The quantity of Fur on my shirt exceeds the amount of times I hung out with your mom.

- Me in 6th grade

Name

Fur describes the phenomenon when you go relax in your house and suddenly your exquisite black shirt gets ruined by the endless stream of fur.

To express my frustrations I experience dealing with cats and a dog, I always would complain about the amount of Fur that is left behind on shirts that I want to wear in social gatherings. You can try to clean them, use a lint remover, or even throw them in an incinerator. But the Fur within the shirts doesn't disappear and it never will.

Concept

 *insert photo of shirt with fur. 

This is the problem I deal with on a daily and I wanted to create a design that basically allows excess fur to be incorporated into the shirt design. I basically was thinking different methods of what to do.

My original plan was to teach myself how to create a Fur Effect on Illustrator. Although the tutorial did prove to be useful, the problem is that these type of designs are more for a colorful pallet rather than just using the color white. 

Eventually I just drew up a mock-up of a Cat, that would lead to the production of other designs.

Progression

By utilizing two shades of gray, I created a design of a Cat with two layers of Fur.

Essentially I wanted the eyes to be a reflection of each other and make the mouth simple, as my focus were more on the design of the fur itself.

Later on, I decided to create other renditions of the same model

One would represent a continuous line, another would be a more rugged look, and the last one would utilize simplistic shapes to achieve an interesting outcome

Originally I wanted all four of the designs to be utilized at the front of the shirt. However, there is a lot of conflict between the variations, thus creates a clash of focus that could potentially ruin the t-shirt.

My intention is to incorporate Excess Fur as part of the work, rather than showcasing different forms of the concept.

Thus I decided to go with the following two versions

The one on the left seems to show the most fur of the design due to me drawing a lot of curved lines.

The one on the right is the most unique of the bunch, where it utilized shapes to achieve a more abstract look.

However, it felt like it wasn't good enough. There was a huge portion of empty space, thus the design didn't feel complete when I implemented them onto a shirt.

I decided to add two elements to act as the supporting tools for both of the cats.

For the Furry Cat, I created this portal-like contraption to indicate that it was summoned from a different world. With fur coming from the portal, it has become evident that the design will eventually be full of fur given time.

As for the Cubic Cat, I wanted to simulate that fur is falling from the cat, thus I utilized the triangles that matched the cat and have them fall through various angles.

With this, it achieves the background details for both variations and resulted in the two final designs.

Execution

*Note the image slightly differs from the final product

With this concludes the journey of creating Fur the shirt. I personally tested it by hugging my cat and seeing if the fur left behind enhances the experience.

I gotta say, it does look good now because of the added Fur.

Overall a fun design to work on, with potential to create other products off of it due to the other two versions of the cat not being used.

Fur creates the solution that no pet owner could every imagine; The usage of Fur within the design is just Purrfect.