With things starting to warm up, perhaps the designs of this month should reflect the change in weather, the emergence of colour, the mood of the changing season. No. I am not so easily influenced by the weather. Instead, I am influenced by the challenges set by Threadless and the things on my ever-growing list of designs that I want to create, but haven’t yet done so.

Mother’s Day in the UK also happened this month and I did not create a design for this occasion. I don’t want to further encourage the commercialisation of Mother’s Day. Not right now anyway. Make the kids help out around the house… every single day for the rest of the year. That would be the greatest gift a mother could receive. And it shouldn’t start on Mother’s Day.

I actually do have some designs that are aimed at people looking for gifts for their mothers. But don’t wait until Mother’s Day to show your Mum some appreciation.

 

Let’s take a look at what designs were born this March!

 

Keep Your Friends Close

If you don’t know the other half of this saying, I feel you’d be missing out on fully comprehending the meaning of this simple little design. This was for a Threadless challenge titled “Unlikely Friendships”. When I initially posted my teaser on social media and hinted at the theme, the post read:

🐱+🥒= ?

As innocent as my intentions were, I now realise that this could have been interpreted in other ways. I apologise if anybody was disappointed when I revealed my final design… Actually, never mind. I’m not sorry. I wouldn’t like it if it had turned out any other way than this.

This design is your reminder that your quality of life can drastically improve when you face your fears and do not let them control you in a negative way. Maybe you could even learn to love something you once despised. Like broccoli. Or Marmite. Just look at this wonderful example of a pussycat, going against his natural instincts to flee from a cucumber. Once you take a moment to really look at what it is you’re afraid of and decide if it really is a threat, your irrational fear of cucumbers may also disappear.

 

Join The Network

I’ve been wanting to make this design for a while, but was put off by the knowledge that it would involve lots of lines. Lots and lots of tiny lines. Even though any picture is made up of lots and lots of lines, these are different. They have to look like an interconnected web, but also be aesthetically pleasing and in the shape of letters. I’m pretty sure there’s a digital brush out there that would have done most of the hard lifting for me, in a different style, but I decided to do it this way… for almost 8 hours. The process of making this became more of a meditation.

I thought it might help if I did some scribbles in my sketch to help give me some random lines to follow (below). It certainly could have worked, but I ended up not using them. Goes to show that you can lead yourself to water, but that doesn’t mean you’ll remember you’re there to get a drink once you arrive.

I was going to do the mushrooms in colour, but decided to go for all white. The mushroom on the left is supposed to be a button mushroom, the one on the right was going to be an Amanita muscaria and the ones in the middle I imagined were those common brown mushrooms that you find growing among grass. No clue what they’re called.

If you’re not familiar with fungi, they’re pretty amazing. This design is my tribute to these vast organisms that grow beneath the ground, silently intermingling with the rest of the ecosystem. Hopefully, they will never decide to take over our minds like something out of a horror TV series or computer game.

 

Purrfect Sunset

So, for this design, I was initially going for a traditional Japanese style design, but didn’t quite follow through all the way with that idea. A lot of Japanese-style paper and fabric patterns have this “wate” pattern, which is essentially concentric circles all laid out side by side and overlapping to make these fan shapes. I actually spent a decent amount of time just drawing this pattern, which I intended to draw over with the ink brush, but then I remembered I could just copy and paste the concentric cats, making the outline almost completely unnecessary. So that’s what I did for the sea of cats.

After drawing the great big cat sun I had a series of problems deciding what colour everything should be. It originally looked much more bland than this. After looking at a lot of traditional Japanese art, I decided this wasn’t going to have a traditional colour scheme, as I had originally planned. I was just going to pick pretty sunset colours.

You might be thinking, “Shouldn’t those cloud cats have some nice, bright orangey-yellow outline to them to show the sun is shining on them?” It would probably look better if they did. It would also probably look better if those sea cats had some of the orange of the sunset on them too. But this one was created with the intention that it should be simplistic and cartoon-like, but that intention was interrupted by indecision and too many conflicting ideas. I hope I captured this in the design.

You might not believe me, but I’ve also been trying really hard to avoid drawing cats. I just think I’ve been drawing too many of them. I don’t specialise in cat art. But they’re just such nice little characters to draw. So here are a whole bunch of cats, all over the place. Maybe after this, I’ll have exorcised them from my system…

 

Hypno Cat

So, this is what happens when you start your week not knowing what to do. You do another cat. Think about it this way, if I drew a human, it wouldn’t look as cute and interesting. Would it?

If you think this character would have looked better as a different species, tell me. I only have my own completely biased personal opinion to go by.

The aim of this design was to try and keep things super simple. Just one colour and lines. But after finishing the basic cat drawing, I just felt like he hadn’t received enough attention. I felt as though I needed to spend more time doting and fussing over him. Just for a little longer. That is why he has squiggly aura lines coming out of him.

Originally I was going to fill him in with black, but I think it’s better if the fabric does the work of colouring him in. So he’s a white outline with a black background. And if anybody prefers a white cat, he comes in white as well.

Perhaps the black one should have had green spiral eyes and the white cat could have had blue spiral eyes. If you keep looking at and thinking about your artwork for too long, you just find more to add to it. This is how some artists end up spending years on the same piece of work. Is it possible to spend years on this simplistic cat design? Yes. Is it worth spending years on it? No… it is not worth spending any more time on this design. Not even ten more minutes. So, in the spirit of keeping things simple, their eyes shall remain black and white.

 

Would you have preferred to see more spring and Mother’s Day themed designs?

Are you sure she wouldn’t rather have a cat or mushroom themed shirt?

And if you’re reading this and it’s nowhere near Mother’s Day, when’s the last time you thought about treating you Mum to something just for the sake of it? Go on, take her out somewhere nice, help her out with some of her daily tasks, have a chat with her about anything and everything. Every day is Mum-day, just as every day is you-day too.

Stop waiting for special days. Just get to it.