Endangered Love - A work in Progress

I'm working on taking this sketch I did ages ago and turning it into a graphic which can be submitted to Threadless Tees. I've gotta say, this t-shirt designing thing is both exciting and daunting. I'm enjoying playing around with Illustrator, taking my work and turning it into vector graphics or creating little drawings from scratch, but I'm really frustrated when it comes to the details for submission.

I can't seem to work out exactly what is being asked. There's a lovely little package you can download from them which explains how to go about making an image, how to layer it and what size the files should be etc. etc. etc. They even provide handy templates of all of the different articles of clothing (and colours they come in.) that you could get your image printed on.

It's very comprehensive, unless you've not worked with the programs required a whole lot and you're still learning. I find it frazzling because currently, the only time I have to work on my art is during the week after a day in the office at my This-Pays-The-Bills job. By the time I get home I'm absolutely knackered and despite reading the instructions for submission over and over again, googling 'How to make an image 73 dpi' or similar nerdy questions, I am finding myself hitting more walls than I'm finding a way forward.

For me this is particularly frustrating because once I've set my mind to something I really want to get it done. I also make my own timelines, usually unreasonable ones, and I do sort of want to have some stuff submitted, at least for the critique part of Threadless, in the next few weeks. I've drawn up my Wee Free Kitties, I'm working on Endangered Love and I've got some other ideas in the works. But this inability to decipher the submission requirements feels like something holding me back. Something holding me back because I just can't seem to figure out how to ask the right questions.

It's one of those things that makes me long for the days of helplines and human contact. For all the convenience of google and emails, I often just wish I could speak to a human being. Someone who can understand what it is I'm after even if my question isn't worded exactly right.

Anyway, enough ranting about technology. I'm just a bit bitter about it at the moment, likely due to printer and interweb issues at my previously mentioned day job. Time to press on and persevere. Threadless does have a forum for questions so I should probably give that a go as my next choice.

Onward and upward!