I have entered a competition that is held each year by AS COLOUR, a really good T-Shirt company that produces high quality T-shirts for Screenprinters. They have a competition called THE LITTLE HELP PROJECT, where designers and artists can send their T-shirt design range in and the winner can get help in the form of $ 10 000 to launch their own T-shirt line/company!
I was really excited about the idea and have created the “love thy shirt” label, a label that wants to show and encourage support for something in a fun way. It was inspired by the idea that most often people wear fun t-shirts to tell others something about themselves. Even if it is simply a funky graphic, to a certain degree it defines who they are to their surroundings. I wanted to create a label that would on the one hand tell people about something that the wearer of the shirt is passionate about or at least interested in but ALSO something that he/she wants to encourage others to get engaged with. The shirt owner would want you to know that this is something he stands up for and the sentence “love thy” is a bit of a call to others to do the same. All designs are supposed to be humorous to make the message a bit more ironic because everyone knows that things that we love are not perfect and have their problems or flaws but that we like them despite that, even because of that. So the aim of the shirts is to bring a smile on the face of the viewers, even if they are not interested in the specific topic. I drew the illustrations/designs by hand in ink, to get a flowing, sketchy outline that gives an approachable look and then coloured digitally in bright tones. They are a bit childlike to accentuate the fun, naïve, playful side of the illustrations and help bring across the humour. The themes I use are topics that deserve recognition and the owner can choose to wear the shirt because either he/she likes the topic or simply because it looks fun and cute.
Here is the link to the competition in case anyone else is interested, you have time until the middle of November! (NZ and Australians only)
http://www.littlehelpproject.com/
They also have a really cool animation for explanation, love that style!
Now here are some of my designs. I have also decided that they might make cool posters too and some ideas actually would look even better in that format. So there are poster format ones and T-shirt ones here.
Hope you like!
