Cooper.

There's a difference between an animal that decorates and an animal that keeps you company. Cooper is the second kind. In the portrait you'll see him head-on, still, in his usual clothes, with an unhurried look, and that calm is exactly what hooks a small child: a koala that doesn't shout, doesn't pull faces, just quietly stays there. Cooper's tenderness doesn't come from giving him huge eyes or a ring of little hearts, it comes from the cuddly look the animal already has on its own.

Real koalas do the heavy lifting here. Their body is soft, the nose big and dark, the ears furry. When you carry that animal printed across a kid's chest, what you get is a creature you want to hug without anyone having forced it to be cute. In his story Cooper has a character that fits that face, and if you feel like getting to know him whole he's there in Cooper's story, but to wear the t-shirt you don't need any of that: it's enough for the little one to decide that this koala is theirs.

That's why it works so well as a first animal t-shirt. It isn't a character from a show that goes out of fashion tomorrow; it's a signed portrait that stands on its own. A koala with a name, with the face of a friend, and one that comes from a project I've been building animal by animal for years.

There's a detail about koalas that fits a kids t-shirt oddly well. A baby koala, called a joey, is born tiny and spends its first months inside the mother's pouch, a pouch that curiously opens backwards. Once it's a bit bigger and comes out, it doesn't walk along behind her: it climbs up and rides clinging to her back, tucked in, watching the world from up there. A young koala spends half its childhood hanging on to its mother.

I like to think that carrying Cooper on your chest has a little of that in it, even without meaning to: an animal that goes with you, up against you, while you get on with your life and the world goes by. I didn't design it with that intention, it's just that the parallel is there and little ones love to hear it. You tell them how a baby koala travels and suddenly they want to know everything.

As a koala gift for kids, this t-shirt plays on two fronts at once: it's a garment with a design they like, and it's an excuse to tell them something real about an animal. And if it clicks and the little one becomes a Cooper fan, Animal Kinhood has more clothes with other characters to keep pulling the thread. I sign every portrait myself, Yago Partal, so you're not buying a stray print but a piece of a big family.