Go the Rounds

Go the Rounds borrows from classic cartoon boxing, red gloves included. Weary Wolf gets beaten up and goes through every round, the way life keeps knocking you down and putting you through the wringer. You decide whether to show up and stand through it and come out stronger, and that is what makes you a winner. It is meant to be more humbling than victorious, closer to what people actually go through.

It started with the tooth, the first thing drawn. This page shows different expressions for it. The goal was something exaggerated and silly, flying toward Weary Wolf or away from him.

Once the tooth was flying out of him, Weary Wolf's face came next, along with the idea of stars lifting him up. In a classic cartoon you see stars when you get hit, so here the stars help him. Some pull on his ears, and others act as his corner men, spraying him with water and wiping him down.

The angle took a while to settle. A fist flying in and his tongue flying out were fixed ideas. This is the first design shown to the team, and it wasn't visually appealing. Art for clothing has two jobs: it should be exaggerated like a classic cartoon, and it should look good enough that someone wants to wear it. That was a big lesson.

The team said the facial expression needed work. The eyes stayed, but the attacker, the dog, needed a different angle. This is the first dog, throwing the punch at an angle. It changed again before the final version.

When a sketch isn't right, a new layer goes on top and the sketching continues there. The layers stack up, one over another, until something looks good.

More details go in, including the teeth. The question was whether they should fly straight at the viewer or off to the side. Off to the side won, because it looks more like a tooth from that angle. The goal was still something really silly.

In the last version, the dog's face is stronger and the body language stays the same. He is an Irish bulldog, so his shorts use the colours of the Irish flag. He has a gold tooth, tribal tattoos like boxers and wrestlers often have, a four-leaf clover because he is lucky, and a little dog bowl because he is a good boy. His belt is based on wrestling title belts: simple, with small diamonds and a plaque on the front that reads Toxic Society. The lettering changed too. A bold, classic boxing font had the right energy but didn't match the script, so it was redone to be clean and consistent.

Every print is hand-pressed in-house onto the garment you're holding.