Lee Wiley's Work on Threadless

While working some client projects, some volunteer work, and starting Expiration Date #3, I was filled with a desire and the inspiration to create submissions for 3 Threadless challenges. These were not only great projects, but personally challenging. See, when you design for Threadless, you design for the people who would buy your design, then they score and comment on your work. So you have “woo” them and at the same time you want share a part of yourself in your art.

The 3 challenges that I participated in were, Creatures of the Forest, Select Fall Patterns, and THOR. All of them have very great prizes associated with them, thus there is a great incentive to do your best work, and promote the crap out of it, to get it noticed by the people who score the designs, and on the radar of the Threadless judges.

For Creatures of the Forest, I went with a style that was more youthful, and created a work entitled “forestivity.” I really wanted to show the wonder, beauty, connection, and personality that comes to life with the creatures that live in forests and well, all over.

For Select Fall Patterns, the challenge was to do a mash-up or alternate version of a traditional seamless pattern. I got caught up in the idea of Hawaiian shirts, and the awesome Tiki designs of the South Pacific. Then, I decided to mash it up with Halloween, and so was born my Halloween Island theme…”How would you like to spend [Halloween], on [Halloween] Island”…hardy har har.

For THOR, I originally thought digging right into the very traditional super-hero style, as you know I’m a super-hero nut, but then I thought, well, it will just blend in too much with everyone else’s designs, so I opted for something a bit different. I wanted to try something a bit more cartoon-y and add a touch of humor. My first design was of Thor Playing a Mjolnir-esque guitar, rocking out, but it was rejected, because it was “too out of character.” I know when it comes to Marvel characters, things get pretty strict, so I wasn’t butt-hurt about it. I just took it as an opportunity to improve my design, and I simply reworked it until it became RECHARGE! And I’m very happy with how it turned out, in fact it is still up for voting for like 6 more days, so take a minute to Score and Comment on it here.

I don’t know if any of my designs will win these competitions, frankly, it’s in the hands of everyone out there on the interwebs. I’d like to dream so, but if not, it’s always great to keep in mind that creating work for challenges like threadless can be used as portfolio pieces and even still used as personal prints that you can sell. I fully intend to put these works up for purchase on My Society6 Store if they don’t win their respective challenges (S6 is also a sister site to threadless, man, these guys really know how to support artists). It may be a while till I do another challenge, but I’m really looking forward to more opportunities to design for challenges on Threadless.

Check out my profile on Threadless here.

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