Ben Hartnett

Artwork & Play

Traditional

Threadless Shirt Design – The Champion

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The Champion - Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More

Several years ago I experimented with some different drawing methods, using this one-sided ping pong game as the test subject. I have no idea where the idea came from! I’d occasionally toyed with the idea of turning it into a Threadless design but somehow didn’t quite get around to it. When the Threadless Drawing II challenge turned up it was this idea that came to mind the most.

I worked over the drawing to improve the clarity of both the concept and the  art, then added colour (always a difficult process for me, with lots of experimenting) with a textured brush in Photoshop. I’d considered painting the design from scratch for a ‘cleaner’ result but I decided to stick with the drawing theme and keep the original pencil texture as much as possible.

Dark Psalm

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A painting, with real paint! I did this quite a while ago but it wasn’t exactly cheerful so I delayed posting it. I’d been wanting to paint on wood for some time, so after the picture came to mind I a piece of 435mm x 240mm pine, then prepared it with a textured primer to try and enhance the wood grain (which worked, kind of). Finally I pulled out some haggard old brushes I’ve owned (and abused) for years, plus some “Jo Sonja’s Artist’s Gouache”. I didn’t know if that was a good brand or not (I still don’t) but I had some, so I used it. For the obsessively curious, the colours were: Carbon Black, Titanium White, Paynes Grey, Pthalo Green, and Burgundy. A friend took a photo of the finished painting, and I altered the contrast and sharpness in Photoshop. I added the text there as well.

Why the words from Psalm (song) 69? Well, that part came after the painting. I once read a complaint that people usually make posters with the nice Psalms from the Bible and avoid the less pleasant ones. I thought this picture was ripe for a few depressing words so I scoured the Psalms for something suitable. I had quite a few options to choose from! The ‘word-picture’ of the flooded soul stood out as connecting best with my ‘picture-picture’, so that’s the verse I chose.

Pet Portrait – Toby

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It’s good to get out the coloured pencils and paper again! I tried different brands than I’ve used before: coloured Stonehenge paper and Prismacolor Lightfast pencils. There’s a nice moment in drawing a pet portrait (or any portrait) when it stops being layers of colour and starts becoming a friendly face! Then the focus can be on personality instead of technical details, although the technical side can be satisfying as well.

Threadless Tee – Stone-Cold Western

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Stone-Cold Western - Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More

Months of doing just a few minutes here and there and a new design is finally done! The process started as digital sketches, then went to pencil sketches, then pen drawings, then colouring in Adobe Photoshop, then conversion to vectors with Vector Magic, then tweaking in Adobe Illustrator. I also received advice from friendly people at Threadless. You can see their comments, and different versions of the design, in the design critique.

<a href=”http://www.threadless.com/submission/300823/Stone_Cold_Western?streetteam=brainrust” title=”Stone-Cold Western – Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More”><img src=”http://www.threadless.com/subbanner/300823/banner1.png” width=”220″ height=”119″ border=”0″ alt=”Stone-Cold Western – Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More”/></a>

Threadless Collaboration – “Do Not Enter”

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Do Not Enter - Threadless shirt design Do Not Enter - Threadless shirt design Do Not Enter - Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More

“Do Not Enter” is a Threadless collaboration with Evan Ferstenfeld (known as Frickinawesome). He did the brainy stuff while I did the arty stuff! He wanted to play with a concept that uses both sides of a shirt and I wanted to draw a silly number of classic villains, so it all worked out pretty nicely! He’s an old hand at tees while I’m still pretty new, so there was a fair bit of communicating (online. We live in different countries) as we tried to get the most out of the idea.

The art was sketched up with pencil then scanned into Photoshop, where it was finished off with a total of eight colours. Shading and extra colours were created by partially erasing colour, so if it ends up getting printed it will still only need eight inks to produce the full range of colours in the design.

You can find Evan online at Threadless and his shop.

Artist Santiago (santo76 at Threadless) kindly did the fancy Threadless presentation.

“Invention of Colour” – Printed at Threadless!

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Invention of Colour Threadless t shirt design

Invention of Colour product page

Note: The model in the photo isn’t me (I have shorter hair. And I’m male).

Good news for me! My t-shirt design “Invention of Colour” has been printed, and released for sale at Threadless.com with a change of shirt colour. If you like, take a look at my first post on the design.

Update: The first (but hopefully not the last) print run has sold out in all male sizes and there are just a few left in the female sizes. In a common Threadless practice, some people have posted photos (on the product page) of themselves wearing the shirt. Maybe I’ll have the chance to get used to it, but at the moment it’s all enjoyably weird!

Thanks to people who’ve mentioned the design on their sites. Some examples:

Geeksugar

The Blot

Shirtoid

T-Shirts Mose Likes

Meme

WeHeartIt

Old Pencil Animation – Oska e-Cards

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Edit: These links seem to be dead now. I’m leaving the post here anyway, as a reminder to myself that I actually did these animations!

WARNING: Although these animations are all family-friendly, the business has added other markets since my time there (the site is now blocked by some Internet filters) so keep that in mind if you follow the links below.

General Silliness – Gullibility Test

Wedding Anniverary – Husband

Wedding Anniversary – Wife

Grandparents’ Day – Groovy Grandpa

Grandparents’ Day – Groovy Grandma

Mother’s Day – Koala

Romance – Koala Cupid

Romance – “Bee Mine”

I used to work at “Oska” in Brisbane, where I did old-fashioned pencil animation, cleanup, inbetweening, and occasional basic character design. Some of these animations are still online, which was a fun discovery for me! They’re not classics of animation craft but I have good memories of the work and the workers. The above animations are ones which I’m almost completely sure I did, but less sure with some than others! I did all the pencil drawing stuff and none of the digital tracing or colouring. I’d like to animate again. Storyboarding is fun, too. Actually, most things to do with animation are enjoyable… or at least they were where I studied and worked!

Threadless Tee – Invention of Colour

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Invention of Colour - Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More

My second Threadless submission is up for scoring has finished scoring, with a very satisfying result! The critique process was really positive, so take a look at that if you want to see the journey of this little picture. The background was drawn with pencil on paper and altered digitally. The characters started as pencil on paper and ended up as vectors (in Adobe Illustrator) with some digital painting in Photoshop for the shading. The colour parts were vector.

Thanks to Super Punch for linking to my design, alongside another design called “Iwo Jumpa” (check out the number of votes on that one!)

Intense Titanium

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pencil drawing of wedding by Ben Hartnett

Not having a computer of my own that wasn’t dead, and the other computer I could have used being occupied by someone else, I decided to use my trusty coloured pencils. The stripes were added at the last minute in simple photo-editing software.

I try to complete these Intense Titanium pictures in an hour. Usually it takes longer, sometimes by quite a while, but this time it was right on the button. A figurative button, of course, although it could be argued that several buttons were used (but not harmed) in the creation of this picture.

Soldiers with Rat

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pencil drawing of soldiers with rat, by Ben Hartnett

This drawing was finished in December 2008. I’d planned to use it as a first step in the process of finding a good colouring technique. I was going to reproduce the same image in colour in both traditional and digital forms. This picture was the first thing that came to mind which had a variety of materials in it, including smoke, shiny and dull metals, grass, sky, and so on.

I ended up thinking through the various media combinations I was considering and decided that none of them would work as a long-term technique for the style I wanted, so this drawing is all there is of the series! I think it took about five hours in several small sessions (excluding the initial blue pencil rough). I used a 2B mechanical pencil and a black Polychromos pencil.

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