The Making Of Jay-Z's "The Blueprint 3" Album Cover

This is cool and can be very inspirational. Check it out.

Listen To Your Heart Featured Today 9/23 on TEECRAZE.Com

TeeCraze.com is a site that features 13 new designs available for purchase everyday. Today my Listen To Your Heart t-shirt design created for Branded Baron is part of that group. It is exciting to be featured on other blogs and websites for your artwork. This design is probably my favorite design I ever created. I've always liked the concept, which I feel is very important in a design. The execution has equally match the concept or better to make it that much better of a creation. I hope to have another shirt design make it on this site again. Thanks to the good people at TeeCraze.

-Joe

Purebuttons.com

Purebuttons.com is a great resource to get a range of promotional products. They do really good work and have a fast turnaround(which is fantastic). As you can see below this one they did for Branded Baron a couple months ago. Not only do they do buttons, they also have packaging for the buttons, magnets, keychains, zipper pulls and mirrors. I would definitely go with them. You can find out the price on their site, because they have their own calculation system. They have templates for their products too. Check it out and go there. You'll love what they provide.

DesignByHumans.com Halloweek 3 T-shirt Contest

One of the most popular t-shirt sites, is the design contest DesignByHumans.com I own a couple of really top notch and cool looking shirts from there. It's a great outlet to showcase your skill and hopefully will the cash and dbh credit to their store. They have this special theme halloween contest, to come up with a hot looking t-shirt for Halloween. I will be submitting my piece later this week. So good luck to everyone.


From Designbyhumans.com
Design By Humans
MenWomenVoteForumLoginSignup0 DBH CONTESTSPECIAL CONTESTSENTER CONTEST & SUBMIT ARTWORKRULES & PRIZES

HALLOWEEK 3!
It's that time of year again where creepy crawlies, monsters and ghouls take center stage. Start creating your scariest design because the deadline is just around the corner. Good luck and may the most terrifying designs win!

Submission Deadline: September 20, 2009 (Midnight PDT)

Halloweek 3 Guidelines:
1) All printing techniques allowed, including foil, flock, metallic ink, and glow in the dark ink.

2) Submission deadline: September 20, 2009.

3) 5 winning designs will receive $500 cash and $250 dbh dollars.

Inspiration-Fatoe

Hello,
I know I've been slacking. I've been busy. Working on my t-shirt brand, Branded Baron that launched on my birthday on the 27th of August and working on a bunch of design jobs. Here's an artist that I like to check out and gather some inspiration. Mike Orduna aka Fatoe is creates great work. I recommend checking him out when you get the chance. I like the spray paint and splatter and overall look of his designs. It definitely stands out. You can check the rest of his work out his site http://www.fatoe.com/

Need help with Color Schemes? Go to Colourlovers.com!

I had a college professor tell me that she loved my color selections. Personally my secret is using a monochromatic scheme. It works best for me and I find it a lot easier than combining colors. Of course I have to a variety of colors for many different projects, so if I get stuck on deciding what compimentary colors work or I can't think of a color, I'd go to this website, Colourlovers.com They have a huge selection of palettes, patterns, colors, and they have their own blog on colors. They'll tell you what the current trends are. It's very helpful.

BrandsOfTheWorld.Com For Finding Company Logos For Your Jobs

Whether you're given terrible artwork or a student that wants to add some finesse for a school project, this site is very useful. http://www.brandsoftheworld.com is great with providing you with vector logos for companies from Coca-cola or Pepsi or other big companies. You never know what will be there, so type it in the search engine and see the images that come up.

MY ShirtFight.com submission- "Hothead" Process

Hello,

I have always liked ShirtFight.com. For those that do not know what it is, it is a weekly t-shirt design contest. I posted general rules on how to win a t-shirt contest that was written by the owner of the shirtfight.com, El Presidente a couple weeks ago. I've been meanin

g to do this for a while, but I figured I should submit a design for this week. It may be a little late, but hey I can always win, plus I'd like to be featured on their blog as one of the top 10 heavyweights. If I would like to be in that category, because I'll have more people viewing my portfolio,which could lead to more design jobs. You have to look at the bigger scheme of things. It's not just a competition where you're competing for cash and prints of your design, but exposure where you can land jobs. 

        This week's theme was fire, so I wanted to create something good. I had a couple ideas, but I figured why not name a design "hothead". I thought it would be great to have an old colonial type skull on fire. Here's my process from sketching, to doing the linework, to the coloring, and the final design. I knew that I wanted to keep my colors to a minimum, so I would be using a lot of halftones for lighter shades of the colors I chosen for my palette. 

       If you wish to vote for this design, so it can be printed you can go here http://www.shirtfight.com/vote/entry/hothead/   It's free to sign up and vote. They have some cool shirts for sale. They're now going to do bi-weekly themes instead of every week, which gives a designer a lot more time to work on it. I hope you enjoyed this post.

            -Joe

My Sketch being inked

I'm beginning to lay down my colors.

This is more of a complete illustration, but there are still more details I want to add.

Here you can see the background color I wanted and how it to be used for the shirt.

This is the final design and you can see the boxes above which show how many colors I've used. I wanted a burn feel so I added some grunge effects. Next thing to do is mock it up on the shirt and submit it.