I’m a big fan of designing and putting in work on my site, but cleaning is no fun. The wife enjoys cleaning, or rather can’t go long without it. I made an argument that she needs to think about hobbies that make money instead of those that cost money and are no fun. She’s very talented and began drawing some tribal skulls and then came up with a drawing for a day of the dead skull.

She scanned the day of the dead skull drawing and emailed it to me. I cut out the white of the paper and sharpened up some of the imperfections. The outline was filled in, flipped to white, and then given a beveled effect. I placed the hand-drawn style roses in the eye sockets. To make it stand out on white, as well as black, I gave it a nice black shadowed outline. The last step was to integrate the company logo. It was now ready for the next dia de la muerta celebration.

It was uploaded to Zazzle first and quickly won a “Today Best Award” for the day of the dead skull canvas bag. It has now been added across all of our shops. It’s not a big seller yet, but there is definitely a lot of buzz for so early on.

There was a time when the old skull and cross bones were only for bikers, gangs, and goth kids. These days, kids all over wear them to school and there are even versions with pink bow ties. My wife is a big fan of them and she’s an artist, so she sketched a few designs for me to put on shoes. I converted them to digital copy, then added some shading and rough texture to all of the skull and bones designs.

These skull and cross bones were such great designs that I had to make sure to add them to anything. The main skull and cross bones design was placed on the front of shirts, gifts, the toe and lip of shoes. The pile of skull and bones was used for the sides of shoes and the backs of some shirts. Our store logo was built subtly into the designs.

Hitting the punching bag is great exercise and an even better way to work out aggression. This has been a part of my workout routine, so it was only fitting to create a design using boxing gloves. I prefer black gloves, but the red boxing gloves are classic.

I chose to use the gloves in the guard position. It’s a nice way to show them off when you are sparring or when hitting the speed bag. This was designed with both the amateur and professional boxer in mind. Also available from my Zazzle Red Boxing Gloves section.

The irate gamer is a popular sight in this video game age. That inspired this painting by my fiance, Renee Carrick. It was painted onto a canvas, she snapped some photos of it, and I translated it into digital art. There’s no doubt that everyone who has played a video game can relate to how irate this kid gamer must have felt.

Most kids today can relate to the irate gamer. If it weren’t practically bald, then I would have pulled out my hair over more than a few games. My favorite expression of anger is punching the couch and swearing. I’m sure the kid in the painting has come close to turning his arm into a catapult for the controller. On this design my fiance did all the creative hard work and I got to do the easy job of adding it to my sites including the secondary Irate Gamer section.

During my Physics years in college, I became very familiar with the variations of the radiation symbol. The fission and fusion of atoms was always a big part of the various science courses that I had to take. The radioactivity warnings always stuck out, because I learned that you could be literally cooked from inside by decaying particles from radioactive elements.

A radiation symbol catches the eye and I’m sure that most people would agree that nuclear war is high on the list of fears. Many popular movies center around the danger of terrorists getting a hold of a nuke. The atom bomb is the most dangerous technology ever created by man. This warning sign design passes on that intimidation. I never got too deep into the atomic sciences, but I had to give a nod to this symbol of danger.

I took the basic form of the radiation sign and gave it a beveled appearance. Yellow was chosen with caution in mind. Black was used to outline the entire symbol to make it pop in any color. Finally, I integrated the brand into the very bottom in a subtle way.

I think it was around the time of the whole lift on assault rifles ban that I first thought of this design.  Sure guns are dangerous, but that 2nd amendment is a very important part of our freedom. There are virtually crime free towns across the globe that stay that way due to all the guns.  No criminal will dare hit a town that is filled with gun toting grandmas.  Criminals need easy targets.

Now this is a logo that proclaims that you are free. It’s not just about your right to bear arms, as much as it is about all the freedoms that you enjoy. I wish I could say that the white and black colors were chosen for some kind of profound double meaning for freedom, but it’s just what looked good to me.

The pistol makes the perfect r for this logo.  I just updated the logo to better incorporate my brand by moving it from under the design to the barrel of the gun. This way it appears to be the writing that you would normally see across the barrel of a gun.

As per usual, the design on my main site can be reached by clicking on the thumbnail, or you can also check the “Free” Logo at my Zazzle store for even more unique products.

There was a time that my main site ( Gabriel Angel Design ) revolved around the 7 deadly sins. I’ve never been very religious, but religious history interests me. I would spend hours watch the specials on the history channel. Each of the 7 sins is as much fun as the next. It has become very easy for me to list them: pride, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, envy and lust. The recent economic times have made Greed a very popular subject in the news.

This greed logo was inevitable. There were designs for each individual sin, but I eventually needed to have one flagship design with them all. It was an obvious choice to pick a Gothic style font. I chose to have the “Seven Deadly Sins” part stick out with larger letters and an off white color. Things did not look right when I had just 1 of each of the sins in the background, so I chose to have multiple instances with a faded silver color.

This all blended nicely with the black background that I had chosen when I first began, but you can’t have a black box with sharp edges. It’s not easy on the eyes and looks really cheap. That’s where the rounded corners came in, problem solved. The last piece was the logo which fit easily in the center margins without taking away from the design.