Justyna Dorsz

Justyna

For new artists

I’ve notices that Threadless published a useful article in their Creative Resources section: Get Featured on Threadless.

One of the questions that new Threadless artists often ask is whether they should opt into the Threadless Marketplace. I think it’s really worth it to opt in β€” most of my sales come from the marketplace. If you are a new artist then most likely you are not very good at promoting your art yet. If you don’t opt in you will have a difficult time getting people to visit your shop. It’s of course up to you. You can read Threadless’s advice here.

One other topic that Threadless mentions is that you should submit 1-2 designs a week. I admit I haven’t been designing much recently. I wish I could submit more but I’ve been swamped with other work like preparing our game for releasing on new platforms and migrating the manichyena.com website to a new server. But that’s all behind me, I plan to draw more in May.

Go read the whole article, it’s full of good advice πŸ™‚

Act now

My design “Act Now” has just been added to the Threadless catalog.

Act Now

There’s a story behind the design. I was in a grocery store and behind me there were two guys buying beer.

  • Guy 1: So how’s that postwoman of yours?
  • Guy 2: …
  • Guy 1: Have you talked to her?
  • Guy 2: I didn’t dare … I won’t ever dare.

I was thinking about it when drawing the skull. We are all going to die, we have less time than we think. I added the flower β€” a symbol of romance β€” to say: if you hesitate, if you don’t act on your feelings, you will die alone.

“Act now” is in the Threadless catalog. Check it out here if you want. Wear it as a reminder to be brave.

Two paintings

Someone posted this painting by Ben McLaughlin on Facebook:

I immediately wanted to know more about the artist and see more of his paintings. And then I stumbled on the following painting, also by Ben McLaughlin apparently:

This is not the same painting! Those are two different paintings. Look at them side by side:

This is strange, right? Did Ben McLaughlin painted those two paintings? Did he like the scene so much that he painted it twice? Or is one of them painted by a copycat? There’s no way to know because Ben McLaughlin doesn’t have a website. Some of his paintings are shown here and here, but neither of those websites display either of the train paintings.

Design Challenges

I was looking for a topic to write about and noticed that Threadless published a new video in their “Your Art, Your Shop” series, this time about design challenges.

I have participated in many challenges but have never won any. However, my “Not Today” design was one of a few designs selected for printing in the Black and White challenge back in 2016, so maybe it counts a bit like winning. Besides that, a lot of my designs were selected in the Threadless main challenge, where you can submit anything. But I haven’t yet won any of the themed challenges.

Even if you don’t win anything, it’s still good to participate. Thanks to the fact that I submitted my designs to challenges, I got a few hundred followers on Threadless. And now, when I publish a new design, people who follow me are notified about it, and some of them probably end up buying something from me.

That reminds me that Woot has challenges too – they are called derbies. I used to participate a few years ago. Again, didn’t win anything but some of my designs got printed anyway πŸ™‚

Sangie

This is Sangie, and she’s wearing my “Overthinking and also hungry”.

Sangie (Photo from Threadless)

She posted another photo of this shirt on her Instagram and wrote about losing hair. It’s scary how many young people have cancer.

Overthinking and also hungry - by Justyna Dorsz
“Overthinking and also hungry” on Threadless

This design is part of my philosophical cat collection.

As a side note, I’ve never met a stranger wearing any of my designs. I wonder when it will happen.

New products, new colors

When Threadless adds new products everyone who has an artist shop should go through their designs and enable them on new products and colors. It’s what I do regularly.

Threadless recently added Women’s Scoop-Neck Regular t-shirts which they wrote about. It also looks like there’s a new kind of hoodie: Classic Fleece. I don’t see them mention it anywhere so maybe it’s not yet available in all artist shops. I remember that when Threadless introduced face masks there were not available in my store at first so maybe they haven’t added Classic Fleece to every shop yet? I don’t know, but it’s probably a matter of days.

The easiest way to enable new products on all your designs is to go to your Shop Dashboard, and then in the Artist Shop section hover over Products and choose which products you want to edit. You will see a list of all your designs and just have to choose colors for each:

Scoop Neck Regular T-Shirt
Classic Fleece

My art in the wild!

Threadless sent me the following photo:

@mrdanielnguyen

It’s Daniel Nguyen, you can view his Instagram profile. He is wearing my Space Painted design, I think it suits him πŸ™‚

This is one more reason why it’s great for designers like me to work with Threadless. Every now and then they run various campaigns to support artists. Sometimes they double artists’ earnings, they also find opportunities to sell our designs in retail stores or other online stores. This time they teamed up with creators and influencers to show off our designs as part of the Threadless Spring Style Refresh campaign.

Space Painted is of course available on Threadless like all my designs:

Space Painted

Magical Art

We spent another day fixing the gamepad issue in Summer Paws. Making games is awesome, but sometimes hunting down bugs takes a lot of time. And the bug that we are currently trying to fix is not even a bug in our code β€” it’s most likely an issue in the Unity engine.

I haven’t had time to draw anything new, but here’s a sketch that my brother and I made in a scratch book. It’s a sort of sketchbook that has pages coated in black paint, and you draw by scratching away the paint with a pen and revealing a holographic paint under it.

Camp by Justyna Dorsz, RafaΕ‚ Dorsz

We got this from my mom for Christmas. Every drawing so far is created by both my brother and me. We took turns drawing the image above: he drew the guy sitting on the log, I drew the dog, he drew the bike, I drew the helmet and the backpack, and so on. This is great fun. And the silver paint that is underneath the black paint really shines as you see in the photo.

I found a similar sketchbook on Amazon.