My brother and I started working on our cat book. It will be a children’s book with lots of cats.
Here is a sketch of the first page. It’s a kitchen with a bunch of cats.
Working on our book #1
Cats
Happy Holidays!
Happy Holidays! May you have a wonderful week.
The photo is of our cat, her name is Mrówka, which is Polish for Ant.
I almost deleted my best selling design
When you work on something for a long time it’s difficult to say how good it is.
This is a design I made 3 years ago and it’s titled “Get your own pizza, human!”
It took me a while to make this design. It has a lot of details and colors, and the cat is more complicated than I usually draw. I could not get the cat’s butt shape just right. And I kept changing his fur color until I finally settled on blue.
“No one’s going to like it,” I thought. I was sure no one would buy it and that people would complain about the blue color and wrong cat anatomy. But I had spent over 5 hours on this design so I didn’t want to just delete it. I was too attached. And there was one thing that I liked about this design — the cat’s serious expression, not angry or scared, just serious as if the pizza was the most important thing in the world.
So I published it. It’s in my top 10 best selling designs of all time. Shows what I know about what people like. Now when I look at this design I really like it and the blue fur too.
I wanted to share with you this little story because we often forget that we are our worsts critics and we judge our art too harshly.
Let other people make their own mind about your designs. Publish them and see what happens. You might be as surprised as I was.
My most popular design ever
Today I wanted to show you the most popular design that I ever made. Here it is:
I don’t know how many designs I’ve made in my life – a few hundred probably. This remains my best selling one.
Doesn’t look like much, does it? It’s really quite simple. My friends don’t believe me when I tell them that they too could design something and sell on a t-shirt. But as you can see it’s absolutely possible.
The important thing is to just have an idea.
Everything is better when a cat says it
T-shirt designs are sort of like cartoons. Everything is more inspiring when said by animals.
Before I created this blog I’ve read a lot of articles that tried to motivate me to — start now! I still procrastinated but I am glad I did finally start writing.
If you have a project that is on your to-do list, don’t wait, act now.
This is a terrible idea
How skilled a designer do you have to be to make a drawing and sell it on a t-shirt?
Have a look at this ridiculous design that I made a few weeks ago:
The idea is key. I thought about a sly cat and drew the simplest version that I could think of:
- I used only one color.
- The cat doesn’t even have whiskers, but it’s still clear that it’s a cat.
- Actually, it’s not even the whole cat, just the head!
Now for the text — this is always the difficult part. I try to choose something that adds a story to the design. Here, the cat hears an idea and likes it very much, even though it’s going to end up in trouble.