Photoshop
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.
This is another piece like Sloth Darts, where the journey matched the subject! For some reason I found this comic a tough nut to crack but I stuck at it. One challenge was that I wanted to fit it onto one page. While I could’ve done this by just having the stones and the puddle with some explanation, I felt that characters would help give a personal connection and make the comic more of an encouraging illustration rather than just an instructive metaphor.
There were several attempts at the comic before hitting on the final one, the main contender getting quite advanced before I abandoned it. I started the earlier one with a really rough layout, which I made some equally rough changes to (the three layouts reveal a secret about me: I’m left-handed! I usually work from right to left so my hand doesn’t cover previous art). I combined these in Photoshop.
I thought I’d try out MyPaint so I did the linework with it, designing the characters as I went. Then I shifted to TwistedBrush for the colouring, where I hit a road-block; I couldn’t seem to picture the background! A pro would probably make something up without even blinking, which I can do sometimes, but not this time. The result? I abandoned it entirely (I also gave up on MyPaint. I liked the feel of it but it was lacking some important tools and the brushes were weird when scaled up. It’s changed since then, though).
An environment came to mind along with an altered layout. I experimented drawing the final linework on paper (again designing the characters as I went along) with pen and then with pencil (which I haven’t shown here because it’s just more lineart), gave up on that, then scanned the mixed results into TwistedBrush where I retraced the line art and coloured it. The rest (such as speech balloons and text) was added in Photoshop. There are things I wanted to adjust further, and I like some parts of the earlier version more than the later one, but I decided to combat my perfectionism by calling it finished.
Another bit of teamwork between myself and the thinker Evan Ferstenfeld. It may not be a scientifically accurate depiction of space exploration but I like it! It was fun to play with the idea of adding a glow ink to it as well. It was another good experience and I’m happy with the design, so let’s see what it’s future brings!
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.