Vaja Vajush

Ever since I drew my first picture on my computer 8 years ago, I knew this was what I wanted to dedicate my life to. Digital art is my passion and life purpose and now I can finally show it to the world and make some extra cash from it! Hopefully you'll be as happy with your commision as I am when I work on them :)

I made a whole ko-fi page dedicated to it, but if you'd prefer to lead them and communicate with me through tumblr, thats entirely possible! You can pay through PayPal directly, or ko-fi offers various payment methods, including a debit card, without registration :)

What lead me to this project, what inspired it?

I've had this planned for like 2 months beforehand and ive been daydreaming about designing tshirts since i was like 15, I finally got to it now because i graduated from graphic design and finally have time on my hands to do fun new artsy projects!

For the topic I wanted something cyberpunky and original at the same time. Recently ive been getting into more electronic music and fell in love with the album I Love My Computer by Ninajirachi–i related to it a lot, because ive also grown up with really only my computer by my side and its also how i got into digital art, which felt like the perfect idea for a "debut" drop of my t-shirts!

For the designs I wanted to focus on the iconic, nowadays daily, tropes and cliches in computers, and i decided that i want to have separate designs for the hardware and software parts of computers. They're women only because i love drawing women and i wanted to make them very pretty lol

Behind the scenes

I started the project by sketching concepts for the girls, adding the transcript of my horrendous handwriting in the ALT.

Also, since I knew from the start i wanted to focus simply on the outline in white and use one accent color, there was no need to go behind just the sketch, so this is kinda the only BTS content that exists lol

hardware girl

software girl

After these i headed straight to creating the designs themselves.

I started with Software girl in the morning and I finished it before going to bed, literally blinked and saw my discord status say ive had krita opened for 10 hours lol. Decided to take 2 days on each design after that.

This is also the first project for which ive planned to make some marketing material for. Since most of my audience is on youtube, it was kinda a no-brainer, I just had to make a video ad. Luckily my good friend Michael released an album with fitting cyberpunky beats like a year ago, so I had a safe and fitting song to use, cut it into a half a minute clip and it went swimmingly from there. Although i needed 2 small clips with the shirts in-person, so I needed to pray and wait for my shirts to deliver from redbubble.

Also this is the part where I need to introduce my beloved oomfie @paper012 that saw this getting created and gave me so much motivation and power to keep going – she is the other person in the ad!

My experience with Redbubble

I was looking into all the available options when it comes to Print on Demand, and redbubble was the only one which shipping didnt make me want to krill myself lol. They're partnered with printing studios around the world and always automatically choose the one closest to you, so you dont need to worry about customs at all, and from the POV of the artist, you dont need to worry about anything other than your designs and margins (your income in % from the products, i kept it at 10% so it's still cheap for buyers)

When it comes to getting paid, this is where it gets tricky. While earning only the set percentage of the order, you get paid monthly only if it crosses 10 dollars (which for me means around 10 shirts) and from that they take a percentage for themselves as a monthy "account fee". This percentage is 50% by default, 20% if your account is "premium", which the program already granted me somehow, probably an automatic thing if you make an x amount of designs/if they mark your designs as profitable, im not sure. This can be a dealbreaker to some artists, but I'm planning on getting a job anyway so I'm okay without a good pay.

I also wish there was a way to check how all those different types of shirts feel, how do they fit, how well it gets printed etc., because theres just so many types to choose from and it kinda feels spammy, i guess i would want to be able to have my products more curated instead of giving the buyers all those options to choose from that look VERY similar. To test that I would have to order all of the types for myself and i currently do not have budget for that.

I bought the classic shirts in size S (im sometimes XS, sometimes S) because they were cheaper and looked nice in the image. They arrived today and i honestly couldn't be happier! I was scared that it would be too slim (i prefer oversized tshirts) or that the printing dye would be baked directly into the clothing, making the design more muffled, but I was wrong! the shirt is slightly taller so its comfier for me and the design is baked on a layer on top of the clothing, which makes the design really pop.

Ending thoughts