Justyna Dorsz – Page 25

Increase sales of black and white designs

This is a simple trick to have a few more sales. Maybe you know it, but frankly, this trick hasn’t occurred to me until after a few years of designing t-shirts. I’m going to write it down here, in case there’s someone else who hasn’t thought of it.

Some people really don’t want to buy dark t-shirts. And some people won’t buy light t-shirts. Let’s accommodate both those groups.

I made a lot of cat designs. This is one of them:

"Existing" - cat design - by Justyna Dorsz — “Existing”

When I made this design I checked if it looked good when colors were reversed:

It did look fine. Turns out this design works well both as a white design on a black t-shirt and as a black design on a white t-shirt. So now both versions are for sale in my shop.

If you have a white design and you sell it on a black t-shirt, then invert the colors and check if it looks good too.

However, don’t just submit every design in two color options, it doesn’t always work. For example, this one looks good on dark but wouldn’t make sense on a white t-shirt:

"Saturn the Cat" - by Justyna Dorsz — “Saturn the Cat”

I hired a law firm

I never thought I would need a lawyer.

I wrote previously about my most popular design. Unfortunately, a lot of people steal it and sell it in their stores. Reporting all those places where it’s for sale takes a lot of time, and it never brings me any compensation.

This time is going to be different.

"Not Today" - design by Justyna Dorsz — “Not Today”

A few weeks ago, I noticed that “Not Today” is, yet again, sold by a lot of sellers. I counted 19 of them! I hired a law firm to represent me. This week all those sellers got requests to remove listings with my design and pay me a small compensation. They have time until December 31st.

In January, we will sue those that will not have complied. I will write more about this as the situation develops. It will be helpful to other artists who want to protect their intellectual property.

Here’s the next part.

Advice for aspiring artists

It’s an advice for aspiring actors, not for artists, but it applies anyway.

Bryan Cranston is an actor, he played the main character in Breaking Bad. What he says is that you should do your job, as you can, and everything else is out of your control, so you should not even think about it.

His advice reminds me of what Elizabeth Gilbert said, that you should stubbornly continue making your art, even if people ignore or hate what you create.

When you are just starting out, it’s difficult to get noticed. For months no one may even know you exist, and no one buys your designs. Wait it out. Create more designs until, one day, one of them sells. It might be the one you expect the least.

What if no one likes my art?

Just do your job. — Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

I subscribe to the Farnam Street newsletter and recently there was a quote that I am going to share here:

Recognizing that people’s reactions don’t belong to you is the only sane way to create. If people enjoy what you’ve created, terrific. If people ignore what you’ve created, too bad. If people misunderstand what you’ve created, don’t sweat it. And what if people absolutely hate what you’ve created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud? Just smile sweetly and suggest – as politely as you possibly can – that they go make their own fucking art. Then stubbornly continue making yours.
—Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of the book “Eat, Pray, Love” which I haven’t yet read because the word “Pray” kind of scares me off. However, I like the calls to “Eat” and to “Love” so I might give the book a try anyway.

Elizabeth also did a TED talk, which is one of my favorite TED talks, and I have watched it a couple of times.

“Your Elusive Creative Genius” by Elizabeth Gilbert (TED)

In the talk, she says that after the success of “Eat, Pray, Love” people approached her and said: “Aren’t you afraid you’re never going to be able to top that?”

And what stuck with me is when she said:

I’m pretty young, I’m only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. (…) It’s exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me.

That’s scary. What if my greatest success is behind me? And I haven’t even achieved anything that amazing. I have just a few moderate successes: my “Not Today” design, our “Hidden Paws” game. What if nothing I make will top that?

Elizabeth has an answer. It’s in the quote cited at the beginning, “stubbornly continue making yours [art]”. And in the TED talk when she says, “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be daunted. Just do your job.”

I like this attitude. Create things — that’s your job. Everything else is out of your hands.

Giving credit

I’ve been writing this blog for the past 6 weeks. Sometimes I have my own images to add to my blog posts. When I don’t, I browse Unsplash to find something that matches the topic.

I am amazed that Unsplash exists, with so many beautiful photos, and you can use them for free, even commercially. You don’t even have to give attribution.

But you could.

When I use any of those photos, I always add a caption below the photo to credit the photographer. I don’t even have to write the attribution myself. Every time you download a photo, you get a little pop up where you can simply click on a button to copy the credits.

When you use a photo say thanks. — When you download a photo, simply press the button to copy the attribution.

I browsed Unsplash so much that I now recognize a lot of those photos on blogs that I read. I notice that many bloggers don’t credit the photographers. Sure, they don’t have to. But don’t they remember that photographers are the same people as we are?

Bloggers, artists, photographers — we want the same things. We are all trying to find clients or reach an audience. We can help each other by simply adding an attribution whenever we show someone else’s work.

It doesn’t cost anything and can help another creator a lot.

What is this madness?

One of my designs has been added to the Threadless store. Yay! I received an email a few hours ago.

Now, what exactly does it mean that a design is added to the Threadless store?

First, what you need to know is that there are two ways to sell designs on Threadless:

One way is to simply create your own Artist Shop. For example, I have my Fox Shiver Artist Shop. You can add any design you want to your shop. You can have hundreds of designs. But, at least in the beginning, those designs might not be visible in the main Threadless store.
The second way is for Threadless to select one of your designs to add to their own Threadless store. Every time there’s a design challenge, a few of the best entries are selected. And sometimes Threadless might select a design from your own Artist Shop.

My first design that they selected was “Not Today” and it was one of the seven designs selected from the Black and White Design Challenge.

When your design is selected and added to the Threadless store, it means better visibility and a higher chance that someone is going to see it and buy it.

That’s why it’s so important to add all your designs to your shop. The more designs you have, the better chance that one of them is going to be selected. Same with challenges — submit your designs to challenges and you get a chance that Threadless likes them and wants them in their store.

And remember, you never know what is going to be popular, so submit every design. I very nearly deleted one of my best-selling designs because I thought no one was going to want it.

Oh, and one more thing, usually when your design is selected to be added to the Threadless store, you get a $250 gift code to be used in the Threadless store on anything you want.

Ask people to be harsh

This is something that happens too often. It goes like this: An artist posts their art, or a writer posts their story. And they ask for feedback:

“do you like it?”

Or like this:

“tell me what you think, please be kind”

Some try to guilt you into feeling sufficiently awed:

“what do you think about it? I spent 150 hours on it”

To top it off, when they receive critique, they get sad and offended.

This is not a way to improve at anything.

If you want to get better, you have to be fine with receiving negative feedback. More — you have to ask for it. People don’t want to upset you, so if you ask them to be kind, they won’t tell you that your work needs improvement. If you ask: “do you like it?”, you imply you expect a positive response. Rarely will anyone tell you that no, they don’t like it.

To get honest feedback don’t ask if they like it. Assume that there’s a lot to improve and ask about that. Tell them you want to become a better writer or a better artist. Tell them you want to know anything that might help you. Even if your art is awful — you need to hear it.

Don’t ask anyone to reassure you that your work is fine. Instead, ask them for advice.

And whatever you do, don’t get upset or angry, unless you want to make sure that they never tell you their honest opinion ever again.

Tell people NOT to be kind. Ask them to be harsh.

Galaxy design – how it’s made

This is my Galaxy design:

Someone asked me about this design: how it’s made, why it looks kind of ‘silver’. So I am sharing it here in case you find it interesting too.

This is a close up:

And even more close up:

As you can see, it’s painted with the most basic hard pencil brush in Photoshop.

“Zen Maze” design sales stats

I think it might be interesting to share how much each of my designs has earned. For today I have selected “Zen Maze”.

“Zen Maze” is a moderately successful design, which means the sales are somewhat in the middle among my designs.

Sales Stats

Average Monthly Earnings: $58

Total Earned: $755

How long did it take to make?

It took me 2 hours to make and another 1 hour to modify it for different products.

The design on apparel is slightly different than the design on most other items. I didn’t want it to be a regular rectangle when printed on clothes, so I erased some parts and made it irregular:

But on other items it looks best when it takes up all the space:

Passive income with one hour a day

I am having a difficult time convincing my friends that they too could make designs and earn money. They say they don’t have time.

You don’t need that much time. One hour a day is enough to start.

You don’t even need any tools. I use a graphic tablet, and if you want you can buy a Huion Graphic Tablet, which is good and cheap.

You can also start with just a pencil and a piece of paper:

Draw something.
Take a photo of the drawing.
Clean it up in Krita or Photoshop. Follow a tutorial on cleaning up scanned line art, like this one.
Separate linework from the background. You need to save just the line art in a PNG file. Here’s a good tutorial.
Now that you have a PNG file with a transparent background, you can submit it to your Threadless store.

Now, what to draw? Choose something that you can sketch in a few minutes. Maybe there’s a funny saying that you or your friends use? Put it on a t-shirt. Can you create a simple sketch of an animal? If you can’t draw well, then try drawing just a cat’s head, make it easy on yourself. Do you have a dog or a cat? Take a photo and then draw over it to learn.

Start with simple designs. So simple that they consist of two or three elements only. You can make a design like that quickly. Once you get better at it, you can draw something more complicated.

This is not a way to improve at anything.

Sales Stats

How long did it take to make?

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