Hey guys. So first of all if my voice sounds a little bit weirder than usual it's because
I'm currently fighting off a cold so please excuse that. But I'm still in a really good
mood today because I launched my new tshirt line earlier this week.
In case you didn't know I started my little apparel company about 5 years ago and this
is the sixth collection that I've put out. A little while ago I had a request to talk
about my tshirt design process and I thought that since I've just been designing these
new tshirts for the past month or so that now would be the perfect time to tell you
a little bit about how I design them.
So my tshirts are always inspired by music. And being the creative type, I always am jotting
down lyrics that stand out to me, or perhaps a quote from a musician that I've read about
in an interview or an article and I put them down into a notebook or maybe in the Notes
app on my phone so that they're there for me as ideas to refer to when I come to designing.
I think doing it that way is much better than sitting down and going "right. I need to design
a tshirt" and coming up with the idea on the spot because that way you've taken note of
things that have inspired you so that when the time comes to actually create something
you can look back on those things and get inspiration.
There's 5 new designs in a few different colourways. Some of them were really fast to design because
I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and others took a lot longer and needed more exploration.
The fastest one to design was definitely the logo tshirt. I knew I wanted to feature a
logo shirt in my line because I really like my little logo that I came up with all those
years ago. And I wanted it to be an outline of the logo and I did it with a brush pen,
so I drew it so that it could have more of a hand made feel and I'm really happy with
how it turned out.
Another one that I did with a brush pen is this one that says "High def hopes and dreams"
which is something my friend Sharleen wrote a few years ago. I actually had a design featuring
this quote in my second ever collection but I feel like, you know, as I've gotten better
as a designer my tshirts have gotten better and the old design didn't really do this great
quote justice. So i wanted to create something that was a little bit more worthy I guess.
So for this one I spent ages drawing these words over and over again. i don't know how
many sheets of paper I used. But when you're using a brush pen it's sort of all about moving
quickly and getting the shape right and yeah sometimes it can just take a long time to
get the words looking how you want them to. especially when you're new to brush pens like
I am.
And i really wanted to persevere and do it with the brush pen rather than just going
straight onto the computer because I feel like its much more authentic that way.
The next one will probably only appeal to a very niche audience of people who feel as
passionately about pop-punk music as I do. It's this one here that says "defend pop-punk"
and I drew this defend at a Typemeet, which is a hand lettering, sort of meet up I go
to.
So I drew the letters and before I filled them in I decided I really liked how they
looked just as an outline so i decided to stick with that. So I just vectorised it and
thats what went on the t-shirt.
This one here is another one where I had the idea in my head but it took a long time to
get it down on paper. And actually though I did start this one on paper, I did a lot
of the work for this on the computer which is quite rare for me. I normally would, you
know, work for ages on my sketch and redraw that and neaten it up and get it looking right
as a sketch before moving onto the computer but I guess just because this one has a lot
of words to it it was taking a lot of time to keep redrawing it and refining it that
way so I did move on to the computer faster than i normally do with this one.
This last one is probably one of my favourites because its quite different for me, but I'm
really happy with how it turned out.
Unlike the other shirts, I didn't really have an idea for this one in my head before I started.
I knew I wanted to use soundwaves, and the soundwaves on this tshirt are actually from
a song I love called Growing Up by Fall Out Boy. So I knew I wanted to do something with
them, and I was playing around with putting them in various shapes and putting words within
them but it was just looking really messy and overly complicated. Also with the DIY
way that I screenprint you can't have details that are too fine, so having words within
these little soundwave lines here just.. it was just gonna be a bad time.
So i'm pleased that i came up with this in the end. And I put the words that I did want
to include on it on the back neckline instead which is just a little bit more subtle and
I think really nice.
But yeah, that was quite a different process designing that t-shirt and it was a lot of
exploration and playing around on the computer with these soundwaves and trying to get something
that I liked. And I'm really happy with the end result.
So that's all I can think of to tell you about for now. If there's anything in particular
that you're curious about or perhaps I didn't explain properly then please feel free to
leave a comment down below because I'd love to chat to you about it.
I don't want to be all self-promoty or anything but I'm really proud of these tshirts so if
you want to go check them out in the store that would be awesome. Next week I have another
Christmas themed DIY for you because its less than a month til Christmas now. When did that
happen?
So stay tuned for that on saturday and I'll also have a weekly vlog uploaded on Wednesday
so I'll see you then. Bye.