Threadless is advertising gift certificates, and using a character from my design “Invention of Colour” to do it! Unfortunately my design is all sold out, so at the moment you can’t actually use your gift certificate to order it! If you like it, though, you can go to the product page and request a reprint (look just under the “Add to Cart” button).
Edit 11 Feb 2012: It’ back in stock as a 2nd edition!
Tags: Animation, cartoons, tee shirt, threadless
These are my last two pieces of art for the Intense Titanium newsletter for the time being. Both pictures were done in Twistedbrush Open Studio at twice the resolution you see here. There’s a good chance I’ll be able to work with these folks in the future, but under their new name: Vurge Jewellery.
Tags: cartoons, characters, colour, digital colour, digital painting, illustration, intense titanium, twistedbrush
Edit (August 15, 2011) – I’ve had this design removed from Threadless so I can have more freedom to use it outside of the Threadless world.
My second and last entry into the Threadless 10th anniversary tee shirt challenge. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while. A year or two ago I saw a photo in a book called “Miracles for Life!” (by Jonathan Krause). The photo was of a father and daughter in Tanzania. The daughter had hydrocephalus, but in the photo it was the father who seemed to carry the pain; the daughter lay completely happy and trusting in his lap.
I soon remembered the photo when the bird idea came to mind, and tried to let it influence the heart of the picture. The design doesn’t have the added context of serious illness, but the birds allow an extra bit of symbolism that’s thousands of years old and which possibly comes from the humble chicken! It’s used in the Bible like this: “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust…” – Psalm 91:4.
The picture started with pencil sketches but ended up all digital, painted in Photoshop with the basic hard/soft round brushes using a Wacom Bamboo Fun. There are some subtle colours in it which were kept on separate layers in case it gets screenprinted.
Tags: animals, characters, colour, digital colour, digital painting, photoshop, tee shirt, threadless
This is either a deeply meaningful work describing through visual metaphor the complex nature of the human condition, or it’s a piece of silliness with no meaning to it whatsoever. You decide! This design was done in Photoshop, using a Wacom Bamboo Fun, and took too long. It was pretty fun, though!
Tags: cartoons, characters, colour, digital colour, digital painting, photoshop, tee shirt, threadless
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.
Tags: characters, colour, digital colour, pen, photoshop, tee shirt, threadless
More art for the Intense Titanium website. The first and third pictures were done in Twistedbrush, while the second was drawn in pencil then coloured in Photoshop. I’m fortunate in having a bit of freedom in how I approach the pictures, although I still need to do them fairly quickly (about an hour from concept to upload, generally). So the first puts the priority on mood, the second on a joke, and the third on design.
Tags: cartoons, characters, colour, digital painting, drawing, illustration, intense titanium, photoshop, twistedbrush
My entry for Parka’s second contest: “Unusual Cowboys”. The standard of entries is already high, but the subjects (so far) are fun enough that it’s kind of like art playtime and winning is secondary! Follow the link and check out some of the other entries. There’s some good stuff there.
The process: I started with a pencil sketch of a lemon being chased on a desert plain with Monument Valley-style mountains in the background. After looking at some reference photos, I liked the mood of morning mountain musters so I switched to that, and red seemed to stand out better than yellow so the lemon became a tomato-like thing. For the final painting, I used a Wacom Bamboo Fun and hopped back and forth between Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Twistedbrush Open Studio.
Tags: animals, cartoons, characters, colour, digital painting, illustration, landscape, photoshop, realistic, twistedbrush
‘Parka’, a noted art book reviewer at Amazon, decided to run a small art competition with the theme “Animals in Competitive Sports” on his blog. I like his site so I decided to enter with an action-packed sloth picture. Maybe I should’ve gone for something more dynamic but this one was fun anyway! I used Photoshop for the intial colour work, Twistedbrush Open Studio for the painterly stuff, then back to Photoshop for a bit of detailing. I used a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet. I’m not sure how long it took; maybe 4-5 hours. Unusually for me, I didn’t use a pencil sketch.
Parkablogs.com – Animals in Competitive Sports
Edit – Take a look at the new version of Sloth Darts!
Tags: animals, characters, colour, digital painting, illustration, photoshop, realistic, twistedbrush
Time passes so quickly! Three more months, marked by one Intense Titanium picture per month. Each time I’m given a general theme, and occasionally a specific ring, earring or pendant model is mentioned which I include in the art. The software used: Twistedbrush Open Studio. Timeframe: roughly one hour each from concept to upload. The thumbnails show the pictures at the size they are actually used at.
Tags: characters, colour, digital painting, illustration, intense titanium, twistedbrush
“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.
Tags: cartoons, characters, colour, drawing, illustration, pencil, tee shirt, threadless
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:
Tags: animals, Animation, black and white, cartoons, characters, colour, drawing, illustration, pencil, tee shirt, threadless
More Threadless tomfoolery! This is quite different in style to my previous efforts but is more like the non-shirt illustration art I’d like to play with in future. I used Twistedbrush Open Studio to digitally paint over a scanned sketch.
Tags: animals, characters, colour, digital painting, illustration, landscape, tee shirt, threadless, twistedbrush