Some pretty good reprints to chat on about this week, some which have been added to the ‘Dee Wishlist’ for sure! It’s pretty lengthy now.

Totally epic B Movie humour hear and colour and comedy that pops ‘Aliens Gave My Cat a Beard’ by Steven Rhodes, is hilarious and in my opinion this is an obvious choice for reprint.

I find the next design to be quite a feminine one but it has been reprinted for guys, sol by Diogo Hornburg and Lucas Alcantara shows two beautiful song birds resting on a treble clef. I love how realistic and stylized the clef is.

My boyfriend, who is a photographer, is all over this design and it’s kind of like two Threadless tees he already owns mashed up together! Sky Aperture by Tang Yau Hoong  is a really original design which it’s interesting but not in your face, and one where you see more detail the harder you look. Excellent Threadless tee!

This design is so funny, I am pretty sure I have blogged it before. Totally gutting that it has only been printed for guys though, I’d welcome this tee into my collection with open arms. Crayon Role Reversal No.147 by Nick Roberts would be the perfect gift for a slightly comedic and artistic friend!

Lastly for this Thursday Threadless blog, Invention of Colour by Ben Hartnett shows very well drawn retro cartoon characters in Black and White with a test tube of colour. Excellent concept, excellent execution!

Everyone gets what I mean when I say ‘wearable’, right? There are some tees out there with great art that I can appreciate but wouldn’t particularly want to wear, whereas I feel that these shirts are the kind of thing that just about anyone would want to wear. Clear?

Favourite for me this week at laFraise if the record/moon design, very nice.

I really like the idea of the collage within this logo from streetwear store Krudmart, and the way that there’s a lot going on within the letters but otherwise the crewneck is quite simple and not overbearing.

Costiness=$55 Buy it at Krudmart

Do you know the font? Can you tell what it says yet?

I’m almost embarrassed how long it took me to work this out.

Costiness=£20 Buy it at Bare77 [Mens / Womens]

Frischfleisch (‘Fresh Meat’ in German) sent me an e-mail saying “hey we have cool shirts” and I would tend to agree with them, the idea of a shirt with FRISCHFLEISCH stamped on the front in a fairly imposing typface with unique and individual blood-like splatters on the front of the shirt is fairly cool. Admittedly, it’s not especially original, but just because something isn’t original doesn’t mean you shouldn’t like it.

However, I can’t work out how you’re actually meant to buy one of their shirts, am I being silly or is it not particularly obvious?

Dexter’s Laboratory meets Mythbusters in this shirt from Teefury.

Y’know, I’ve never seen Donnie Darko, judging by the amount of shirts about it, including this one from Qwertee, I probably should (lots of shirts usually = a good movie).

Shirt.Woot have a delightful 8-bit Ghostbusters design.

Strangely, RIPT also have a Ghostbusters shirt, though with a Muppets twist.

Glow in the dark shirt from The Yetee.

Nowhere Bad have a Portal inspired shirt.

OtherTees have a nice Sherlock design. Did anyone see the last episode of the current run last night? That show is so damn good.

24Tee are selling a familiar stormtrooper design.

TeeRaiders have a Firefly design that I didn’t need to Google to work out what it was.

Quite a pretty Twitter design from Stupidhurts.us.

GraphicLab have a Portal shirt on sale all this week.

Tee Mashups is closing, which is unfortunate, though at least they are being up front about things and are sending refunds to people that will not receive their shirts.

Star Wars comes to Shirt Punch today.

Not my kind of tee at DBH today, but interesting nevertheless.

Hey look, Tilteed are selling Greg Abbott’s lovely fox design again.

Glennz has turned five of his designs into iPhone wallpapers (may also work with other smartphones, I’m not sure).

Tony over at Wrongwroks has released a parka jacket in five different colours.

Perception Apparel have put three of their tees on sale for $10.

Halfcut Clothing have released a shirt to celebrate their involvement with the Blind Tiger Collective. Use coupon code hcc10 to get 10% off your order in their store.

The official press release for the Boston Tee Party has been released, it doesn’t cover much new ground but it’s nice to have it all be ‘official’.

Big Cartel let us know about some of their milestones in 2012, such as collective store sales of over $100,000,000 from their almost 200,000 stores.

Mighty Fine are running a competition with Marvel to find an amazing Avengers t-shirt design with the winner receiving up to $2,500.

Johnny Cupcakes has a couple of new tees, and a couple of new hats in his stores.

Here’s Rihanna wearing a Celine t-shirt that probably cost more than my whole outfit.

I have to admit I have had this t-shirt since before Christmas but just haven’t got round to blogging it, so firstly sorry to TeeBlitz.com for being shockingly slow however I only have lovely things to say about you so hopefully that will make up for it.

TeeBlitz seem largely about trying to get exposure for a wide range of artists from comic artists, game designers, toy designers, all sorts basically, this means they have lots of different styles of designs hitting their site. If you have a nosey at they gallery you can see what I believe to be past designs.

The tee I got sent from these chaps is called ‘The Passenger’,  I got this in red but if you pop to the site now this tee is still available for 11 hours, as they are only available for a certain amount of time, this is fab as it makes them more ‘limited edition’ and you know there are going to be very few people in the world with the same tee.

As far as the quality of the tee goes I adore the quality, I adore the fit, I adore the design! This is a tee that I shall be wearing time and time again. It has a very transformery feel to it and as a geeka-chica it totally fits in with other t-shirts I own.

One teeny negative point, the tee I received had accidentally got a permanent marker dot on the sleeve this may of simply happened during the packing process but I thought it was worth mentioning.

The tees on TeeBlitz are fabulously original, super high quality and a very nice fit. Again running true to size. I would definitely recommend grabbing The Passenger for $10, it’s an absolute steal.

(Must apologise for simply using my bedroom to take pictures, they do show off the tee pretty well though)

There is still clearance goodness on Threadless but I’m not gonna blog about it no more, if you’re wanting to get yourself some bargain Threadless goodness you know where to go.

So, newbie tees this week! Going to start off with my favourite one of the bunch, made me do a little internal giggle and that’s what you want when people are looking at your belly! The Daily Grind by Jaco Haasbroek is just a super clever concept that has been made cute!

Next tee grabbing my attention and desire is Ka-Bloom by Richard Lee, awesome title too. It’s a very girly tee, I definitely see it selling out of girly fit before guy fit but the colours are just gorgeous and the design placement on the shirt is perfect, not so much in the v-neck however.

Next tee oddly has managed to make Death look kinda beautiful. Grim Poetry by Lucas de Alcantara is a lovely mixture of earthy colours with a splash of pink thrown in. It’s almost a cross between Death and Mother Nature, very interesting.

The Deep by Emery Greer is quite simple but powerful undersea scene, I hope the little dude in the middle isn’t drowning, that would be sad. I love the pale blue against the black it’s really stunning.

Lastly for this lovely Monday, The Gift of Knowledge by Jeremy Owen shows a little chap in amongst some books.  I personally think that this would have looked better on the black than navy. Still a lovely whimsical design.

There’s been a lot of hubbub about the new Batman movie Dark Knight Rises over the past couple of days since the new trailer has been released for the film, which gave me ample opportunity to mention this t-shirt over at MySoti which has been languishing in my bookmarks for far too long. Lovely style to this design.

Costiness=$23.40 Buy it at MySoti

After the inauguration of the Pillow Monster character at Artopia for the t shirt battle with Fur Face Boy, the design has been getting great reviews. Dallas Observer sponsors this annual event as their birthday party and I was proud to have their help bringing the Pillow Monster Lightning Strike design to life in the true nature of Frankenstein! So continuing with the success of this behind the design column, I decided to share the whole design process for this new character. The Pillow Monster will be involved in another design this coming year, so I am going to show how the idea began from concept, then sketching, then inking the layout, then vector the art for production of the printing.

The first step of the process is creating the concept. The Sleepy Dan branding has been so much fun to design for because there is a wide range of possible ideas that fall in line with the sleep theme. The Alarm Clock character was the beginning of the character side of the branding, reminding fans of our youthful side that used to be afraid of the dark and the possibility of things coming to life when you are unable to see them… Remember the clown doll from Poltergeist under the bed? Thanks, now I can’t even look at clowns any more!

Illustrating a complete character design for the brand, is a more complex project than people realize. But it’s the passion for the brand that keeps me going! Pencil sketching the concept takes several attempts to get the look right. Keeping in mind that the design needs to have more of a vertical layout to take advantage of the printable surface area of the shirt.

Making friends in the arts community is easy when you are giving back at the same time. Having friends with ill skills like Rico Ultraelectromagnetico to help with the character style was the first step to the Pillow Monster. I want to make sure that all my characters have the same appearance so they are easily understood to be a Sleepy Dan character, even if the design has no displayed type.

After making several sketches, better parts of the character will be remade in the next sketch. There is a constant improvement for the problem areas, till the whole design has the perfect layout. This is the fun part of the process but usually takes the longest, so you can’t get frustrated with levels of failure. Just gotta work thru them till you find successful revisions. Ask friends for constructive criticism, you have to learn to take the good advice with the bad, create a thick skin for necessary revisions cause this is the best time to make them…

I am sharing less than half of the sketching process for this project, so you can understand there are so many versions of progression for this design you can almost look at them like a flip book! Eventually you get to a sketched layout that best suits your concept vision from the start. All parts suddenly fit perfectly into place, then you can move onto revising the smaller details thru the inking process and using Adobe Photoshop.

Inking over the sketch allows you to see a clearer design layout, while creating deeper levels of detail. Usually after the first inking designs, you are confident to almost be there. But treat this stage just like the sketching stage, revision is still easily done now that details are clear, so get some more constructive criticism from your friends that you know will not leak the secret just yet…

Making final inking revisions gives you goosebumps! You wind up staring at the design for a couple days, 30 minutes at a time to make sure there is nothing else that needs to be changed. Then you can decide how many colors you want this design to be printed with, then create color layers of detail for the character scene. Inking new layers can be done in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, I prefer to use Illustrator because it makes the color separation so much easier to manipulate and revise.

Usually I start this stage, not by looking at the color I want, rather looking at the color details I want to involve, so use crazy contrasting colors… The Pantone colors used can be revised after the levels of detail are finished. The best way to decide colors of the print is to decide shirt color first. Figure out the background color of the design, then the character colors can easily be picked knowing what shirt trends are most successful. Research shirt brands over the web, see what colors are selling best for the season. You’d be surprised what a little research can tell you!

Printing shirts for your brand in this economy means planning out the profitability of the design. The more color you print, the more the shirt will cost, and shirts just don’t sell well the closer to $30 each you get. I advise to keep even the most complex designs to a maximum of four printed colors. There is no reason for you to use more color than that, also fans will have a harder time matching up their gear to the shirt, secretly all guys love to do this…

Any printer you use, will appreciate you color separating the art before you give to them. This means separating each color, so the printer knows what colors to put on each film layer they print, which will be used to make screens for your printing. Remove the questions from the process for the printer and your project will turn out the same way you give it to them. I prefer to have a design with the darkest color as the top detail. It’s easiest for the printing process to have the color layers beneath the darkest layer, that way the bottom layer edged are covered with the darker layer, insuring there will be no offset printing problems.

Give the printer the exact Pantone colors you want used in your design, they will be mixing ink to match the Pantone colors you give them. If you don’t give them exact colors, then you are opening the possibility they will not mix the right color you want to use. For the Pillow Monster design, I had to see the shirt color to pick printing colors since there is one tonal color specified in the shirt. The print might have looked weird if the navy color was too much of a red tone rather than a blue tone…

After the Artopia event, the extra shirts were added to the Sleepy Dan web shop. Check out the Artopia event blog posting and friends links on the posting to see lots of pics of the event! Maybe we will see you at Artopia 2012?