Design

ReMarkable Cat

All my days are spent sketching on reMarkable or working on our cat book. I am also searching for a new apartment.

"Cat Looking Out a Window" by Justyna Dorsz

This cat is another minimal sketch I made using reMarkable 2.

If you want to do more sketches…

I think reMarkable 2 is one of the most useful things I bought. I always keep it next to my keyboard and whenever I take a break from work, I start sketching in it. Sometimes all I manage to create are some silly drawings but every now and then I make something good and can send it to my Artist Shop on Threadless.

Here’s a drawing I made two days ago:

"Night Birds" by Justyna Dorsz — Night Birds

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.

King Cat

I drew a cat in a crown for a Threadless Competition 🙂

Forest Person – first design made with reMarkable

I bought reMarkable — 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 — 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:

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:

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 — 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 — 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.

Space Botanica

You’ve probably heard that you should choose a niche for your store and that all your designs in that store should be thematically consistent. If you want to make designs with a completely different topic or style, then you should create a new store for them. When customers visit your store or see your logo, they should know what to expect.

When I was starting with designing t-shirts, I heard that too. I had a separate store for my designs with ducks — somehow that store never got popular. And another store with monsters, it didn’t get any traffic either. I also had a store named “Fox Shiver” that was supposed to be about little foxes in frozen lands. I didn’t know it was going to be as popular as it is, so I kept adding different designs to it — a lot of cats and space art. Now my store is a mess, and I might need to fix it one day. Or maybe I will leave it as is.

Here’s one of the designs that should not be in my store. It’s plants and space combined. When I made it, I only had a separate store for ducks and another one for monsters, but not a store for space designs. So I added it to my Fox Shiver store.

When you decided on a niche and know what you want to draw, then that’s good. You are probably a more organized person than a lot of artists and definitely more than me. If you can’t decide on a niche, don’t worry about it. You can add all your designs to one store, and after a while, you will see what’s popular or what you like to draw the most. You can always move some designs to another store if you want to. The important thing is to create.

There’s always tomorrow

See the whole design on Threadless 🙂

Design

1. Not Today

2. Overthinking and Also Hungry

3. Get Your Own Pizza, Human!

4. Vaguely Aware of Social Norms

5. Go Outside. Worst Case Scenario, A Bear Kills You

6. Among Trees

7. Space Stuff

8. Space Botanica

9. Adequate Expression of Feelings

10. Inconceivably Vast

Sales Stats

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