I do struggle to find a consistent theme for the shop. It doesn’t help that my mind rarely settles long enough to think about business plans and that sort of thing. I think everything falls under the heading ‘Stuff I like or that I know other people like’, which is neither useful nor concise.
So this is another in the ‘General’ pile of designs.
Comic sound effects
I read a lot of comics when I was a boy, that’s not unusual. I even read one comic when I was a young man (Viz) and dip into it occasionally. One of the visual elements that I loved in comics was the sound effects. I stumbled upon a library of comic sound effects while I was researching this design.
The original sketch (below) is most of the way there. I need to find a way to convert that into something that I can upload to RedBubble and put onto t-shirts and stuff.
Process
I redrew the sound effects, using the same rough off-white paper as above. Then I took a photograph of the page, uploaded to my computer and then pondered how best to get the image into a form I could manipulate digitally.
Inkscape was my first call. I have had a lot of use from this app, it’s great for removing background (for patent images) and has an easy-to-use colouring-in function that I use for pop art-type designs. However, the paper I used is off-white, so it was a challenge to get a crisply defined edge to the lines.
I used Blender in the end. I added the photo as a background and traced over the lines using the drawing function. The lines are easy to edit and move around, just as well since my lines were a bit wonky. Once I was happy with the lines, there is a “Fill” function that fills the shapes. I did a few different colours for variety.
I exported the lettering from Blender and then used the images in Canva to do the final composition. The lettering used the font Waterlily. This isn’t the comic book style I was after originally, but seeing this with the sound effects made sense to me.
Comic letterers use India ink to get the clean, crisp letters that carry the text. There is a font called whizbang which I could have used, if I’d known about it before I finished the design.
Tiled version
I’ve recently learned how to make tileable designs. So I took the noises I’d made, copied them, changed the colours a bit and made a tilable alternative to the ‘straight’ design.
For clothing, you need an all-over print. In RedBubble, the options are the Graphic Tee and the A-line dress.
Making this pattern – and the others I’ve made recently – means I can put the design onto items where the other images (like rubber ducks – see below) wouldn’t look so good. Large items such as shower curtains, scarves and bedspreads, work well with a repeated pattern. Some smaller items – mugs, mouse mats, desk pads – also look good with certain repeated patterns.
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