Hot Like Chocolate

T-Shirt Design

Designing a t-shirt has been on my bucket list for a while and I finally did it!  I love my homework these days because most of my projects are things I have been wanting to do and now I get to do them.

The absolute hardest part of this shirt was coming up with an original idea.  I made a Pinterest board of shirt idea that I like, but it was hard to get them out of my mind and come up with my own thing.  There are a lot of clever jokes and puns out there that I could have used, but I felt like I was copying people.  I’ve always considered myself a rather funny and witty person so I wanted to create something all by myself.

I began sketching all sorts of ideas.  Some of the sketches were copies of other people’s stuff.  Sketching what other people have made helps me in my creative process to think of ideas and to become better at sketching.   I was debating between humor and something just cool.

 

 

After sketching, I created a first draft of a Mark Twain quote.  Testing out the idea in Illustrator was helpful in showing me that this idea was something I did not want to do!

 

Breakthrough

Inspiration finally came as I was sitting in church on Sunday.  I was doodling Christmas icons in my notebook when I started thinking of Christmas and Holiday ideas.  I drew a jingle bell and thought “Jingle like a bell.”  I went on to think of other similar phrases, “Ride like a sleigh,” “Sing like an angel,” “Chill like a snowman,” etc.  Then “Hot like chocolate,” popped into my head and I knew I had hit gold!  I sketched a variety of text layouts and hot chocolate mugs before jumping into Illustrator.

 

 

 

 

I got to this point in my design and then I hit another road block – the hot chocolate mug!  Sketching a mug was so much easier than creating a vector mug.  The ones in my draft looked okay, but I wasn’t satisfied.  They seemed too simple and didn’t look the way I had envisioned.

Finally, after a lot of critique and a lot of research, this is what I came up with…

 

 

 

Theo James likes my shirt design!

 

And so does Taylor Swift!