I’ve been trying to follow the keto diet. Which means pizza is definitely out of the question. But today I am visiting my brother and his wife and we are making pizza!
this is me today
Pizza
This is my pizza!
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.
Put it on a t-shirt
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.