Barista Bears [Behind the Scenes]

I get asked quite a lot about the inspiration behind the Barista Bears print.
To put it simply: I was inspired by the Starbucks cafe I worked at and loved.
However, the original concept was not that of bears in green aprons, but of wandering and dancing giants.

I was inspired by some of Olly Moss' work and I wanted to create an ethereal feeling through my background and use of shapes and space. This concept involved the mountain range you can see from behind the store, and a great bear spirit carrying the store on it's back.

That concept later evolved into a phoenix and dragon dancing in the sky above the store. I wanted to put a piece of me into the print, and I decided to get inspiration from my korean heritage.
The design however, was not giving me the sparkles I normally feel when a design is what it should be. I love the concept, but it just wasn't meant for this purpose. So, I decided to brainstorm some more and took a nap.

Upon waking up from my nap a thought ran right into my noodle brain and said: BEARISTA BEARS.
And thus, the barista bears were born.
With this design I decided to try a different way of illustration. I really love the marks I make when I sketch and so I wanted to incorporate that into my final print work.
Here are some sketches and WIP images:

Upon making this design I ran into a problem: the bears were all too small that when printed you would lose a lot of their finer details. One point of this piece was to highlight different species of bears and their different physical attributes.
The solution to the problem was to eliminate three bears to create more space. The three bears that were cut were: American Black Bear, Antler Bear (the beer), and Spectacled Bear.

After more refinement this final design was born:

Printing this bad boy was a pain in the rear! Mainly because of registration. Ironically, I designed the traps in a way where registration was meant to look messy and not perfect...yet it took me about ten-twenty minutes on EACH colour trying to get the registration correct. UGH.
Here are some printing/production pictures:

 My biggest concern through this whole process was if this type was going to print out without looking like crap.

Tada! And what do you know? The type printed out perfectly.
And it's available in my etsy shop!


Design time: 4 hours
Print time: 6 hours
Total time spent: 10 hours