Cheesecake Toy T-shirt

This t-shirt design came from the Toy Story-ish design of the "Teamwork to the Rescue" t-shirt. It's a similar idea, with toys coming to life, only this one "set" in the Second World War. It's based on the very famous pin-up poster of Betty Grable. It was a fun little design, though getting the angle of the green army man who is knocked over by the beauty of the poster was pretty tricky. I tried to keep the poses of the toys are true to the real thing as possible.

The Lego-style Betty Grable was a lot more difficult to do, since Lego people don't have a whole lot of curves, and I didn't want to change it too much. I used the shadows to give in controuring more than changing the square shap of the toy. The shadow, however, comes straight from the real poster, so it's got plenty of human shape. The half-tone dots are, in my opinion, what really sets that off. The dark part is coloured around the dots, and the light half the dots are coloured. Gives a good contrast with just black.

This was a fun one! I think the design works well at capturing a Forties feel, with the halftone dots and vintage shapes. The design is named "Cheesecake Toy" because pin-ups were often called "cheesecake girls."

It's available in a few different forms at RedBubble. Enjoy!

Yesterday's Jam

I really enjoyed The IT Crowd. It was a really great, geeky, show, and had a few really terrific moments. One of the most memorable is the scene about 'Yesterday's Jam'. So I took it, and made it into a t-shirt design:

There are many references to the show packed into this little design: The 8-bit opening credit sequence is referenced in the lines, colours, and square 'half-tone dots'; the logo is 'The Internet', the 'Red door' of the jam (do you see the shape/colour of the jam and also the doorknob?), and the company name; and lastly the best before date is the emergency number.

I'm very happy with how this guy turned out! Head over to RedBubble to get a shirt or iPhone case.

And We Shall Call It This Land

I suddenly realized that I haven't posted about the t-shirt designs I've done over the past couple of... years. Years! So, I'm going to begin a series of posts covering all the designs, because some of them are really good, and I want to share them.

This is a reference to one of my favourite TV show, Firefly. It's from the very first scene, one of the funniest moments in the show. I decided to make it into a Soviet-style propoganda poster, which included having to make the font. Right now it's just in Photoshop, but I might look into getting a program to make it a real font. I'm happiest with how the dinosaurs and half-tone dots came out on this, it really worked well.

Head over to Redbubble to get a t-shirt (or hoodie, or iPhone case).
 

Moroccan Tiles Fabric - Times Two

This fabric design (designs, if you could colour variations) came from a very real need for curtains for my bedroom! I'm sure the neighbours will appreciate it. Here's a photo of my very cool new bedroom in the old house I'm slowly restoring (the colours area  little dark, sorry):

Pay special attention to the stained floor pattern! I did that to excuse the crappy wood planks that are in the middle and are meant to be covered with an area rug. All the rooms are like that, it's pretty common in older houses, in order to save money on flooring. It probably made a lot of sense back in the day when the new area rugs were probably part of the overall house budget. Moving into a house that needs six or seven large rugs (including a custom shape in this one)... a little harder to figure out how to afford them. So, I stained a pattern on them instead. It looks really awesome and is my favourite part of the rooms I've finished.

Point is, it's a Moroccan pattern, and the room has a lot of colour in it, so I decided to come up with a very subtle Moroccan tile pattern for the curtains:

 

But to keep it interesting, I made a colour version as well, and that will be the bottom border, and I'll use a copper ribbon between the two in order to finish everything off.

The cream and white fabric turned out so much better than I ever expected! It's phenomenal in real life! The colour one looks great too, but the different off-white colours really suprised me.

I'll post photos of the finished product as soon as I find my sewing machine and the right ribbon.

Head over to Spoonflower to take a look at and purchase the fabric:

Moroccan Tiles in White

 Moroccan Tiles in Colour

New Honeycomb Fabrics

It has been a really really long time since I've been able to do anything creative (I moved and bought an old house that needs a lot of work, and I don't want to flood this blog with photos. Yet), but a few months ago I was in Winnipeg on course, and so I had spare time in the evenings to work on a few designs. I drove the person sitting beside me a little crazy doodling honey combs all week. The results are really nice, though!

I set myself the challenge of using a honeycomb pattern and the Pantone 2014 colours, and here is the result:

But all the doodling (and just the way I happened to make the pattern in Photoshop, which lent itself to some playing around) also led to this pattern, which uses one of the colours from the first design, Dazzling Blue.

Today they finally arrived, and here are the test swatches. They look terrific, especially the small honeycomb pattern. Well, and the blue is really rich and lovely as well. I'm very happy with them! These are on cotton-silk, and the fabric is really nice. I'm going to experiment with making them into book-cloth someday.

Both patterns are available at Spoonflower:

Honeycomb Pantone Rainbow

Honeycomb in Dazzling Blue