T-Shirts are here!
+ a look at the process behind them.
So I finally have my T-Shirts done! They are LIVE and ready to order! I’m putting the finished product at the top here before I dig into the process of making them - it was messy, frustrating and fun all at once.
There are two designs available in both t-shirt and sweatshirt form, in a few different colours. I’m doing them via Everpress, so they handle all the production & shipping. They operate on a pre-order basis, so there’s no waste!
It’s been really exciting to see these finally come to life after living in my head for so long. I don’t think that feeling of seeing your work printed on something, and holding it in your hands for the first time ever gets old!
OK, so now let’s get into the process behind these. I first had the idea to make some T-Shirts a while back after seeing a couple of other artists using Everpress, and it seemed like quite a good way to test out new ideas & new products, without having to invest hundreds of pounds in buying the stock. It took months to finally get around to starting the artwork for them! I knew I wanted to make something pretty simple and also with a sense of humour. I thought it would be a fun wee project and I wouldn’t overthink ever single detail like I usually do…
Cut to: me tearing my hair out trying to make my drawings simple and funny enough. Line drawing is something I am not used to at all these days! Give me paint or pencils & pens and I’ll happily work with layer upon layer of texture… but line is a whole different ball game! I used to work in pen & ink all the time but it’s not something I’ve been using much over the last few years. I find the simpler the drawing, the harder it is to get it right!
I started off with my first idea, the Walrus, drawing in my sketchbook from moving footage of walruses initially (which I shared in my March newsletter), to get a good feel for their character and how to capture their goofiness. I always love this part of the process! Moving onto developing these into more ‘final’ drawings was where it got difficult; this is the part I always find so hard. It is so difficult to transfer the energy of sketchbook work - it’s impossible to replicate! I loved my pencil drawings, but since I was making something to go on a t-shirt, I felt my line had to be more bold, and the drawing had to be as simple as I could make it. Drawing walrus after walrus (there were loads more than you can see in the photo above!), I just couldn’t get it to work at all.
I did actually shelf the idea for about a few weeks, and pretty much gave up on it. But, I came back to it, only to face the same problems! This time I worked through it. Every time I shoved another failed drawing into the drawer beside my desk, and put the lid back on my pot of ink, thinking I was done, I kept trying again, opening the ink again and thinking of new things to try. I kept going round and round in circles, with inky hands and tired eyes.
Eventually I made progress and started making drawings I actually liked! Somehow it finally clicked and the process felt fun again. I’d done a couple of bigger drawings that I felt like I was going in the right direction with, and was going to stop for a break, and decided to draw one more… and at last, I had something that resembled what I’d been picturing all along!
This guy here is the one that made it onto the t-shirt. I cleaned up and simplified the drawing quite a bit on photoshop, and changed his eye too. The drawing itself is quite small, coming in at 6x7cm. Often smaller drawings, blown up to be a lot bigger, can work out a lot better, rather than drawing things massive to start with!
Next, my ‘Big Stretch’ design (inspired by my own dog Jeffers, who has learned to do a big stretch on command!) followed a similar pattern of trial and error and going round in circles. But because I’d done the Walrus a certain way, I felt like the dog had to be drawn like this too. I think this one was actually even worse and I just could not do it with ink! It was so hard to capture any texture in a simple enough way, without the drawing looking really laboured and busy.
I was feeling a bit more positive with this drawing, using some stuck on bits of paper to re-draw areas I wasn’t happy with. I scanned it in a cleaned it up… but it just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like my work. So much of my work, and especially my sketchbook work, is about energy and character, and this drawing just didn’t cut it!
Again, I kept putting my ink away, and then getting it back out again, trying another drawing, and another one… I wasn’t getting anywhere so I decided to draw out what I was aiming for in pencil, with the view to try and to copy it or trace over it with ink. But, I really loved the pencil drawing - it felt so much more natural to me to draw like this and it definitely showed!
But, the next stumbling block was how I could get this drawing to work for the t-shirt. The artwork needs to have a completely transparent background, with no white bits showing at all. I had no idea how I could do this for a pencil drawing, because there are so many little white flecks engrained in each line, in amongst the texture.
Again I was getting annoyed and frustrated… until my husband suggested I look for a tutorial online which might have a solution. I didn’t want to at first as I thought my basic knowledge of photoshop covered all the techniques possible. But, I was wrong! I went ahead and searched, and there was indeed a way to do it. This changed everything! So, I followed the steps, and sure enough I got my pencil drawing all cleaned up properly and ready to go on a t-shirt. PHEW! I did it! This is what I wanted the project to be about - loose, sketchy, fun drawings.
It can be so easy to forget how hard the creative process is, especially when you’re out of practise or new to a certain way of working. There are always things to be learned though, even when it feels like you’re wading through mud and you just want to give up. I have such a bad habit of coming up with ideas and rarely seeing them through. I’m so glad I managed to stick with it this time and I actually managed to make something new.
If your heart is in it, keep going! Remember to have a Big Stretch first though.
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