"Radical" t-shirts

I recently was asked to create another T-shirt design for my church's youth group's Disciple Now event. The event was ultimately downsized from a full-blown D-Now to a single-night lock-in, but as this was the first major event hosted under a new Minister to Students, we wanted to go "big" (or bigger, at least), so we sprung for the T-shirts anyway.

The theme was to be "Radical: Putting God First", with Deuteronomy 6:5 as the theme verse.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

I started as I always do: hand-drawn sketches, word maps, etc. The idea of swimming upstream (counter-culture, radical, etc.) appealed to me, especially given the symbolic connection between Christianity and fish. And I was searching for an iconic way to represent the "heart", "soul", and "strength" words. Here are some photos of those initial fiddlings:

I ended up not caring much for the winner's stage treatment of the three icons for the shirt back, so I just simplified those into three rounded icons, with a stylistic approach to the verse quote. (In fact, I got said stylistic approach from the way that block quotes are rendered by this very blog's templates!)

The front of the shirt came together pretty much like the sketch, except that I revisited the heart/soul/strength icons as watermarks, and added some grungy text:

Finally, here's the concept image I put together to "sell" the design to our pastor and youth leadership:

If you're looking for a shirt design along a similar vein and wish to recycle this one, I am, to put it rather concisely, quite okay with that. Just ask me via email for the artwork files.