Congratulations! that is one excellent WIP example. Your are awesome

Thanks mate :)

Wow! Can you draw. I love the the varying degrees of finish in the art work. It reminds me of the hand colored B&W photos my grandmother used to show me. Beautiful. The soft, pastoral technique really clashes with the subject matter. It's like a calm, even-voiced narrator describing the correct method for gutting a deer with your hunting knife, (I don't hunt). Scary fascinating. I wonder how it will do in scoring. It's got to be love/hate, I don't see anyone being indifferent to it. I'd definitely wear it around the studio and when serving up burgers from the grill but might shy away from wearing it to a freelance gig.

P.S. I've never tried scanning a drawing, I guess you scan is at 300 dpi, as recommended by threadless? Is there anything I need to do after that or do I just color it in layers?

Select Your Scanner.

I've been exploring new ways to illustrate for t-shirts, i.e. within my painting style but in a way that it can be printed with less colors. I am now painting in Greyscale (it has been challenging for me), scan with high resolution 200dpi or 300dpi, then convert to color Half-tones in dots in Photoshop. Now I have all color dots, nice, but I still want to add other colors, so I need to reduce the number of colors altogether.
I converted the full image to Greyscale. Right there it will reduce the design to black and grey-- still keeping those shades and water smudges. Since most people won't have their nose right on the t-shirt, half-tones is a way to fool the eye... creating the perception of shadows, photographic appearance.

I then apply color through layers in Photoshop, overlapping, controlling and counting the colors to fit Threadless guideline. It has been a good technique so far. I'm still exploring new ways of doing this.

For me, it is easier to just paint a landscape or portrait--using any ink or paint, then it is to do an all greyscale painting and add color per steps for t-shirts. My tendency is to just add color right away, since I'm inspired and want to do as I please...but the end result would be hundreds of color tones. So using Greyscale from start already helps a great deal and still gives my illustration the flow and feel I want.

You do need a good scanner. Some tend to be more flaky then others, but I bought a scanner some time ago, one of the highest resolution ones. Canon... it has been a good buy.

I paint in A3 size (aprox. 15 x11"), my scanner is half that size so scan in two parts and join in Photoshop.

Thanks so much. Very descriptive, very helpful. Cheers!