Writing on t-shirts is nothing new, at work I constantly have orders with “2 inch oval” or “1 inch dot” in the middle of a design for players to write their name or number on. This is mainly used for practice shirts, shorts, and PE shirts. Anyone can take a sharpie to white plastisol for a permanent mark. So what happens when you want to wipe the ink off and write something else on the shirt?

Thats where EraserTees has come up with a fun way to make personalized t-shirts simple and fun. If you go to their site you see a plethora of deisgns that you would see on nomral t-shirts. Each design is set up so that you can write, draw, plan your day, whatever you want with no more than a waterbased marker.

So how did they do this? Their site says they came up with a fix to making a special ink that you could write on and wipe off much like a dry erase board. (in this case a wet-erase board as dry erase wont come off the shirt!) It seems they have bypassed this problem with something simple rather than something hard, heat pressed vinyl.

We use vinyl at work all the time for custom player names that would otherwise require half a dozen screens and wasted emulsion just for one pass on a jersey. I can see some t-shirt snobs putting their noses in the air about using vinyl rather than ink, but in this case its all about the functionality of the shirt that makes it so awesome. They do use a high end garment from Tutlex which some can compare to American Apparel. The best part about vinyl is that it doesn’t fade, crack or wash out like ink can and eventually does. In the end the shirt will wear out before the design does!

Of course the second I got my shirt out of the bag I went to testing it out. Sooo glad they included a marker for this! I was totally skeptical about the whole washing off process but much to my surprise it wiped off super easy. They said to make sure its totally dry before drawing on it again and for good reason because the marker is waterbased and the marker just wont stick! I was so excited when this actually worked.

So whats the outcome?

EraserTees

• Packaging: great.
• Labeling: standard.
• Design quality: super clean
• Ink quality: vinyl
• Price: Affordable @ 14.95

Whats even cooler is that this is all run by a couple of high school business teachers, You should definitely give these guys a shot!

In an effort to slowly turn this blog into a non-personal artsy fartsy blog I am throwing around some concepts. I notice I don’t get inspired to do much of any of my own work anymore. No idea whats caused it but it has been going on for several years now. Whats cool tho, is that lately I have been given the opportunity to finally do some design and art work for a few friends who have totally different tastes and styles than me. Getting yourself out of your comfort zone is probably the best thing you can do as an artist because you end up in the “dirty bathwater” that is the inside of your head after a while. You get the same concepts and ideas wallowing around in there for long enough that you eventually get bored with them and in my case ignore the signals entirely.  So its a good thing  when someone comes up to you and asks you to design something for them that throws a wrench in the little gearbox in your head and forces you to think like them for long enough for them to get something good out of the process.

I’ve noticed there are two kinds of designers. Those who design around their own principles and if the client doesn’t like it then too bad you should feel honored to have had them design for you in the first place, and those who get in the clients head and design something to match the taste of the client to the point that the design may not even look good but makes the client happy.

Everyone has their own style they like to incorporate into their designs whether they are for themselves, a friend, or the lady who owns the bakery down the street. Personally, my work tends to be very minimal, not because I am lazy but because I like clean design. However that does not carry over into my tastes for fine art. In fact, it’s the opposite! I cannot stand minimalist painting or abstract art and sculpture in the slightest. I think it has to do with the effort that goes into these things. When you work with a computer its easy to get things out of whack when you don’t know what your doing. Dirty, overly noisy and textured design is easy to throw together because the mash up of objects and colors can look good, however the effort that went into it was probably minimal. On the other hand when a design is meticulously clean and even and the strokes look laser etched and machined that shows the artist has crazy manual dexterity with the mouse or tablet and knows the software well enough to get uniformity out of organic shapes.

However with fine art the opposite is true, you can draw super clean lines and straight edges using rulers and masking tape just as easy as the guy who paints your house. Destroying all evidence of brush strokes, being able to mix colors properly as well as portray lifelike colors and textures within a painting is in my opinion way more interesting and professional as well as requiring years of practice and education. A painting of a woman sitting in a chair is way more artistic to me than say a canvas with three red boxes painted on it. Yes they are both paintings, and yes its hard to make a red box even without using tape or a guide of some kind but technical painting skill and artistic painting skills are two different ballgames.

Technically the painting with red boxes is still art. Anything people make can be considered art. The McDonalds cup your holding is art because it was designed by someone to hold liquid and decorated to keep you drinking out of it. But it’s just a McDonalds cup. It’s not pretty or engaging or sensual in any way. Its industrial at best. I guess I don’t consider graphic design on par in any way with fine art. It’s always been two separate monsters to me. Graphic Design is the hyper-crafted, well oiled Japanese robot war machine while Fine Art is the Fabergé  Bugatti Veyron filled with reclining nudes. Graphic design is everywhere and on everything around you so it seems natural that it just gets ignored sometimes, yet it still needs to be at a high level of quality or your not going to read the sign or buy the product. Fine art is different in that it normally depicts a false image. While that image could be something real, or something that the artist was looking at, we all know the image is just the artists interpretation of what they saw which, I think, makes it much more intriguing.

What do you think? Do you feel graphic design and fine art are on the same level? Or do you agree they are to different monsters with their own highs and lows?

Well the party isn’t on my birthday it’s on Marki’s but can’t have a good ol’ cookout on a Sunday, especially when alcohol is vastly abundant.

Did the invitation today:

Here is a link to it full size so you can read all that bitty print: INVITATION.

Spent a ton of time today in Illustrator farting around with things. First thing I built after the invitation was a mockup of a fake AustinTuners energy drink. I named it BOOSTJUICE lol.

After that I was trolling about shutterstock before the account went dead and found a cool anime pose so I used it as a base and rebuilt it in illustrator and made it Koe, then went ahead and made it a full blown book cover:

I like it! Now to write the thing lol. I have the first half of the story semi fleshed out in my head. I’ve been working on this story since high school and it has changed DRASTICALLY since the first bit. so yeah, should be fun.

Looking around I realized that I don’t actually do any real art anymore. I photoshop and design at work all day and its the last thing I want to take seriously when I get home. It takes a lot of energy for me to sit down long enough to draw something worth showing anybody. That probably sounds strange to most people who take up art as  a hobby but most artists will tell you that it does drain you of whatever it is you use to create with. But after work, driving Isaac around, getting him fed, bathed and to bed, getting Cody fed and content for bed by 11:30 at night I’m tired too so I end up trolling a few blogs for five minutes and heading to sleep myself. Most people think that making art is just a skill or ability that you sit down and do. Thats totally wrong, if I were to sit down without thinking, preparing, or imagining and started to draw on paper you would see some hideous crap happen before your eyes.

Artists talk about inspiration all the time. Inspiration is what recharges that energy we use to create stuff, art, music, writing, whatever. If your doing it just because your bored your going to get bland bored stuff. If your doing it because you felt moved to do so your work will have actual life in it. Make sense? Anyway, we can draw inspiration from practically and litter ally anything. Paper plates, shoes, bird crap on a car window… Anything can give you inspiration but its usually things that you enjoy in the first place. However sometimes there are just these really quirky things that have no place being around you that just all of a sudden compel you to copy them or make something similar. The following are things that inspire me:

1. Old french posters

She’s selling what? I don’t care because I just bought seven cases of it. This design is a biscuit ad done by Alphonse Mucha, the ever-so-famous art nouveau illustrator. The subdued colors with the intricate and flowing linework let you just stare at the images for hours. The packaging wasn’t meant to be glanced at in a supermarket amongst forty other kinds of cookies, back then you probably had maybe three to choose from in the whole store because people just made their own. The fonts stand out and yet are blended into the waves and forms of the posters. He probably spent a few days just sketching this out and taking his time unlike designers today who have only a few hours to crank out fonts on shapes with photos pasted all over it. Love these.

2. Cars from the 80′s

Its a box, its a wedge, its a plane, no its a car from the 80′s! Car designers were doing astounding work designing cars by hand up until the late 1970′s when that wonderful machine knows as the computer showed up on the designers work desk. With computer aided design, concepts didn’t have to be hand molded from clay and carved out, they could be rendered and precise. You see that with cars made in the 80′s when the shift from sleek and curved to boxy and angled cars started to show up in the dealerships. Cars went from being giant boats to little economy zippy modern cars. I like the way this old style looks, even if it looks bad on certain types of cars, like the fox body mustang, it looks bad but I still like it. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

3. Museums

I can spend days in a museum looking at all the old junk behind bulletproof glass. Not so much paintings and sculpture but things like suits of armor, swords made of nearly rust, and clothes that are still in tact. Thats the kind of stuff I love looking at in museums. Things someone spent a long long time hand making that is somehow still in tact. Clothes from the Civil War, hand-carved jade lions that look like they were cut with lasers, some random Greeks old sandals, the fun stuff. Its cool to suddenly realize that all the stuff they talked about in History class, and in historic movies was actually real and happened forever ago and have its proof laying there in a box.

4. Well kerned text

I have a subscription to ArtForum magazine. Of course I will never be able to go to any of the shows or meet any of the artists listed or advertised in the magazine because their all in New York or San Fransisco. The reason I like this magazine is because every single page is an ad for an artist done in the most beautiful typography you have ever seen. Expensive pantones on giant planes of magenta, uncapitalized text, helvetica helvetica helvetica. I go through this magazine quickly but the designers who do the ads for the shows are just beyond amazing, better than the stuff you see on the internet for sure.

5. Driving

I have thought of the best stuff while going 75 mph down I-35 with the cruise control on (autotragic ftw). Trips to Mineola from Austin run 6 hours. It requires changing of cds but its worth it to get the ultimate zone out for thinking about stuff.  Not just trips to Austin but to Dallas, or anywhere else that requires car time longer than a good hour is my favorite thing. If someone else is driving its even better because then I can look around me more and focus on things like the car beside us or a billboard for jack daniels.  It’s like when you get ready to go to bed and you lay there and all the information and ideas that were in your head all day catch up to you and you have to sit there and let all that just pour out or whatever before you go to sleep. Same thing in the car, you sit there listening to every Fiona Apple song you own and suddenly really good ideas start to pop up in your brain. Maybe its the highway hypnosis aspect that opens up the creative centers of your brain.

Pretty soon that will be similar to what you will see when you visit jetgirlart.com. The first time I reworked it I was going for an ArtForum style print layout for the page which didn’t agree too well with my horrible code. Since starting my new job at myARCworld.com I’ve had plenty of time and access to resources in the web development industry and I now know what I should be doing and what my site needs to be doing.

This blog itself will still be here, a stand alone blog, however I will be feeding in the update feed through to the new site so you wont have to go to two pages to see the same info. You could but that would just be redundant.

New things in the site overhaul:

1. no more gallery
2. actual navigation
3. useful links to the resource sites i use
4. friend icons

I’m getting rid of the gallery and simply importing the digital work folder from flickr since i update that more often and its easier than having to create thumbnails and resize all my images. The navigation will have more contemporary buttons and should be more intuitive than just text in space. In order to help out those who go to blogs for info and stuff I will be linking all the tutorial sites and design blogs I use on a daily basis. The friend icons are something new ive thought of. Most blogs and sites you go to have a small block of ads to the far right of the screen. Since I know my blog wont take off or become super commercial (its a personal site and only friends and family seem to view it) I am going to opt to “look” like the real blogs by putting what appears to be ads when its really just a small image icon that links to a friends blog or website. No money will be made from the links but it might increase their page views somewhat, and I’m all about helping out friends. So before I get the site in dreamweaver (yeah i suck at code so shut up) and you would like to have your site displayed in that area please send me an image to use in that spot. It can be anything from your face, to text, to a design. I’ll make it fancy and cut out right since im not sure the size ill be using just yet.