So this is the first part of what will  be a three part series on my own personal design process. I am by no means the very best in the world at this, but this is the technique that I have developed for myself. So if you think I am doing it wrong, sod off and write your own tutorial Mr. Smarty Pants. This whole set of tutorial/how-tos will be one big post in the forum, so if you found this with a Google search I suggest you look here to see the whole thing.  I do not claim to be a “graphic artist” but what I lack in athletic abilities (I can still kick your ass though) I make up for in my ability to render naked girly pictures with a pencil. I am proud to say that I have  taught myself everything I know. Admittedly Mr. Rolston, my eleventh grade art teacher, gets some credit, and my dad who was an illustrator for years, and all the artists that wrote books that I read. But other than that, and a bunch of other people that showed me stuff over the years, I am self taught.

I find it funny that in today’s day and age the polished products that I produce don’t impress. Many times I have had someone who has seen and bought my graphics and digital designs stunned to see what I have rendered with a pencil. I always get the “I didn’t know you could draw!” speech.  It seems that people think that as soon as you use digital tools the computer magically does all the work for you. This is obviously not the case. But at any rate my point is that you should have some idea how to draw to proceed with my techniques.

Secondly I am a geek too, I love computers, software and gadgets. I have a ridiculously large computer and am presently typing away on a Sony Bravia flat screen TV.  To my right is a Cintiq Wacom tablet monitor and on it is Photoshop ready and waiting for me to prepare pictures for this little post.I am not rich, but this is where I spend most of my time, so it follows that most of my money goes here. To be fair I started out with a slow computer and a screen I stole form someones garbage pile.

In this process I use colored pencils, regular pencils (or a black pen, I can’t find my damn pens right now), photoshop, Illustrator and I use my tablet (but it is not entirely necessary). My computer is old but fast.  My philosophy with computers has been to buy the most ridiculous machine I can at the time and then not replace it for 5 years. I think I save money in the long run, and I have to grovel and go down on my wife less often to convince her to let me get one. Although I love going down on my wife so that is a bad example.

Okay so let’s get started. Generally what happens is I get an idea for a shirt by taking a long crap and thinking hard or I just steal it from another medium. For instance, in the interest of full disclosure, this shirt idea comes from an amusing 4chan style motivational poster somebody sent me.  I  never Google it to see if someone has already done a shirt like this, because I don’t want to be affected by their design style, artwork or choices. So I am simply hopeful that this hasn’t been done as a shirt yet, and get right to it. And besides if someone did this already, fuck them, mines gonna be better.

I should pause here and just rant a bit on the whole etiquette as I see it with the t-shirt design community. As an artist I cheat, I use all the evil tools, like projectors, tracing, etc. Or at least I do for my photorealism work. To be frank I don’t really care how I get to the final piece, just that it takes to look good when I am done. I have rules mind you, but I can draw well enough that I don’t need to waste my time blocking things out when there is a projector in the room. So if you think that breaks the rules of art, then first off I don;t think you know squat about art, and secondly, well piss off. I also use Google images heavily for inspiration when planning a piece and typically I will find a style or picture I like, and replicate it to some degree. I firmly believe that all artists copy and good artists steal. I think it was Picasso that said that.

The fact is that t-shirt designs and cartooning/graphic work in general is not a noble pursuit as far as I am concerned. Sure I may be rendering socio-political commentary and that may have a profound value in our societies. Bt at the end of the day this shirt will mostly be about pubic hair  (no really, that’s where I am going with this). So I will let you stay on your high horse and have some fun down here in the gutter.

As POD designers we must be artists, comedians, graphic designers, web designers, marketing experts, and business people. And most of us do this  in our spare time between real work shifts. Given that I cut myself a little slack. Sure my shirts are usually original, but everybody I know wants that “I Support Single Moms” stripper t-shirt. That shirt design is sold by every company and every shop I have ever seen in my market. Of course I am going to sell one of my own, I’d be a fool not too. I do this to make a little extra cash, not change the fucking world.

To be brutally honest, I gave up on my dreams of being a pure artist long ago, because frankly I had other interests like feeding my family and wearing clothes in public. Maybe when I am rich I can paint my naked body red and defecate on a canvas to make a point, but for now I am happy to live in suburbia and have a real job. So to summarize, I don’t have the time or the energy to commit to truly artistic, pure and noble t-shirt designs, to be honest that whole statement sounds ridiculous to me. That’s not too say that there are those that don’t achieve this, but many do it as a conglomerate of talented people or are freaks of nature. The guy behind amorphia-apparel.com is an example of the latter.

So anyways, I will get off that tangent and get to it. Here’s how I work. First I collect ideas, in this case I got this picture in an email from a friend in Nigeria who I am sending some money, but that’s a different story. Here’s the source of the idea:

Funny right? So I think it makes a great mildly offensive pun (my favorite kind of shirt) and can be expressed well in cartoon form. So the first thing I do is go to Google for ideas. It’s hard to explain what I am looking for, I guess the stylization that others have used in certain parts, the common denominators that help people identify a cartoon as a hare or rabbit. It’s not like I can’t draw it without Google, but I like to have it as a reference. So a quick image search for “Cartoon Hare” and I am off.

I grab my sketchbook and with my blue pencil bust out the basic illustration. I try and keep the look original, this isn’t really that hard mind you. I have been cartooning for years so my own style is well established in that vein. For the young fuckers that may be reading this, never use the word fuckers, and keep working at it. Your style will evolve when you get to be an old bastard like me.

In the meantime copy other peoples style as much as possible.  To be honest my style is a weird blend of old school and americana cartoon types, admittedly cutesy, and fun as hell to draw. But I like to think I add an edge to my designs that my boyhood hero Walt Disney would blush at. For instance in this design I am adding pubic hair to a cute cartoon rabbit. BTW Disney himself is still a hero of mine but his company can go to hell. So anyway here is a pic from my sketchbook:

I am just getting the basic drawing done, mostly just getting my idea on paper and then roughing it out.  You’ll notice I am lazy, the feet are poorly positioned and the hands look a little fucked, but I fix things as we go along. I got the basic feel of it done and that is all good. From there I take out my handy pencil (or black pen, if I could find the damn thing) and do an over drawing that is a bit more refined. I should emphasize that very little time is spent on this part. I literally bash this out in minutes. The real work comes later in photoshop. So here is the pencil over drawing which is a touch more refined.

I have not added any “pubic” hare yet. That will come later. I always try and get the most out of the drawing, and this basic cartoon hare will make a nice addition to my stock image collection. So I will  actually get two pieces out of this when it is complete. I will likely sell the basic rabbit design through my stock image agency. If it makes a few cents it’s all worth it. POD design is all about passive internet income and there are a lot of places where you can make it. I will also add this basic rabbit design to the marketplace at spreadshirt.  Somebody might sell it and make me a few bucks which is always good.

So next up we need to drop the under sketch. This is easy because it is blue. In photoshop I simply go to the channels and select the blue channel. As soon as I isolate the blue channel all the blue pencil work disappears. This is because of additive and subtractive color theory, but I’m not going to get into that. So here is what it looks like:

Blue Channel Isolation in Photoshop

From there I Select All (Ctrl+A), Create a new file (Ctrl+N) and Paste (Ctrl+V) the channel in the new file. This gives me my blue channel isolation as a new file. From here I apply a levels (Ctrl+Alt+L) correction to make it closer to black and white.

Levels Adjustment of Sketch

This is imperfect but from here I will clean up my illustration using my tablet and photoshop brushes. Keep in mind I am lazy as hell, so I do this very quickly. If I could find my damn pens this would look much better than it does because the gray of the pencil is not the best to work with, but it does what I need it to.  In the next Part of this tutorial I will cover the true inking of the piece in Photoshop and finalize the raster portion of the design process. In Part 3 we will go through the vector portion. Stay tuned for more of this tutorial.