Space

We are bad at judging our own work

I made a lot of designs, and sometimes I hesitated before publishing some of them. I never know how something is going to be received. Sometimes I think, “no one is going to buy it, what’s the point”. But by now, I also know that it’s impossible to predict how well a design is going to sell.

Take this Space design as an example:

I think I first submitted it to my Threadless store, where I sent most of my designs. It wasn’t very popular. But I knew that sometimes different websites have different audiences — what might sell well on Threadless might not sell on, say, TeePublic or Redbubble, and vice versa. So I added this design to my Redbubble store. And it has been selling very well there. It’s my most popular design on Redbubble, and I often get messages from customers when they buy it. Here are some of them:

This is going in my husband’s space-themed reading nook for his birthday. Wonderful job guys!
Thank you. My future space travel buddy will love this 😉
Perfect for my next astronomy courses.
Love the simplistic design!!
Absolutely love this design, can’t wait to receive my phone case – thank you for your creativity!

Those are all comments from people who loved the design. And there are many more. Whenever I read the messages I am always surprised — they not only liked my art enough to buy it but they also took the time to write to me! Just imagine — had I listened to my inner voice telling me not to publish it, those people would not have an opportunity to see the design and get something they liked so much. They sometimes even thank me for creating the design, when it should be me thanking them for supporting me.

We artist notoriusly doubt ourselves. This is maybe the most accurate visualization of all this:

Artist: stuffman Source: the-artist-putting-a-simple-cake-next-to-a-much

My art in the wild!

Threadless sent me the following photo:

It’s Daniel Nguyen, you can view his Instagram profile. He is wearing my Space Painted design, I think it suits him 🙂

This is one more reason why it’s great for designers like me to work with Threadless. Every now and then they run various campaigns to support artists. Sometimes they double artists’ earnings, they also find opportunities to sell our designs in retail stores or other online stores. This time they teamed up with creators and influencers to show off our designs as part of the Threadless Spring Style Refresh campaign.

Space Painted is of course available on Threadless like all my designs:

New Space Design

I drew another space design and added it to my Threadless Shop. This is the first of two designs that I had planned for this week. Though I truly don’t know if I manage to draw the second one because tomorrow my whole family comes over and we are making pizza.

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.

Galaxy design – how it’s made

This is my Galaxy design:

Someone asked me about this design: how it’s made, why it looks kind of ‘silver’. So I am sharing it here in case you find it interesting too.

This is a close up:

And even more close up:

As you can see, it’s painted with the most basic hard pencil brush in Photoshop.

We are so tiny

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.

Space

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

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