Justyna Dorsz

Start before you are ready

When I started making designs for apparel in 2012, I could see that my designs weren’t that good. Nevertheless, I submitted them all to Teefury. Sure enough, Teefury didn’t want them. I received rejection email after rejection email.

But I kept at it and slowly improved. I sent all my designs, regardless of how I felt about them. After a while, my designs started to get accepted for printing. It went like this: rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, accepted, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, accepted, rejected, rejected…

If I judged myself by all those rejections that I got in the beginning, then I should have known that I wasn’t ready. But I was desperate, I wanted to see my design on a daily t-shirt on TeeFury, I needed to earn money. So I ignored the fact that I wasn’t good enough, and kept designing.

ReMarkable Productivity Boost

I’ve been using a reMarkable tablet nonstop for the past week.

I moved all my to-do lists there. All notes on reMarkable are organized into notebooks so I now have a notebook just for my to-do lists. I created separate notebooks for all my projects that I am working on. One more notebook with weird ideas that might turn into projects one day.

I keep it nearby all the time, open on my to-do list for the day. No longer do I have to shuffle paper notepads and loose pages that somehow always accumulated on my desk.

But it’s not useful for notes and lists only. I also sketch in it a lot. I have a notebook for my sketches and another notebook for sketches for my next apparel store. When I have a completed drawing I simply export it to a PNG file. I still have to remove the background in Photoshop but it’s way faster than sketching on paper and then taking a photo and cleaning it up.

Here’s another sketch that I made yesterday:

"Dog Looking Out a Window" by Justyna Dorsz
Dog Looking Out a Window

Available on Threadless.

Hygge

"Hygge" by Justyna Dorsz
Hygge

Hygge means enjoying the present, being cozy and comfortable. If you google it, you will see lots of photos of people snuggled in blankets with a cup of hot beverage nearby.

Hygge is a Danish and Norwegian word for a mood of coziness and comfortable conviviality with feelings of wellness and contentment.

–Wikipedia

My mom heard about it on the radio recently and told me about it. I hadn’t known the word before that.

I don’t know about you, but for me sitting comfortably and being cozy, and not doing anything, isn’t relaxing. I always feel there’s something I should be doing, and wasting time just makes me anxious.

Forest Person – first design made with reMarkable

I bought reMarkable β€” it’s a tablet for taking handwritten notes and sketching. I’ve only had it for two days so far, so it’s too early to write a review, but I will write one soon. (Edit: My reMarkable 2 Review)

I bought it because I want to sketch more and turn my sketches into designs for apparel. I draw a lot on paper but it’s tiresome having to take a photo, clean it up, and then publish. And if you draw with a pen you can’t really fix anything when you mess up. reMarkable makes the whole process easier and faster β€” I just draw, erase mistakes without a problem, and export the file. Then I have to remove the background in Photoshop, though I hope I will find a way to automate it.

Here’s my first sketch made with reMarkable:

"Forest Person" by Justyna Dorsz
“Forest Person”

I already published in on Threadless:

"Forest Person" by Justyna Dorsz
“Forest Person” T-Shirt

Transparency problem with DTG printing

I made this design:

"Dark Woods" by Justyna Dorsz
Dark Woods

Unfortunately, when printed on apparel it looks like this:

Most of the design is not printed, only very bright places are visible. This design is painted with white color only, so in darker places those white pixels are nearly completely transparent.

The method that is used to print designs on apparel is called Direct-To-Garment and most DTG printers don’t deal well with low opacity pixels.

If you want your design to look good on apparel, you need to adjust it so that most pixels have higher opacity. Threadless notified me about this issue, and this is how they adjusted my design:

"Dark Woods" by Justyna Dorsz

Now, when printed on apparel, the design should be much more visible.

“Spacing Out” design sales stats

I plan to share sales data of all my designs. Everyone always asks how much you can earn. Today, let’s see sales stats for “Spacing Out”.

"Spacing Out" by Justyna Dorsz
“Spacing Out”
Sales Stats

Average Monthly Earnings: $16

Total Earned: $655

It earns me only $16 per month. Not much. But that’s the thing about passive income β€” you make a design once and then it keeps earning you money without you doing anything else. And when you have 30 designs, or 50, or 100, and each one brings in a small passive income β€” well, you do the math.

As with many of my designs, when I drew it, I wasn’t sure if I should publish it. But I did, and now I have an additional $655 that I wouldn’t have, had I not submitted it to Threadless.

“Spacing Out” T-Shirt

You never realize how boring your life is until you decide to blog daily

This view is the only nice thing about my apartment.

I want to lodge a formal complaint β€” there is no owl in my palm tree. You see, Austin Kleon, a writer, has a backyard with a palm tree, and in that palm tree lives Coconut the Owl. So not only does he have a backyard and a palm tree, but also a blog post that pretty much writes itself every week.

I, on the other hand, don’t have a garden with wildlife to write about.

The photo above is of the view from my kitchen. There is no yard. I need to find a new apartment soon β€” the owner asked me to move out because her daughter wants to live here. I tried telling her that she should just sell this apartment, that this is not a place that her 18-year-old daughter should live in. She says she will renovate when I move out, and it will be fine.

This apartment has a few problems:

  • Some of the radiators don’t work. Most importantly, the one in the bathroom doesn’t work at all so it’s always freezing there. It apparently can’t be fixed because it’s a general plumbing issue.
  • The water pressure is often so low that the water heater doesn’t turn on. (It turns on automatically when the water is running, but not if the water is running very slowly.)
  • I have new neighbors in the apartment next door. Two nights ago a drunk guy was yelling to let him in, I suspected they didn’t want to because he was drunk and angry. I found some pumpkin seeds in my cupboard and decided to go to the grocery store another day.
  • Live wires are sticking out of the walls.
  • People leave trash on the sidewalk. There was a carpet lying there for weeks. And also a toilet β€” for months.
  • The windows are leaking so much that when it rains and you are sleeping, you can wake up to a puddle in the middle of the room.
  • There’s only hot water in the kitchen. Unless the water heater doesn’t turn on because of low pressure β€” then there’s only cold water.
  • I was cleaning tiles in the bathroom, and one fell off and broke.

I know it looks bad. I swear, I am not as poor as it seems, and you can make money as an artist. I got used to the apartment. It will be funny to look at this list when I am rich, or at least living in a functioning apartment.

The Last Psychiatrist

Yesterday I wrote about Scott Siskind who wrote a blog about psychiatry and science called Slate Star Codex and then stopped when his anonymity was threatened. There’s another psychiatrist that, too, wrote a blog, and then stopped for the same reasons as Scott. I don’t even know what’s his real name was, but the blog was called The Last Psychiatrist.

The thing that surprised me most when I was reading The Last Psychiatrist was how little I knew about psychiatry. I mean, of course, I never studied psychiatry so I don’t know much, but I didn’t think that I was so out of depths. There was a story about a boy whose school friend died. The father wrote about it online and asked for advice. Most of the people who responded wrote that he should give the boy space, let him grieve in peace. That what I would think was the right approach too. The Last Psychiatrist disagreed.

Another post was about a woman, Penelope, who was abused by her husband, and she didn’t want to leave. That’s not the surprising part β€” I know many abusive relationships and I know people don’t leave. But there’s a lot to unpack in this story and it was interesting to learn why she was actively looking for that kind of a relationship.

Most of the posts are like that β€” depressing, but eye-opening. I think I will be reading The Last Psychiatrist again.