One thing I love about my job is the fact I never know what I might have to illustrate that day.  Today my lucky task was to combine the idea of a mad scientist with the mad hatter, while giving it a baseball theme.  Obviously this was just a little crazy.  I was feeling a little ambitious  today so I decided to document my workflow.  This graphic is intended to be screen printed on t-shirts, so my main focus was to keep color counts down, and ensure ease of production.  

 

My first step was to quicklyl sketch out my character and flesh out what could be possible elements.  I then scanned in the sketch and began working in Photoshop.

Drawing on top of the sketch I went ahead and started doing a more concerete sketch.  I also decided how I wanted to frame the illustration.  In this case I wanted to go with a circular theme, since placing a squre graphic on a tee usually results in a less than dynamic layout.  I also imported a 3d model of the bat and angled it so I could get the perspective right.  

Here's the more fleshed out preliminary sketch, with all the elements in place.

Here I've tried to go ahead and start laying out where I want colors to go, and an idea of what colors I wanted to use.  

I turned off the color layer and went ahead and finalized and cleaned up the linework.

Started to block in final colors.

I wasn't really happy with the colors I picked, so I switched up the pallet a bit.  I wanted to go for a more electric blue rather than the toxic greens/purples.

Here's the finished product (sans the company logo and tagline).  I adjusted the background colors for a more tonal effect.  I also added a few glows to give it more vibrant feel.  All in all, this probably took around 6 hours to complete.