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.
When I opened one of my stores a few years ago, I planned to draw little foxes and put them on t-shirts and tote bags. It was supposed to be dark and weird art, the foxes would all be alone in forests and caves, at night. And it would be winter.
I named the store: Fox Shiver.
Here is the first fox that I painted:
After the initial spree of dreary fox designs, I somehow ended up drawing lots of cats. I didn’t make a second separate store for my cat designs — I just published them to my Fox Shiver store.
It would be great to have a thematically consistent store with a fantastic name. But what’s even better is to actually open a store with any name that comes to mind and start publishing and selling.
When you look around, you will notice that plenty of people didn’t overthink their store names either. Go through the stores on any of the websites, and you will see lots of artists who often used a combination of words that they liked or simply their name or nickname.
One of my favorite artists is Nathan W. Pyle. If you don’t know him, here is one of his designs:
Guess what’s the name of Nathan W. Pyle’s store on Threadless.
Here’s another artist that I like: Martina Scott and her store.
You don’t need a perfect name for your store, you need to make art and share it.
This is a very fun representation of how small our planet is compared to other known objects in space. You can move left and right, and I dare you not to be amazed:
As an artist, I am often asked how I find ideas for what to draw. The answer is that I draw what I love. I very much like reading about space and looking at the night sky, so that’s why I painted this:
Space is one of the two main things that I draw. The other is, of course, cats.
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:
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.