Have you heard about Noodle? It’s a hilarious pug that sleeps a lot. The owner now has an official Threadless store — most likely because he wants to earn money to buy tons of snacks for his cute dog. Understandable.
I was lucky enough to be given an opportunity to create a design for his store. Here is the store. And this is my design:
Hope you like it 🙂
I found my new favorite Twitter account. It’s called Thoughts of Dog. It’s hilarious. Definitely go read it if you’re feeling down or just want something funny and wholesome to read.
If your dog does something you don’t like, there’s an elegant way of getting rid of that behaviour. Most people don’t know about it, and I certainly didn’t until I read about it in Karen Pryor’s book “Don’t Shoot the Dog”. The method is: put the unwanted behaviour on cue, and then almost never give that cue.
As an example, if your dog barks at night or at random people, you can teach your dog to bark on command. And then only give the command sometimes, in a controlled setting, to reinforce it. The behaviour will disappear when the command is not given.
I wish my neighbors knew about it.
Here’s a brief explanation of the technique (Method 6: Put the behaviour on cue).
And here’s some basics of using a clicker which will speed up the training.
A while ago I said that I wanted to have a separate place for my horror designs. But I don’t think I will have time for so many stores — I already have my Fox Shiver and Trufflepig stores. And I don’t even have that many horror designs — in fact, I have just one! 🙂
It doesn’t look like I will have enough horror-themed designs to open a store just for them. So I added my “Weird Dog” design to my Fox Shiver store.
A few years ago I made a creepy design for a contest. Here, below, is a dog which was part of the design:
I ordered a t-shirt with it and gave it to my brother. His wife said that this is my worst design 😀
Anyway, it didn’t win the contest and I haven’t published this design in any of my stores. As you know, my Threadless shop is a mess, it contains a bit of everything: lots of cats, dogs, other animals, and also space and nature and flower designs. But most of the designs are either cute or funny. A weird dog really wouldn’t fit.
I am thinking of opening a separate store for strange, scary designs. Everyone says that you should find your niche. It’s good if a store is thematically consistent so that customers know what they can expect. This will be a small store, I just need a name.
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:
I spent the day dog sitting 🙂
There’s a funny design I once saw that I now spent 15 minutes searching for. Here it is:
It makes me think about how I approach designing for t-shirts.
Some of the designs I made are just funny things people said that I simply wrote down or happened to remember. And then I put them on t-shirts.
A few years back I was renting an apartment with my brother. I ordered pizza at noon and knocked on his door to tell him. He woke up and said “wake me when it arrives” and went back to sleep.
A while later when I was designing t-shirts I vaguely remembered that. I drew a sleeping dog and experimented with different texts and finally shortened it to this:
Now I write down everything that catches my attention or is even remotely funny – you never know what might come in useful.
This text is not about dogs.
When I first started drawing things and selling them on t-shirts and such, I spent way too much time endlessly improving my complicated designs. And then after maybe a week of work I would have one finished design and I would submit it to various websites. And it would disappear, no one would like it, buy it, no one would pay any attention. Then I would repeat the whole process: make a design for days, obsessing over tiny details and colors, submit, and most often than not, get no response and no interest.
Even after being in this business for years, I still can’t predict what people will like. That’s why it’s so important to not get too attached to any artwork, but keep making them, preferably fast, keep submitting, and some of those designs will get printed, often the ones you least expect.
Among my 10 most popular designs, 4 are designs that I thought no one would like. But I said to myself: “OK, you worked on it for hours, you might just as well publish it.”
So remember — quantity trumps quality. Draw a lot and publish everything, you never know what will be popular.