Patagonia T-shirt design

I did 2 t-shirt graphics for Patagonia in January of 2009, followed by 3 more over this past summer. It takes quite a while for the shirts to finally make it out for sale, and this 1st one is finally available as of today. It's been dubbed "Platform" for the oil platform I depicted in the middle of a very hostile sea. In the words of Patagonia:

"Mother Nature always wins in the end - we hope. Imagine the problems of oil dependency and global warming being swept away - for good. Featuring original artwork by Tim Tomkinson, the Platform T-Shirt carries an inside message about The Southern Environmental Law Center (SouthernEnvironment.org), a group leveraging the tools of environmental law and policy to promote energy efficiency and renewable resources that will lead us to a new, cleaner future. The shirt is recyclable through the Common Threads Recycling Program. "

I'll post the other t-shirt graphics as they become available. Click here to purchase this one, and to see some of the other great t-shirts they have available. They've been having some cool designs coming in from The Heads of State, Geoff McFetridge, and even Shepard Fairey.

End of 2008 Update!!

I realize that's it's been quite a while since my last update. Thankfully, it's due to a huge amount of work in November and December, and not just complete laziness. In November, I worked on a project for Nike & Footlocker making artwork to be animated for 4 TV commercials. The work was added to live footage that had already been shot, with the animation going on in the background, but unfortunately the job was killed right before starting on the 4th spot. It's a long story which I will cover later when I post some of the work.. but it was still a great project to work on. For now, here's a teaser image:


On top of this project, I've been creating much more work for Key Bank to go along with the current campaign I created over the summer. I've been doing collateral work for in-bank posters, brochures.. even for the backs of ATM displays, as well as getting tons of requests from individual banks for direct mail pieces. One of the coolest applications of this collateral work will be as large-format banners inside the Key Arena in Seattle. All of this Key stuff has worked out to be around 24 illustrations in 2 months, many of which I will post soon.. but here's a couple to start with:


Also, in the past 2 months, I've created an ad campaign for IBM, made another 2 Men's Journal portraits, 2 more Spirit Magazine portraits, a piece for Dwell Magazine, a couple portraits for Walden University, and started work for some Patagonia t-shirts. More on all of these later...

Happy New Year to everyone!
- Tim

"Tuner Kids" t-shirt illustrations

Last month, I created these illustrations for a new clothing brand called "Tuner Kids". It's an offshoot of the "PRPS" jeans brand, and is aimed at the very niche "tuning" culture of car modification. If you've ever seen The Fast and the Furious and Jackass, it's sort of like that.. just mix the two together. The "tuner kid" is basically one of those kids who likes to beef up their cars (almost exclusively imports - Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi) with additional or replacement parts for extra speed, or sometimes simply for aesthetics. You may have seen them in local parking lots comparing their cars, their girls, and/or the fluency of their slang. Or racing by you wrecklessly with rather loud mufflers (is that an oxymoron?).

I was asked to convey plenty of rawness, attitude, obnoxiousness, dirt.. flies. As well as a little humor here and there. This subject matter is certainly not my norm, which is why I had a lot of fun drawing these. They'll be printed on t-shirts as part of the launch of the brand, with more designs to come in a few months. I'll post a link to the final shirts when they're up for sale.