Tom Perry is a man of many talents. He’s a shredder on the BMX mobile and a professional doodler, as evidenced by his Awkward Words blog.

Tom Perry recently cooked up the graphic you see above (bear doing a tabletop) for the current line of G-Sport softgoods, which are available now (full preview coming soon). Tom wrote up a quick blurb on how the shirt came to be, so read on….

An homage to one of the original G-SPORT designs (mean polar bear doing a mean turndown), Jim (Bauer) asked me to draw up the artwork for this shirt based on some of my artwork I post on my doodle-blog. Specifically it was a kangaroo with boxing gloves I had doodled for him, check the site archive…

I started by sort of replicating the original bear turndown in order to understand how a bear might look on a bmx bike, but we both agreed that it needed to be more of my take on a big awkward bear doing awkward twisty stunts and less of a retro remake. What better stunt than a tabes, right? So I doodled around with some different bears getting wicked and shortly came up with what you now see on the Beartable shirt. It was originally to be a polar bear but Jim went ahead and colored things up a bit which actually turned out pretty cool…

Anyways, I am always psyched to see my doodles end up on shirts, though I’ve never been much into the whole printing process, so there has yet to be an actual Awkward Words shirt… But companies like Lotek, Avenue Garments, Albe’s and now G-SPORT have all represented some of my artwork on t-shirts and I’m definitely stoked on the idea. Looking forward to more doodles, more requests, maybe more shirts? (Here’s looking at you Defgrip!) Check the blog and hit me up!

-Tom Perry

Photo by Hoang Tran.