About DirtFish
DirtFish Rally School, located near Seattle, WA, is renowned for its comprehensive driving school. They offer programs aimed at individuals as well as corporate and private groups. DirtFish offers a variety of courses focusing on car control, confidence building, and rally techniques across different surfaces.
The school boasts a fleet of turbocharged all-wheel-drive Subaru WRX STIs and rear-wheel-drive Subaru BRZs. Not only do they educate thousands of students annually, but they also compete in stage rally and rallycross.
DirtFish also publishes rally- and racing-related content, helping to educate and entertain a wide audience of motorsports enthusiasts.
Designing their t-shirts
DirtFish commissioned these three shirt designs from me to feature a few of their school’s cars t-shirts. The shirts were given to that year’s students, and were also sold in the on-site pro shop.
The client asked for:
- Simple graphics in the style of my other vector artwork.
- A reduced color palette for easier screen printing.
- Flying mud featured in the artwork if possible. It’s a rally school – if mud isn’t flying, you’re doing it wrong.
The client supplied reference images of several of their school cars, high quality action shots of the cars mid-circuit. At the time, their cars had bold, bright graphics featuring DirtFish orange. I worked that into the colors of the vector paintings, and kept highlights and shadows to solid white and black. This kept the total screens required for the artwork to a minimum, simplifying the printing process.
Once the client chose the final three designs from the concepts I provided, I adapted each to work on light or dark t-shirts as needed.
Final artwork
