The Curiositee Imachination T-Shirt Contest is offering a grand prize of $2000 for all you t-shirt designers looking to make some real money. It’s being run by the science and technology obsessed Phathom Tribe at Phathom.com so I think you can already guess what they’re looking for. You’ve still got until 11.59 PM EST March 15th to submit your entry, which is also when the public vote ends so the quicker you submit the better I’d say. Judging begins 16th March to the 22nd of March when the winner will be announced.

Here’s some of their blurb (complete with typo) to give you an idea of what you’re in for…

“Whether your mission is to protect John Conner Connor at all costs or you simply have an idea on how to make your flux capacitor a little more eco- friendly. This is the T-shirt design contest to melt you steel heart.“

Here’s the submission kit. You’ll be glad to know you can make unlimited entries too! So if you’re over 18, a sci-fi buff, and handy with a Wacom then here’s your chance to pay off those Xmas bills. If you want to keep up with all the latest then follow them at Twitter. Let’s hope they’ve bought the ‘Curiositee.com’ domain which is lying empty right now as hosting a t-shirt brand in a subdirectory won’t do them many favours at Google.

7th Dimension Tee

Available in black and grey- very very cute detailing which looks like an Eastern European folk art version of scenes from Alice in Wonderland. Ah well, whatever floats your boat. The artist ryansham remains rather a mystery.

Anybody Can Be Tee

Very funny and absolutely superb illustrations of familiar faces wearing specs to up their game as blind-as-a-bat designers. Move away from that screen! Available in grey. Artist Leah Chen.

Body Tee

A cool piece of comic art by Jia Ying. check the details, there’s a bear stuck in the ribcage and a little girl about to prod some lower intestines – eeww. Lol. Great stuff, get it in black.

Cat Tee

A lovely piece of watercolour art by Dawn Tan on a t-shirt, now there’s a rarity, I’ve never understood why more labels don’t branch out into watercolour tees, a perfect combo. Available in white.

Head Tee

Another anatomical delight, this time a superb illustration that looks like a blend of manga and Russian art by Jia Ying. Is it a balloon on a string or a big headed kid hocking a loogie? Who cares, it’s great. Available in white.

Something Snapped Tee

A funny tee by tengwan. It’s a lovely early Eighties style design, however the speech bubble is written in the wrong tense. It should be “I think I heard something snap” not “I think I heard something snapped.” Ah well. Get it in black complete with typo.

Skull Tee

If you haven’t had your fill of skull tees this one looks like a sketch by Van Gogh! Great work from Kittozutto. Available in black.

Buy, vote, design more tees at www.9fountains.com.

They offer a new screen-printed limited-edition tee every 24 hours for $9 however you can only buy a maximum of 3. They print on high-quality “regular-fit” tees that are made of 100% ringspun cotton. They pay each artist $1 per shirt sold AND the artist keeps full rights to their design. After a design’s 24 hour stint at Tee Fury the artist can sell the design anywhere they like. They charge $2 US and $7 Worldwide shipping.

Their back catalogue brims over with some of the finest illustrative t-shirts you’ll ever see, unfortunately most of them are no longer for sale, such is the nature of the Tee fury beast. I think it best I focus on designers rather than designs, and what a selection TF has, it would be almost impossible to pick out all my favourites without losing a few nights sleep, so I’ll limit this review to the cream of the crop, and don’t worry (where possible) I’ve included links to sites where you can buy their t-shirts whenever you like ,and where I can’t you can vote for a reprint! Teemocracy in action!

Jimiyo ‘Keep Fierce’ T-Shirt

You can buy Keep Fierce at Design By Humans. A superb double-sided design, almost psychedelic in parts!

Jimiyo offers excellent some illustrative detail and a beautiful range of muted colours to make this tee a must have.

Sign up for his newsletter, and be entered to win a FREE t-shirt. To sign up, Jimiyo.com and enter your email. Every time he sends out a newsletter, someone will win a t-shirt!

Jimiyo’s preferred tools of the trade are the almighty pencil and Photoshop.

Ryan Miller is an illustrator and designer who offers commission designed t-shirts, posters and flyers. Unfortunately you won’t see any of his works for sale to the general public but his blog is still well worth a visit.

Ryan Miller has a fantastic knack for grunge-retro images, I particularly appreciate his due care and attention to line and colour.

I love the textural weave effect used in his Obama T-Shirt, and the contrasted colours really make this work come alive.

He’s prepared to sell the rights to this for the right price, so worth considering if you’re looking to beef up your own t-shirt store collection! Visit his blog for more information at http://www.relentlessstudio.com/portfolio.php?id=69

Fouad aka Tessa Vesak only has a few t-shirts on offer but ‘Murder of Crows‘ is a beauty, you can also buy another work ‘Evolution‘ at Uneetee.com, although I still think M.O.C is my fave.

Funnily enough I’ve a few t-shirts submitted there, both are previous Threadless.com incarnations who didn’t make the grade, although Moonlighting did make it through a full seven days of voting.

Yes it’s a shameless plug, but if you fancy voting for ‘Face Book‘ at Uneetee by well …me, you can vote for it here. Yes I know I forgot to include a placement image, doh! I’ve had a few moans and groans about that, don’t worry I won’t forget again!

I’ve realised whilst perusing the artists directory at Tee Fury that many artists haven’t a web site, or they almost exclusively offer commission-based illustrations, which means that very few of TF’s original editions aren’t available, which increases their exclusivity, but makes it rather difficult to review their past offers. However you’ll find the following designers do offer other designs not available at TF, which I have listed below.

J3Concepts has also had success at Tee Fury in the past, here’s on of his classic tees, “Country Club Nouveau” – now available at only $14 from Design By Humans!

Collision Theory is also relatively well known in the underground t-shirt industry, however his winning t-shirt “When Pandas Attack” hasn’t made it at Threadless.com which backs up my argument about the problems with their voting model! CT still has some great tees available, you can buy “Refraction” at Design By Humans, one of my faves by this designer.

Perhaps my current favourite designer to have sold at Tee Fury, Monographiz offers some absolutely perfect designs, MG recently won the weekly prize at UneeTee.com with his design “Hidden Castle“. Just take a look at the detail in this…

I had to give one last mention to Tom Burns who’s well known by many as a winner at Threadless.com, Uneetee.com and DesignByHumans.com. He’s also a past winner at Tee Fury, and currently offers many of his designs from his own store at Loiterink.com including his celebrated “Communist Party” t-shirt. If you can’t remember it – here’s a reminder…

If you’d like to follow in the footsteps of these and many other great t-shirt artists and at the very least make yourself a little extra free publicity, all you need to to is submit your art to art@teefury.com (if your design is selected, they will contact you for the high resolution version).

Submission guidelines:

1. Designs are limited to 6 colours and front chest print up to 15 x 19 inches.
2. Submissions should be at least 800 x 800 pixels (keep file size below 10MB).
3. Include a succinct but interesting biography in your email and a link to your portfolio site.

You’ll find many of Tee Fury’s archived winners’ tees at the following sites:

Threadless.com

DesignByHumans.com

Uneetee.com $10 Deal! One Design, One Day On Sale Everyday. New Deal Every Midnight!

I had a very friendly exchange of emails with Taylor at DBH who reassured me that my style suited their site’s creative ethos to a tee, essentially the mistake I had made was nothing to do with the quality of my work but rather the placement of the images on their t-shirt template. My advice is the less coverage a design has over the spread of a shirt, the higher you should mount it. I notched my design up a few inches towards the armpits and resubmitted the design with a resounding success. I’ve even completed a second design – see the image below!

Unfortunately no one has voted for Eggheads yet! I’m going to have to take a closer look at how DBH works their voting system, but I have a sneaking suspicion that yet again it is all down to having a very popular site or an unlimited advertising budget, or a few thousand Facebook mates (none of which I have yet), to push your designs to the top where are DBH users will even see the damn thing.

If and that’s a big if, I ever get to the stage where I could run a similar site to DBH, (although I would only offer organic fair trade tees), I’d like a script that would make sure each and every accepted design got a fair crack at the whip. In plain English, I have a big problem with successful marketers scooping up the prizes at all these Threadless clone sites, I mean shouldn’t creativity come first above all else?

Anyway enough of my grumbling, I’ve been foolhardy enough to design and submit yet another work to Design By Humans, it’s called “Amsterdamned”, and if I had the marketing budget to back me up I think this would be a hit with their voters…

Amsterdamned harks back to the old Bob Masse psychedelic festival poster designs of the 1960s, not sure what the message is here, I’m sure it isn’t so much ‘drugs are bad m’kay’ as ‘too much of a good thing can be a bad thing’. I went on a trip to Amsterdam with around 90 other art students decades back and I had never seen so many stoned people in one place in my whole life.

The hoteliers, the bar managers, the shopkeepers, obviously all of the coffee shopkeepers, the prostitutes and even a few policemen (by the looks of their pupils) were all stoned. I suppose ‘passive inhalation of second hand smoke’ could’ve explained the cops, but in essence the place was too high, so far gone it almost took the pleasure out of partaking oneself (I said almost). Over a decade later I visited the city again and actually took in a few art galleries and museums that time – ye I am getting old. People were far less stoned in general, they’ve had a crackdown on the coffee shops since then, over half were closed down I’ve heard. Nevertheless I can call this work a nostalgic jaunt, a hark back to more innocent and rather mellow times, when hippie ideals came before business and profit. Even if they were all stoned.

I’ll keep you updated to my progress on this submission to DBH, as and when or if it is accepted. Who knows perhaps it’s just too controversial – ooh!

FIRST PLACE-
A BlogDumps T-shirt and 200 EC’s
A feature and review on BlogDumps

SECOND PLACE -
A BlogDumps T-shirt
150 EC’s

THIRD PLACE -
A BlogDumps T-shirt
75 EC’s

In case you’re wondering EC’s are Entrecard points, I’ve mentioned Entrecard.com before, a great place to start marketing your t-shirts (or just about anything) for free. If you’d like to know more about how their system works (and also how to speed up the process significantly), do make sure you check out this post.

I seem to be the first entrant to the competition, BlogDumps.com offer free t-shirts to all their premium listings advertisers. They are a blog directory with a very healthy number of blogs listed there already, and I’m hoping for a little free publicity for all my hard work. There doesn’t seem to be a voting system which is kind of a surprise, however the winning design will be printed on their next batch of complimentary tees. I’m not so keen on their last batch, which is offered as part of the prizes, take a look at this:-

I know I know, it’s not exactly a classic is it? Ahem. I really doubt I’d ever wear it, except perhaps when I’m decorating the house, painting, plastering, anything messy, you know the score :p

BD mention in their rules that contestants need to include their logo in the design, which again is kinda awful…I managed to find a similar font and sneaked their logo in at the bottom of my design. I’m also tempted to redesign their logo for free!

Anyway with no more a do let me show you my submission:-

I’ll keep you informed as to the results, perhaps
I can convince them to give me the above t-shirt
design instead!