Tarantino Babies

It was early 2008 when start-up clothing company, Dutch Southern, approached Blair with a crazy idea for a T-shirt.

Blair recalls the one-paragraph brief: ’We want a T-shirt design with a bunch of Quentin Tarantino film characters. But they have to be really young kids, in a playground, interacting with one another. And try to make them look like younger versions of the actors from the films’.

So, Tarantino meets the Muppet Babies. Easy. Right...

Blair says he remembers little of 2008, but this design obviously took up some of his grey matter. ‘I spent a lot of time on this, trying to lock down characters, make them obvious, but keep them feeling young.’

Once he’d locked down the composition - who would interact with whom - he started on the characters. ‘I think I drew Chris Penn and Harvey Keitel first, then Michael Madsen. I was really stoked with the style I had for Michael, so I went back, changed Harvey and Chris, and from there the rest fell into place. Jonathan at Dutch Southern had some great ideas too, like the 'stick in the eye' incident in the sand pit.

The next challenge was picking the 5 colours for the print. ‘Limited palettes are always a hard ask, especially with so much going on,’ says Blair, ‘with such varied characters involved I convinced them to push it out to seven. Still a mission, but can you imagine how flat this would be without the blue and yellow?’

Fast forward four years, and Blair, to his surprise, starts getting emails and Facebook messages saying Tarantino is wearing his shirt at the 2012 Comic Con in San Diego. 'I'm stoked he got sent one, even if it took him four years to wear it!’ says Blair. ‘But seriously, I’m just glad he liked the homage.’