Ben Hartnett

Artwork & Play

characters

Watercolour Test

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For a long time now I’ve been struggling with arm pain while drawing on paper, and eyestrain while painting digitally. I’ve also had trouble getting the results I want, so with all that in mind I thought I’d try the unthinkable (except it’s not unthinkable because I clearly thought it. Anyway…) and pulled out a tube of black watercolour and a couple of old brushes that had been lying around in a drawer for years. Here are the results! Nothing too fancy, just a test to see how my arm handled it (it was much better than when drawing) and to see what sort of control I could get (good enough to play with it further).

Not great art, but a useful experiment! I think I’d be a much better artist if I experimented more, just trying things out and pushing boundaries to see what different tools and methods do.

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.

Sow & Reap

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I wanted something to remind me of the positive or negative outcomes of my choices, however small those choices may be (and however long the results take to appear). This can apply to the major issues of life but it can also apply to things like learning a new skill. The idea of using two different types of crop came from a section in the Bible (Galatians 6:7-9), although I’ve obviously (and maybe foolishly!) tried to use some words of my own to keep things short and simple.

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Rapunzel in Boots

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Rapunzel in Boots

I had a couple of pleasant surprises recently: the CG animated movies “Puss in Boots” and “Tangled”. I confess I didn’t expect a lot from either of them and in some ways they met those expectations pretty much exactly, but they both had some really funny moments and some enjoyable character animation. I actually liked the character animation in “Puss in Boots” more than the “Shrek” movies, with some natural, fluid motion and subtle, character-specific body language.

“Tangled” had possibly my favourite CG human animation to date, as well as some superb timing and poses on one of the funniest characters I’ve seen for a while: Maximus the horse. Great stuff! To get the main humans so right, though, in both the subtle and the broad acting (along with appealing designs for the main two characters), well, the Disney folks really set a high standard with this movie I think. In fact, while I’ve enjoyed other CG movies more than this one in terms of their complete experience, I’m not sure that any of them have inspired me to just enjoy top-quality character animation like “Tangled” (although “The Incredibles” provides tough competition!).

I did the above sketch in TwistedBrush Pro Studio.

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.

Sloth Darts Remake

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digital painting of sloth playing darts

It’s the same as the old one, but different! It was also a very slow process, with a little bit here and a little bit there… much like a sloth, in other words! Some minor things had bothered me slightly about the original Sloth Darts, so I decided to increase the size and fine-tune it a bit. I ended up painting over the whole picture!

Process: Though I’d used TwistedBrush for some of the original one, the remake was done entirely with Photoshop. I can’t remember why I did that. The brushes I used were mostly the really basic round ones, and I tidied up some of the blending with the smudge tool.

Threadless Collaboration – Be Afraid of the Dark

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Closet full of classic villainsBe Afraid of the Dark - Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More

It’s finally here: a remake of the popular but unprinted “Do Not Enter”! After a lot more communication with the brain of Evan Ferstenfeld, the two-sided design has become one-sided, the level of scariness (and the number of characters) has been increased, and the colouring technique has been changed. We managed to get it done in time for the Threadless “Horror III” design challenge. Strangely enough, I’m not a fan of horror but it can be great source material for some silly shenanigans (does anyone else use the word ‘shenanigans’?)!

Big thanks to Reags for doing the Threadless submission’s Flash presentation!

Check out Evan’s online store.

Edit – I’ve removed the technical notes from the post and added a more detailed version to the tutorial section: Shirt design process.


Threadless Tee – Loot Collector

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Loot Collector - Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More

A bit of geek humour for people who enjoy science fiction and fantasy. The initial idea was to parody those video game characters that can carry an impossibly large amount of items in their inventory but then I got a bit carried away myself! There were another couple of movies, tv series and video games I wanted to reference but couldn’t find a way to do it. Oh well, I had fun with the stuff I did manage to squeeze in! I did a pencil sketch for the character then did all the finished art in Photoshop.

Threadless Tee – Frankentee

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Frankentee - Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More

‘Life stuff’ has kept me away from art for a bit, but here’s something new at last! Threadless had a design challenge going, with the theme “Character”. The goal was to develop a fun character that could also be made into a costume. Unusually for me, my entry was done entirely digitally from sketch through to completion. I used Photoshop CS3 and a Wacom Bamboo Fun, using the hard round brush.

Threadless Tee – Two Wings and a Prayer

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Two Wings and a Prayer digital painting

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.

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