Ben Hartnett

Artwork & Play

tee shirt

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.

Threadless Tee Design – Skin-Swap Safari

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Skin-Swap Safari - Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More

A good dose of African animal silliness for this shirt design! I don’t know where the idea came from but I thought it was fun and that was a good enough reason for me to do it. At least we all know what an elephant looks like with a baboon skin, which people have been curious about from the dawn of time (possibly). This was drawn in Photoshop.

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.

Threadless Collaboration – Astro-Not

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Astro-Not - Threadless T-shirts, Nude No More

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!

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.

Invention of Colour Again!

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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!

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.

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.

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