welcome back, wooters!

i have a 3rd design up for sale at shirt.woot today:


if you have a moment to poke around, please do. i always appreciate it. i have a couple items for sale through my big cartel, society6 and red bubble stores.

i also have a couple designs up for vote over at threadless if you have a moment to flex your mouse clicking finger(s):

july updates.

rather than attempt a cutesy title for this post, i think july updates will suffice.

i have been paying much more attention to my tweets and facebook than i have this poor blog, so i'll place a creative dump of everything i have worked on for the last month.










some of these will be up for voting at threadless soon:



this one is already in the running at threadless:


and a bit of good news, shirt.woot will be featuring one of my designs sometime soon. good news for me, as i needed to pay for a window i broke, repair some plumbing and get caught up on some bills.

make your walls awesome!

i have 2 poster prints available at society6.

the first is a design that was recently featured as "side art" during my recent teefury sale, and a lot of people seemed to dig it:

click here to buy.

the second is one of my favorites (because it's my wife's favorite):

click here to buy.

society6 came to my attention when threadless put out a call to all artists to submit and join their sure to be well trafficked collaborative "storefront". both of these pieces are currently vying for a space in their "store", but i'm up against hundreds of other excellent artists, so i'm crossing my "fingers". lots of air quotes.

i have also recently tweaked my site. now all of my shirts, posters, stickers and playing cards are collected in one single "buy" page. i have also moved my limited run tees that i still own the rights to back to the "designs" page under the cumbersome title "designs sold at limited sites & still available for sale."

"more quotes"

sunny day, sweeping the clouds away!

finally.

i'm contributing to pop-culture rather than just parodying or riding its coattails.

late last year, threadless was contacted to take part in a project focusing on sesame street characters. the staff then brought it to the alumni group (printed threadless designers) to come up with an idea to make a collaborative piece that centered around what makes grover who he is. the idea of his traveling tales trunk came up and the group went to work on grover's stickers collected on his journey.



the full project was for "t-world magazine" an australian bi-yearly publication, and the magazine just came out today:



and here is an early scan of the magazine (if you squint, my name is creditted third from the bottom right)


click here to zoom

if you want to get a better idea of the construction of this collab, please visit the flickr set. and an extra special thanks to ian leino for compiling everything and keeping us all in the loop!

last we had heard, t-world and the folks at children's television workshop were very interested in seeing this printed on (can you guess?) t-shirts! i would be very pleased to see that happen!

more meta mario!

i have a new design up for vote on threadless:



i even have a little back story for the design:
"lakitu towing
'the art of knowing kart towing'

"after time spent in jail, lakitu reentered the world a changed, and determined man. he started his towing business using the same vehicle he had previously used for misdeeds. it took lakitu a while, but he proved himself time and time again, helping stranded motorists from the stickiest of situations. lakitu was finally awarded full sponsorship of the star cup (a local kart racing tournament) and has become a hero to many on the road to victory.

"this is the official lakitu towing shirt worn by the lakitu staff."



if you like it, please show me some love on emptees as well!

fuzzlebeast.

threadless is running a 10k prize competition. this year's theme is new trends.

so i looked at the (extremely) vast collection of threadless shirts and saw a lot of designs that tell a great, well thought out story. not too many left the story open-ended for the viewer.

so i created trevor & the fuzzlebeast.


a design with enough detail to draw your own conclusions, making my suggested trend one of open-ended story telling designs.

this design should be up for vote soon.


if you would like to see how this design came together, i have the work in progress images here.

turtle shells are dangerous.

a shopping cart wearing a hat:


if you get it, please vote:


if you don't get it, you sir/madam, have not experienced fun in it's purest form.

rock the vote!

threadless has a "bestee" competition every month. each design printed the month prior is voted on, and the winner receives $2,500.

"picket." (seen below) printed last month and the voting for the bestees is right now.


please vote! my very wallet depends on it!

nerdy butterfly!

i have a new submission up at threadless that i'm particularly proud of.

there's a themed contest running titled "threadless loves geeks", and i frantically bugged friends on facebook and followers on twitter to lend me their glasses so i could put this together:


many many thanks to my friend dean for the photoshoot.

i created the design to display empty lenses in low light, and then when it's exposed to sunlight (uv ink) the monarch-like pattern appears. the transition can be seen here:


i've titled it "lycaena gygax.", lacaena being the butterfly genus, and gygax being the last name of the creator of dungeons and dragons. i played with the geeky name in the tag in the larger image you see above in the blog, but i chickened out of including it in the design when no one seemed to know why gygax was :P

on a personal note; the apartment's all packed up. we move into our house on friday.

wake me up when october begins.

t-minus 12 days until the family moves into the new house.

i've been working on a lot of favors and a collab that have been swept into an oft forgotten corner of my mind. i apologize if you are one of these 4 or so people. i'm trying my darndest to remain creative with a house full of boxes.

threadless recently reprinted "picket." so if you missed your chance to nab "picket.", try, try again.

i recently sold a currently "secret" design to culture twist so i'm having my first design printed overseas.

i want to give a quick thank you to robbie lee. he helped me get my foot in the door at shirt.woot and eased my trepidation when i recently entered a deal with culture twist. i seem to trail him by a few days at various shirt sites, and he was recently printed at design by hümans, so i'm knocking on wood, crossing my fingers and throwing table salt over my shoulder in hopes that i finally get a print there.

i recently vectorized an earlier sketch of mickey being torn asunder:


and made a logo for my uncle's construction company:


there's another design you've already seen in these blogs that will be printed somewhere on the internet sometime soon as well. as a matter of course, this is also a secret. the world of t-shirt design is very secretive, mysterious, and treacherous, friends.

help me picket threadless!

threadless chose my design"picket." and it just printed today!


click here to see the listing and buy one iffin' you're so inclined.

this is my second print at threadless, and i'm beyond stoked. i felt like such an adult when i turned over the entire threadless check to the bank to add to our house down payment. i'm such a big boy now.

september is busy!

threadless will be printing "picket." tomorrow morning. (i'll dedicate a lil' blog to that in the a.m.)

i'm going to see kevin smith mid-month (squeeeeeel!)

i'm flying down to colorado to celebrate my aunt's retirement from the airforce

i'm meeting some old friends in denver (one of which punched me in the face when we were roommates :D )

we've been and will be very busy at work releasing a new product for a client that is time-consuming but exciting (so if anyone has been waiting on me to finish side-projects or favors, there's my reason, sorry)

and to top it all off, the family and i just bought a home, so we'll be packing furiously and going through the mountains of paperwork all month to get into the new place next month. (thanks in part to threadless' and shirt.woot's prize money giving us that last little push)

so hopefully you're not one of the individuals on my list of folks being neglected. if you are, here's a sketch of j.f.k. with a goofy haircut to tide you over:

the phantom of crystal lake.

joing me in watching the classic play, the phantom of the opera on friday the 13th.

beware ye the walk-ed cross.

had some time to myself this evening, so i put together a design playing with the icons within the crosswalk sign:



this will be up for vote at threadless soon, and the design has some glow in the dark expectations, click below to see how that would work out:

easy, peewee, snorks.

i had contemplated (and blogged) about entering the last 2 designs i made at threadless.

but the more i thought about it, i didn't think they were the best fit for threadless' audience.

so instead, i'm gambling that they're right for the teextile audience.

fossils and viruses and shades, oh my!

i might as well post a threadless roundup.

i have 3 designs up for vote right now:







also, if you read the previous blog, i have a design up at teextile as well!

it's a designing bonanza!

paperclip hangers and mysteries.

i have a new shirt in line to be voted for at threadless.

this is my first design since bowler that feels artsy to me. here's hoping everyone else agrees :P



it's titled, "convoluted."

it will be up for vote soon:


and some more mystery news, i recently confirmed that i'll have another design up for sale at a site i haven't been sold at before. i am very excited for this one!

remains of the fray.

another lazy sunday, so i busted out my sketchbook and came up with this:


if you've seen any of my non-vector work, you may notice that i'm a huge fan of textures, i almost sent this design in to threadless without the texture. but as i was putting together the submission image, i added the texture to the background to dress up the submission a bit and found some serendipity. so i retooled the image as seen above.

i'm imagining that everyone can tell what the image is, but in case you can't, it's the skeletal remains of a hand grenade. hence the title "remains of the fray."

here is the link to the submission mocked up on a shirt:

pizza!

i've been printed a threadless again.

only, this time, as 1/50th of a collaboration!

alexmdc put together the idea and the color scheme etc here. and then assembled the deliciousness here.

here's my topping:



see if you can find it on the pizza!


Pizza Party with Alex Solis! from Threadless.com on Vimeo.

you can buy the shirt here.

a big thanks to alexmdc for putting this together and making this collab look really awesome tied together with his art. he also put us to work on a bunch of cool side projects revolving around the pizza party design (they can all be found here) here are a few of my entries into those side projects: