Most of the work you’ve created so far has been as a result of specific exercises with clear objectives defining the outcome. However, every drawing, every mark, every image you produce belongs to you and, as your property, has a potential value beyond the satisfying of a brief or exercise.

Go through the artwork you’ve created so far for this course. Review your sketchbooks, notebooks, working drawings and sketches as well as the more ‘resolved’ or finished pieces. Use post-it notes to identify the images which have elements that you enjoy. Try to distance yourself from each image’s original function, and its success as measured against your original intentions and goals, and make your selection purely on whether you enjoy the image aesthetically or conceptually. Photocopy or scan a selection from these images to make a ‘gallery’ of pictures, fragments of illustrations and drawings.

Choose from one of the areas of authorial practice and select an image from your gallery that would be appropriate for that area. Remember that you also need to identify an audience for your work within the area you’ve chosen.

If you can, implement the choices you’ve made and actually produce the artefact. There are many companies on the high street and on the internet offering services to help you transform your imagery into commercially viable or appealing objects. If you choose to implement your design be aware of the cost implications and investigate at least three alternative suppliers before committing yourself to a particular supplier.

OCA Key Steps in Illustration

I started by going through my blog to remind myself what I’ve created during this course so far.

Interestingly, I liked all 3 cat illustrations from part 4 for different reasons, and I could imagine them being used for different purposes.

It is quite an eclectic mix for sure, but I thought I can make some of these into some interesting and sellable articles.

I think my best shot is trying to create some T-shirts. These are super easy to produce, and can make a good profit. I have dabbled in screen printing before so I was thinking that some of these would make excellent screen printed t-shirts. I can imagine the black & white line drawings would work better as t-shirts, but there are also countless services online that let you upload your artwork to create your T-shirts. One of such services I used before is Vistaprint. What my issue was with the outcome is that the print was on a vinyl layer and therefore the front of the T-shirt was not very breathable.

I wanted to start with designing some T-shirts to see what I can come up with first and then look for the different printing services that would be available to compare pricing.

First I went with the line drawing of the cat. I think this has a really cool quality that reminds me of stuff by Nadia Flower. https://www.illustrationx.com/artists/NadiaFlowerScribbles I find her things very inspiring, I think they are super cool.

I scanned the drawing and turned it into a vector image using Adobe Illustrator. I thought this looks nice, but I wanted to add some cat related text to this. I looked at some cat related sayings and idioms, and I finally landed on Cool Cat. It is an idiom that is used for a fashionable person.

I written the words on a piece of paper with similar line quality to connect it more with the illustration.

I think these products would appeal to the younger crowd, teens to mid 20s. I asked in some student groups wether people would buy it and I got mixed feedback, a few people around this age group said they would buy it. Some siad that they didn’t like the text, but would buy if it had some profanity. I think this is quite common for the age group as well, If I were to market this, I would probably add some rude words to a version to see if that sells better than the CoolCat text version.

Looking at the above, I though this could also work on other things such as bags and maybe mugs.

Suppliers

I went ahead to see if I can find suppliers that would make 1 off pieces of these items, but I found that for higher quality prints you would generally need to order larger quantities.

Monsterpress

https://monsterpress.co.uk/order-online

Monsterpress seems to have some great options for screen printing from as little as 20 pieces.

20 T-shirts would come to £214.37 (£10.72/T-shirt)

They also do tote bags, which would come with a minimal order of 20 as well, and would come to £201.70 (£10.08/unit). (If you order more the per unit price coild go as low as £3.71).

Vistaprint

https://www.vistaprint.co.uk/clothing-bags/mens-t-shirts/fruit-of-the-loom-basic

These come with no minimal order and they cost £10.48 per T-shirt.

What I don’t seem to be able to do with this website is setting the design where I wanted to and making is larger. I think it would not be suitable.

They also do cotton tote bags, but they seem to have a minimum order of 100. This comes to £3.45/unit.

4imprint

https://www.4imprint.co.uk/

Narrow Mugs

The minimum order from this company would be 72 mugs and it would come to £223.60 total, this is £3.10 per mug. Mugs usually sell for around £10 so that would be a healthy profit if I were to sell. However I wanted to see how much it would cost from some other suppliers too.

Gildan Ultra T-Shirt

For 70 of the above t-shirts it would come to £371.10 with this company which would come to around £5.30 per shirt.

If I ordered 20 of these shirts (which seems to be possible with this supplier) it would cost £191 which brings up the per piece price to £9.55.

Eco-Friendly Long Handled Tote Bag

This bag comes with a minimum order of 100 and it would cost £229 which means 2.29 per tote bag.

My total order with this company would cost £823.70 for 72 mugs, 70 T-shirts and 100 tote bags. This would be only the black colour as you would need to make another set of the minimum order in advance to get some colour variations.

Home printing

Of course, I could go with home printing instead which would make it more cost effective and I would be able to produce my own articles of clothing from home.

https://www.screens4printing.com/custom-screens.html

I used the above service and the results were pretty good, I managed to create some screen printed shirts at home for my local Pokemon Go Group.

Their largest size 23.5cm x 35cm is £35 and can be turned around in about 72 hours. The inks and accessories would cost about £30 extra. At this point I would still need to buy shirts.

I found the same Gildan shirts that was used by some of the suppliers above at WorkwearExpress. Although you would be able to order as little as 1 from here, it would not be at all cost effective as it would come to 12.45 including delivery. I think this is always going to be a problem with the small orders.

Reflection

I really enjoyed this exercise. I think looking into how I could make my art into something that creates income is a very exciting prospect. It has a lot that one should think about before embarking on a such journey, even the production of the goods is difficult but I haven’t even touched upon the logistics of actually selling them. I really enjoyed this because I think as an illustrator/graphic designer this could be a lucrative business if you are able to create objects that people are willing to buy. I would find it very endearing if people started wearing clothing and using items with my illustrations on it. The opportunities are endless, because there is so many different things available nowadays through the internet that getting into an authorial practice seems quite attainable.