Ben Hartnett

Artwork & Play

black and white

Shirt Design – Muscle-Building Quiz

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And now for something completely different! The new-look Threadless came up with a themed challenge called “Threadless Loves Taking Leaps”. One of the categories was for regular submitters to use a very different style to what they’d used before, which is certainly true of “Muscle-Building Quiz”! For ages now I’ve wanted to try a very simple style but my ideas just didn’t work that way. Fortunately this idea popped into my head just in time for the challenge. I did rough sketches in Photoshop and the final art in Illustrator.

“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

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!)

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.

Hard Walking

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brush pen drawing of struggling figure, by Ben Hartnett

I’ve had a picture in mind for quite a while. It’s of a man walking uphill while dragging all sorts of heavy and painful things behind him. The picture is in colour, with heaps of detail including things which aren’t obvious at first, such as parts of the load pulling at the man’s skin and so on. I started sketching it, and it all seemed too hard! So I placed a sheet of A4 over my rough sketch on the lightbox, pulled out my Pentel brush pen (which I had no particular intention of using again), and came up with this simple, black and white little picture. I confess it was rather nice to keep loose and simple and get a result in minutes instead of hours. Both kinds of art have their satisfaction. I may do the ‘proper’ version of the idea one day but it doesn’t matter so much now.

Ping Pong Experiment

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rough drawing of ping pong characters by Ben Hartnettbrush pen drawing of ping pong characters by Ben Hartnettpen drawing of ping pong characters by Ben Hartnettpen drawing of ping pong characters by Ben Hartnettpencil drawing of ping pong characters by Ben Hartnett

It seems my pen drawing skills aren’t what they were back in my pre-animation days, but these exercises might still be interesting for artists who are exploring different methods (like I am). Finding models the right sizes looked to be a little tricky, so I dispensed with live reference for this one!

All were drawn on smooth, white A4 (the blue one was drawn on standard copy paper). The first picture was the rough I traced from for all the others (with the help of a lightbox). The second was drawn fairly quickly (and a bit lazily) with a Faber-Castell PITT brush pen (I’m not used to brush pens, but I can see some of their major potential). The third and fourth were done with Copic pens with the fixed-width, fine points most pens have. The last was drawn with a 0.7 2B mechanical pencil  (Faber-Castell) and a black coloured pencil (Faber-Castell Polychromos). The last also took the longest to draw, but I have an idea involving markers which may reduce drawing time…

Edit – There’s now a colour version!

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