Abridged art) artist commentary, yeah~!!!

So LK was like “I think it’d be cool to have a new shirt that parodies those Andre the Giant ‘OBEY’ shirts but instead it’s like Marik’s face you know?”  And I was like “I draw floating Malik heads all the time, I can do that, boom.”

Of the two shirts I designed, Obey was definitely the more straightforward one since LK had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to begin with.  Seriously just went into aforementioned “Malik floating head mode” and bam, he didn’t change much from the initial sketch.

From the start, I knew I wanted to incorporate purple as it’s Malik’s thematic color, and somehow none of the other Abridged Marik t-shirts had purple.  This affront against the most royal of hues must be rectified.

I wanted to avoid having this shirt compete with “Shut the Eff Up" as they both shared similar themes (Malik and mind control) so I purposefully made a few design choices to separate "Obey" out from that one, as well as the other Marik shirts.  Specifically, I wanted Malik to look more flustered/angry that hehas to tell you to obey, like he often is when running Evil Council meetings.  I wonder if I made him a little too scary? lol, but LK was okay with it so alright.  Respect my authoritah.

I also dressed him up in his cult leader clothes, from the beginning of Battle City arc, since that adds to the “OBEY” message and none of the other shirts feature him in this outfit.  (Or, Malik merchandise in general for that matter).

LK was really open with creative freedom, which was pretty cool, so long as it kept to the idea and within a five ink palette limit I could do whatever.  Keeping within the color limit was probably the most difficult part, along with the metallic shading, oh my goodness.  

It ended up being a fun but unexpected challenge!  I didn’t realize until I’d gotten to the color stage that the 5 rule really limited my shading options.  (Oh no,I told him I could keep it down to 3 colors, I’m full of lieeeees) But in the end, working around that limitation made for a strong design~!  I like to think so.

I also actually didn’t know these Andre Giant OBEY shirts were a popular thing, lol.  So, in a way I ended up designing two hipster!Abridged shirts, didn’t I?  But yeah, so Abridged shirts over here, go get.

Original Tumblr Post: dragonbeak.tumblr.com/post/102…
Check out Tumblr for wip stages.