Illustration Throwback Thursday #52- The Little Piranhas!

Back in 2006 the Minnesota Twins pro baseball team hired me to design this “Little Piranha” character for them, including doing some illustrations for various T-Shirts and other merchandise.

Why piranhas? Earlier that year White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen was being interviewed about a series with the Twins and called them “Little Piranhas” because while they didn’t kills you with big bites like a shark, they took all these little chomps out of you with their “small ball” style of playing and the next thing you know you are dead. It was a compliment… I think. Anyway the Twins loved that and they made a “little Piranha” plushy and other stuff out of the character.

The above was a T-shirt I designed. Actually it was the third version of it. Here’s the first:

MLB rejected this because we could not be shown “defacing” other leam logos. So I did this one:

They rejected this because it was still distorting the logos. So the one up top was the final design.