I am your boice

Hi everyone!

Thanks for asking. You see, I’ve been under attack recently. Some of my loyal readers were upset that I wrote about Joel visiting before I writing about my parents’ visit, even though my family was here a whole two weeks before Joel.

Well whoever you are, I hope you’ll forgive me. I was hard at work… doing… something… … …

As heartbreaking as it is to think seeing my beautiful face wasn’t enough for them, my parents came in town to see my Mom’s favorite kpop group, CNBLUE. As we were making the plan, my Mom told me that the band wasn’t selling any merch for the tour. If only we knew somebody who could make us t-shirts to wear to the concert…

CNBLUE has a line of merch that I’m guessing was designed around some patches drawn by the band members (above). I don’t think I fooled anyone, but I decided to draw our t-shirt design using a similar chisel-tipped look. Here’s my reference board below.

I’m not really sure why I put in the clipping of someone who looks like Anthony Bourdain, but the drawing is by one of my favorite comic artists Coco Picard. ↓

Click the picture to see Picard’s other graphic essays on her website.

One of the challenges of this piece was that I knew we were going to either be screen printing or using an iron-on, so I needed the background to be one continuous shape. Here’s the final design below, with the front of the shirt on the left and the back on the right.

Some interesting things about this design:

• My laptop has a touchscreen so I decided to use my finger instead of my drawing tablet. I’m not really sure how this affected the final image, but it was a lot of fun.

• The blocky shapes don’t really fit with the original “Home Goods” style, but I like how they create areas of contrast.

• “Boice” is the name of the fandom, so I really wanted to incorporate both “TEAM BOICE” and “I AM YOUR BOICE.”

• As I was moving the shapes around to fill the space, Alex suggested I add the Korean heart hand things next to Yonghwa 🫰.

• “CNBLUE” stands for CODE NAME: BURNING LOVELY UNTOUCHABLE EMOTIONAL, the codenames for the members of the band. This leaves me with only one question:

• This design features all the elements of a good concert shirt: the name of the tour, the tour dates, and a picture of everyone who was there.

The next step was to use Auntie Stacy’s Cricut machine to cut out the designs and then peel off the negative space. This is where my stencil-ification came in handy, since Alex was able to pull off the extra material in sticky piece. ↓

And here’s the finished cutout!

Next is some peeling ASMR after ironing the design onto the shirt.

And here’s the finished product. Look! I made that shirt!

Usually I just laugh when people say “Wow! Did you draw that?” while I’m drawing, but getting asked “Wow! Where did you get that shirt?” was pretty awesome.

Thanks for tuning in! See you next time!

BONUS MANGA