Thanks to Rachel the Threadless submission goaltender, there has been a serious reduction of visual shitstorms staining our eyeballs during the voting process the last couple weeks (I personally keep a vat of Purell and toilet paper next to the computer screen on occasion), and because of her honorable sacrifice, it's getting a heck of a lot easier again and way more fun to take a journey through every single design up for voting. There's still a lot of mileage to gallivant around though, so here's a little crib sheet of the most jaw-droppingly amazing designs currently making the rounds and largest waves crashing down within the Threadless Sea/See, easily washing away the ones and zeroes from our minds.

As always, this is FAR from the definitive list of all that is kick-ass and t-shirt gold up for voting, so post your own below that you think are extremely keen!


HIGH FIVE













THUMBS UP







BACK/BUTT SLAP

Let's get one thing out in the open right away: Icecream Deathbeam aka Clayton Clark aka Ghost Protocol is a dangerous human being.

During the tenure of our collab trilogy, ICDB (as his Intergalactic Interpol contacts code-named him) has brought a pack of rampaging supernovas to justice, learned how to camouflage himself by turning into the shape of an igloo, and taught the supercomputer that runs the global economy how to feel love. His life actually makes "The Most Interesting Man in the World" look like a door-to-door salesman selling dust mite repellent.

In between these top secret missions (that I've just blown the cover of...I'll expect him to be hanging over my computer desk suction-cupped to the ceiling and dropping mind erasing droplets into my eyes within the next thirty minutes), Clayton also found the time to write me hilarious correspondence every week so we could further refine our trilogy of collabs. His emails were so funny and mind-blowing I couldn't even type in the words ROFL into the computer because I was actually too busy trying to stop laughing so I could get myself unwedged from the corner of another room after having laugh-rolled my way clear across the hall.

For a tiny example of this email entertainment, after not hearing from Clayton for a couple weeks, this was the email he sent me in its entirety:



Aw crap, here I go again not obeying orders. I totally threw my computer screen into a shredder to get rid of the evidence after I read this, but somehow it still appears in my email databanks no matter how many LCDs I send to the junk yard in a million well-cut pieces.

Without further ado, Clayton and I present the first in a trilogy of t-shirt tales that will be released once a week for...well, you do the math of how many weeks. If you can't figure it out, I have the number for A Beautiful Mind guy's hot girl personality disorder.

Week One: The Warm-Up Dick Joke Design






Week Two: Teasey-Does-It....Bigger, badder and filthier!




Week Three: The Shocking Conclusion!




So have a guess at what WEEK TWO and WEEK THREE'S designs pertain to and win an actual 80's entertainment artifact! Or don't guess, because by reading this far into the blog....!!!!



*clicks remote control to no effect*

*gives discreet yet powerful Elvis hip thrust*



...YOU ARE ALREADY A WINNER!

Well, it's time to go and spread more of Icecream's trade secrets around the web, man what a sucker that guy is, I tell y.....wait, why is there a drip coming from my ceiling? It's not even raining outside....*blacks out*


Alright Evan, let us up the ante.

Folks, guess correctly the Week Two/Week Three Design, and you win this:



If you don't guess correctly, or IF YOU REFUSE TO GUESS AT ALL, you'll win this:



That's right, if you DON'T VENTURE A GUESS, we're mailing you a copy of CRUISE MISSILE.

We'll mail ALL OF YOU a copy of CRUISE MISSILE.

You don't want that to happen.

Either do we.

So please, take a guess, vote, win and enjoy!

Here's just a small sampling of the art endeavors up for voting right now amongst the generic design sludge, if you don't feel like wading through a thousand designs playing catch-up to the picture parade marching by faster and faster- except on Saturday and Sunday thankfully, which is cool to know even art armies prefer to relax during the weekend :)


FEEL FREE TO POST THE CHESTNUTS I MISSED...


AMAZINGLY GOOD SHIT





















SERIOUSLY GOOD SHIT









REALLY GOOD SHIT

A couple people emailed this picture to me today asking, "Uh...isn't that guy wearing your t-shirt?"







After I read the story behind the shot, I was very thankful to see it was just some lame knock-off that changed the wording to ring even creepier than the real deal.

David Peters, 66, was indicted on 20 counts of possessing sexually oriented material involving a minor and 20 counts of disseminating sexually oriented material involving a minor...


Yikers!!! I'll admit that when I see any of my slogan or collab works out in the wild and untamed kingdom of the media world, it gives me pleasure and some sense of accomplishment, but this is one time I really wish that Barney-Frank-on-a-bender-look-alike woulda left his imitation tee on the floor next to his stained copies of Toys R Us catalogs before getting his mugshot moment in the limelight.

So hey Threadless, with awesome media endorsements like this, why was this shirt never reprinted? It sold out super fast, is it because the typo used or arrow cursor used in the design is to close to copyrighted material? :p

Newest Residents:


With V.Calahan:




SUCH ILLUSTRIOUS TENNANTS AS PILIHP, ITALIUX, POP KID, LMNOP, KOOKY LOVE, MREISAL, ANGELATAG, MATHIOLE AND OH SO MANY MORE HAVE PUT THEIR DEPOSITS DOWN AND STARTED PAINTING THEIR WHITE PICKET FENCES!


Moving In Soon:


MORE HOMES ARE BEING CONSTRUCTED AS WE SPEAK, PTA MEETINGS CAN'T RUN THEMSELVES YOU KNOW.



Well howdy, so glad you stopped on by!

Number of Residents: 27

Number of people that moved on to greener printed pastures: 0

Exam average children in the community get on their T.A.S. (Threadless Awesomeness Score): 2.82


Come on in and have a look around, we're a friendly bunch of communal folk who don't mind congregating together from time to time to drink iced-cold beverages, swap tips about weatherproofing your home, and collaborate on designs.

Contact frickinawesome@gmail.com for more details on how you can join this community and receive a care package containing seventeen kinds of peanut butter.





Permanent Sub-burbians:


With Dandingeroz:


With Queenmob:


With Herrbias:


With Choubaka360:


With Tony Centeno:


With charity.ryan:


With Randyotter3k:


With Pigboom:


With Andres Colmenares aka WAWAWIWA:


With V. Calahan:


With Wirdou:


With Demented and extra awesome help by Tony Centeno:


With ibyes:


With Ricomambo:


With sayahelmi:


With Italiux:


With Icecream Deathbeam:


With Quick Brown Fox (Loves GAP):


With Icecream Deathbeam:


With Thomas Orrow:


With Icecream Deathbeam:


With GyleDesigns:


With citizen rifferson:


With Andres Colmenares aka WAWAWIWA (Loves GAP):


With Thomas Orrow:


With Toopersent:







See you again real soon, friend!

26/73.29

When approximately 57 of us Threadless wild childz went out to a pizza palace during the dinner time break at the Threadless 2k11 meetup, Jonah was showing me his sketch book and we were shooting ideas back and forth. There was a giant pizza in front of us with tons of every kind of lover of cooked animal pieces could savor, and Jonah mentioned something about this place being a sausage party and how it's a good shirt idea. Never mind we had a ton of girls at the table (and even a Courtney Pie, whatever the hell THAT creature is), but I thought it was a funny literal idea. I mentioned we should have balloons and one bun that represents a woman who is outnumbered a zillion to one being pissed off at her horny surroundings, and Jonah loved the addition. So just in case we got severely drunk or etc later that night and the events of the pizza parlor had to be pieced together by people's photos a la Memento, I "sketched" out the concept in my book in literally fifteen seconds.



A thing of beauty ain't it?

Eventually Jonah and I got around to starting this sucker on up, and here's the quick visual process of how a bunch of dorky wieners tried to score with Mrs Bunson, who wasn't having ANY of it.



Suggestions: more crowd around them, different lame outfits for all the potential suitors.



Suggestions: make the woman bun more pissed-off than shocked.



Color commenced! Jonah asked me to find a good bun color swatch, but eventually we settled for a cartoon bun image for the color. Jonah wanted to add in a frat dude, which I thought was an awesome idea.



We switched the girl bun's object from a drink to a phone, thinking that would make her look more unimpressed with her surroundings, about to text up all her friends and see where they were at. We soon realized that was an insane amount of information for people to get from that simple object, so we changed course soon to a VERY recognizable expression of female dissatisfaction ("Am i right 80's, I mean, c'mon really?"): a pair of crossed arms.



Linework was starting to be touched up by Jonah, as well as adding a minor background to illustrate the flash and frenzy of a big bash. We at first thought the original idea we had for balloons and etc was too much for the scene to hold. I also asked Jonah if we could have a dollar sign gold chain instead of the huge medallion which said more disco than hip-hop blingy to me, as well as the frat boy could be holding a Solo party cup to complete the costumed package.



Arms crossing was a much better way to convey the girl bun's pissed-off current state. Future Feeling-oligists would later talk in hushed tones about how we made such a landmark breakthrough on male/female relations that Jonah and I had taken this long to figure out. That accomplished, we pressed! Jonah added more shading to the bun. At this point Jonah and I came to the same conclusion with emails almost hitting into one another on the digital road to the other person's inbox: we should probably add balloons back and maybe a banner.



We REALLY thought this cleared up the idea and added a more festive attitude to the scene that screamed subconsciously "PARTY!" to viewers of the design without actually having the word in the frame.



I asked Jonah if we could have the banner say FESTIVAL with the -IVAL fading out so it would mostly just be read as FEST, which i thought would look more natural on the banner as well as put the word FEST into people's minds a little faster. It's a goofy, slightly-longwinded visual pun, so I think every hint to the kind viewing folk of my collabs helps! Jonah agreed and kicked some major ass on the final revision, along with a few minor touch-ups:







Thanks fer votin', and in honor of this male on male on male on infinity phenomena, here's a lil' song and dance number for the dudes who can count the number of girlies at a party on one finger's amount of thumbnails:

Question of the day: "What's your favorite joyful lyric?"



^
This is Roxy.

This is her too.
v

http://youtu.be/5y_oyELi7X4

She's pretty gnarly, righteous, and other words that haven't been invented yet to describe her impossibly magnetizing personality. I used to date her back in the day when I was into any girl that had a hair color not found in nature and was fuzzy all over. She used to write songs for me all the time, but always managed to forget them JUST as she was gonna serenade me. Bad luck on my part I guess.

She eventually fell in love with a giant piece of shag carpeting, and I just couldn't compete with something that rough and fuzzy all at the same time. I'll never forget the moments we spent together breaking into Kermit the Frog's house or putting hands up each other's butts. I'll probably include some of those treasured memories into the song chorus I make up for Roxy's Threadless contest to try and win her back after all these years. I hope she hasn't forgotten me...

Write your four lines of awesome and submit them here to Roxy's original blog challenge!

If you're too hypnotized by Roxy's guitar licks (seriously, she's been known to play the guitar with her tongue and even gets her strings candy-coated in cherry, lemon and root beer flavors) and are without the hand/eye coordination to smack the above link, here's the text for Roxy's rockin' blog!


What's up, rockers!

I'm Roxy and i'm on my way to being a huge rockstar like my hero, Joan Jett! She had the Blackhearts, but I need you to help me finish this new song I've been working on. Got the verse down but I need a killer chorus!

Here are the rad lyrics so far:
"Got my red guitar and my lucky picks!
Gonna rock all night playin' monster licks!
Got an attitude and style to spare!
Gonna play real loud so you better beware
If ya wanna be lame, get outta my way.
Lemme hear ya now, everybody say..."

LISTEN TO ME SING IT HERE.

Your challenge is to write the chorus! 4 catchy lines of awesome!

I'll pick my favorite, record the song, and film a full video starring ME! You'll win:
- an iPad stocked with music apps
- a $200 Threadless gift certificate
- and a mini-puppet of me, Roxy so you can rock out at home!

You have from now until Dec 23!

Some Rox & Roll approved inspirado for your choruses:

Here's just a small sampling of it, if you don't feel like wading through almost a thousand designs playing catch-up to the art parade marching by faster and faster every week here- except on Saturday and Sunday, which is cool to know even art armies prefer to relax during the weekend. I'm determined to vote on a hundred designs a day during the week so I don't destroy my clicking fingers and what's left of the sanity I still lightly cling on to.

In short, really awesome job Threadless community for making that thousand sub slog worthwhile amongst the eighteen designs in a row that feature 7 8'ing 9 or function more as a clip art demo. Some REALLY inspiring designs up and lots of amazing collabs which always makes my heart a degree warmer. Thanks to all the Threadless submitters- instead of wasting time watching reality shows, I'd rather subscribe to the Threadless Channel.


AMAZINGLY GOOD SHIT




























SERIOUSLY GOOD SHIT











REALLY GOOD SHIT

Good morrow to all you wizards and/or warriors! In this edition of ye olde HWC, pull up your antique throne with Mitchloidolt and myself for a second breakfast while we shoot the sorcery about our collab. Oh, and please feel free to scoop yourself another bowl of Eye Of Newt Soup in the bubbling black crock pot cauldron.



Light Wizard Version:



Evil Wizard Version:




But first, a word about the process from Mitch, a 7th year enchanter of pen and paper:

Collaborating is great because I would normally quit drawing at around 5am and just sub whatever I had, sometimes bugging Rachel to pull it because there was just too much wrong with something to go up for voting, and that's not something I can do when I have a partner. I'm forced to show what I've come up with and then brace myself for whatever changes come that will make the drawing stronger. It's awesome mining those huge emails after sending off a pass at the design and getting good nuggets of what and why to change stuff.


I went to go see the final Harry Potter flick with my fiancee, who is a MUCH bigger HP fan than I. I've read some of the books and seen the films, but I've come to realize I'm much more of a Lordie Rings fan and delving endlessly into the kind of pickaxe cave Dwarfs were using to burrow deeper and deeper into the Balrog's digs. Having said that, golly gee boy that JK Rowling sure knows how to tie her series-spanning plot points together in amazing, unexpected and fulfilling ways in that fucker. By the time the movie was knee-deep into its fifth-action scene where The Harry Potter Experience + Two were weaving around on broomsticks like Star Wars Forest Speeders, this silly idea started to peck away inside my head. By the time we were going home fully satisfied on chunks of emo Snape and heroic Neville comeuppance, I had a pretty good picture of this design's key features and feel. Things rarely come together that quickly and when they do, it's usually best to just get the hell out of the way and let them do their bidding, holding on and hoping something good pops out the other end.

Usually when these scenes are taking shape, I see a general style I think would best be suited for bringing the idea to life, but rarely does a design take me by the collar and honk me hard on the nose, screaming "THE PERSON WHO SHOULD GIVE ME A FACE IS (artist name) AND THEM ONLY!" all the way down to the typewriter. This particular one wouldn't stop yapping about working with Mitch Loidolt (who I apparently accosted at the Threadless meetup two years ago), the fabled ARMS ARE FIGHT!er and creator of one of my favorite drawing blogs of all time. With fingers in hand, I gathered up my e-courage and sent him this word slurry collection:

Wizard’s Duel: The main look of this design would have more of a classic animation feel to it, something out of Fantasia or Sword in The Stone, with a touch of ancient looking Lord of the Rings fan art. There would be two wizards seen from their sides, facing each other on top of a cliff or in some other fantasy environment, looking not unlike they were dueling towards one another in a fighting game. Both would have their wands pulled out, and casting a spell on their long, winding, grizzled old beards. Each wizard’s beard would be alive with light and energy flowing through it and around it, and both wizard beards would be doing loops and twirls before both of them collided at the tip of each beard. The beards would meet much higher up in the air than the wizards themselves are standing. Upon meeting, the tips of both beards would assume the look and shape of two hands, and those hands would be engaged in an intense thumb war wrestling match. So from far away the scene on the shirt would look quite epic, with two wizards casting spells of giant might and energy at one another, but when you get closer you see it’s their beards under a magic spell who are having a thumb war up above to determine who will be the victor of this wizarding contest. We could make the dueling wizards reminiscent of Dumbledore and one like Gandalf, although pop culture characters are not needed for this joke to work, just the character of a traditional old-world wizard with a very long, windy beard. I’d love for both wizards to have totally different dress and styles to them to make the piece more interesting to look at, as well as different colored beards and spell energy colors that are enchanting the chin hair.

Luckily it only took Mitch a couple hours to summon a response:

This idea... is... well.. kinda :
















FLIPPIN AWESOME!!!1


I admit that was one of the longest scroll-downs of my computerized life, but I'd say it was worth the payoff :) Mitch had recently moved and needed to get his life situated before this beast could be tackled, but he assured me this was one he definitely wanted to give a good go at. Luckily that go occurred just in time for the 10k contest extension, with both of us nodding our Hobbit Heads in agreement that this was the kind of design we would happily keep glued to our person like ugly on Gollum.

Mitch sent me an opening rough shot to see if our minds were heading in the same direction:



Even at this point, Mitch had impressively nailed down the key beats of the scene, and added his own elements to the collab potion proceedings. I really liked Mitch going for a very cloudy, high above the mountaintops biblical feel to the scene. I had originally envisioned the scene on a cliff amongst a sea of bubbling lava and fire in order to light the design more dramatically from underneath, but in the end Mitch managed to achieve that look as well. I also liked Mitch's straight forward take on the white/black, good versus evil wizard attire that would easily delineate sides, as well as add to that Sorcerer's Apprentice feel we wanted this piece to be injected with liberal doses of.

The only other note I could think to give Mitch was to make sure the beards twirled and looped around one another a bit more before emerging at the top during an intense turning point in the thumb wrestling war. Now that the scene was literally set for the drawing flurry to commence, Mitch wrote to me about how he'd like to tackle his part of the collab puzzle so we could make this as good as possible before the 10k deadline:

I'm going to try and crank this thing out. What I usually do is draw a thing all in one go and sub it at like 3am. What's going to be great this time is I won't be able to do that, I'll have to actually show it to someone else before it goes up. So I'm going to go ahead and do like a finished version, hopefully tonight in one long stretch of drawing, and then email it to you when it's done, with a few color options ~ and then you, without holding back obviously, can look at what's been done and make whatever changes. Even if it looks like I spent a huge amount of time on it, it will go twice as fast redoing it if you have some good ideas about where to take it to make it better.

I was a big fan of this battle plan, and right around the 4am mark that evening a bleary-eyed and hand-cramped Mitch sent me this magical update taped to the foot of a cranky owl:



After glancing at Mitch's first "real" stab at the design, I instantly felt an Ear To Ear Smile spell take over my face, as so many of the final elements of the design were already perfected. The most important part of the design, the wizards themselves and their skyward beard war being waged, was spot-on and beyond. I loved how much personality Mitch had given both wizards, their good and bad intentions revealed to the viewer within moments through different staffs and body positions.

Mitch had tried to incorporate both the feeling of doing magical battle high above on impossible cliffs, as well as a darker-tinged lava color oozing over the ground far below. The effect was especially convincing and impressive in an alternate colored version Mitch had sent as well, which told quite a stormy, different story than the lighter colored take:



What stood out right away in the darker wizard version was the orange slivers of highlight that glinted off the bottom of the bristling beards, an effect I thought doubled the foreboding ambiance and intensity of the scene. Oh, and it made the design look more bad-ass Heavy Metal and less Disney-flavored.

The main area of improvement I focused on with Mitch was at the bottom of the design, and finding ways to support the epic wizard whiskers colliding even more than it already was. Instead of seeing the ground at all, I wanted Mitch to embrace his original sketch of having this take place millions of miles up in the air, with lots of impossibly shaped and jagged cliffs bursting through the cloud cover in the sky, perhaps a castle on the top of one of them. I also asked Mitch if we could add a little more fluffy detail to the clouds that brilliantly made up both the bottom border and side portions of the design, as well as taking the snaky cloud out of the background since it distracted and confused the eyes from the beard battle being waged just above.

Mitch agreed and the next night sent this version whirling my way:



I was hoping to have this design completed with Mitch after two major revisions since I felt bad that he kept conjuring up a "finished" design that I might suggest making more changes to. Sadly that was not to come to pass, as Mitch and my communication lines got somewhat bewitched. While I really liked the wind-whipped feel of the new clouds in front of the design, I really loved the original, rounder cloudy border of the previous draft, and would love to transplant that kind of fog slowly rolling around some cliffs in the background, which would be poking through the dense cloud soup.

After getting his frustration out by putting a terrifying curse on me that flooded my mind with one hundred images of naked 90-year-old grandmas, Mitch sent me a rough version of the new groundscape to see if our walkie talkies were once again tuned to the same channel:



And that answer was one big "Roger, over and out!" The battle grounds for this beard brawl had finally reached the heights Mitch's first design doodle hinted at, but now blown out in all its technicolor, Battle For Middle Earth glory.



The finished editions soon made their final trek across the Computer Cables of Bandwidthich, including Mitch taking another crack at the colors for the charcoal tee version, and striking the perfect balance between a stormier, foreboding feel, without as much of the previously darker version's cheesier Halloween-ish color scheme.



Mitch and I wrestled (with our giant beards of course) with which version to use for the presentation, and finally decided to go with both since the color schemes almost made the design feel like two completely separate scenes. I asked if we could label them "Light Wizard" and "Evil Wizard" so people could associate each version with the specific wizard character, in effect choosing which side of the battle you are rooting for coming out as the king of beard spell-casters.

SUBBERINO!






If you wish to continue your finger-strengthening screen scrolling exercises, here's a couple more collabs up for voting!

With italiux:



With V.calahan:



With Cazking:

SUBBED!



Old news:

So I'm rarely an indecisive bastard (and sometimes just the last word), but CazKing and myself aren't sure which way this design would work best and was wondering if anyone cared to weigh in on this submission life or death situation.

The name of this design is "Darn Smokers" or something much much better we haven't come up with yet, and hopefully the concept comes through regardless of which version you like better.

Bare-bones, simpler version:



Spruced-up, more conceptual version:



Whatcha think? Carol and I haven't refined the more complex version yet, I personally really like the Pyro's restaurant addition but Carol is worried the surroundings might soften the effect of the actual joke...and egads, she might be right! Wondering what everyone thought, thanks for helping out, and here's some extra helpings of sketches and links to our other scoring designs while you're waiting for people to respond to your latest blogging epiphanies.




First sketch of "Missing":



With ivanrodero: