Band Logo

A behind the scenes look at my creation of The Dead Yetis band logo

I always dreamed of being with a drummer. Not really sure why, maybe I knew from a young age that I would someday end up with my now husband who just so happens to be a drummer.

Being married to a drummer comes with a lot of things. First there is the endless tapping on everything. For the most part it doesn’t phase me unless I’m anxious and then it only feeds the anxiety and must be stopped. There are also the shows, in the last few years they’ve been a lot less frequent and now, with a baby, it’s a lot harder for me to make them which I often feel bad about. So to make up for my lack of physical support at the shows, I decided to help the guys out the only way I know how–art.

Obviously, with the name The Dead Yetis there was going to have to be a yeti. I wanted him to be cartoon like and a little silly. Clayton came up with the idea for X’s as eyes and one of the other band members came up with the idea of wanting him to be giving a thumbs up and having a cheesy smile. Other than that, I had free range to create this character however I wanted.

A few of the original test sketches in my sketchbook. I ended up going with longer legs even though I really liked this short guy.

I started with a variety of drawings playing with shape and length of limbs. I also had to work on his face quite a bit, it never came our right until I realized that I’m essentially making a white gorilla and then things came together.

This was the first version of the Yeti before updating his face and adding the thumbs up. I like how the texture of his fur turned out and still like his facial expression but the band wanted it to be a bit sillier.

Once I had the length of limbs and overall shape of the character down, and knew that his face was going to be more ape like, I had to figure out the placement of the facial features and decide how I would love the fur. Often in cartoons these are colored in one shade of color to keep it easy to draw them a million times, seeing as I’m not making this into a full fledged animation I wanted to go ahead and add more detail to the fur with a variety of colors and texture. To me, those little details give the most personality. I also found a photo of a gorilla giving a thumbs up which helped me to position the hand in just the right place.

(In this video you can see how I created the final character. I liked a lot of the body of the first one but needed a different arm motion and face. I also ended up going with a slightly simpler texture for the fur so that I can more easily recreate him in different poses if the band ever decides to make merch.)

The final drawing displayed at their concert.

After a few different renditions of this guy, I came up with the final Yeti character and placed him next to the hand lettered name of the band. This final drawing would be displayed on the backdrop of their first show together in Denver.