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Nov 17, 06 | 7:33 pm

Japanese Carp Koi



Japanese Koi Carp Artistic T-Shirt

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This Japanese Carp hand drawn design is a great example of a hidden gem getting a chance to shine.

New Jersey based artist Erik Lukacs hand drew this design the good ol' fashioned way: with a pencil and some paper.

Instead of letting this great piece of artwork just sit in the sketchpad, he took the initiative to find a way to share his artwork with the world. I think I should probably take a second now to say "Thank You" to Erik for sharing your art with me and whoever else gets a chance to see it.

This Japanese Carp sketch has a lot of great detail that doesn't always get translated correctly with the t-shirt art medium. However, with the direct to garment printing technology at CafePress, you can see the delicate fades and textures Erik used to give his Japanese Carp drawing more depth.

By choosing CafePress as the printer and fulfillment company for his design, Erik has the added benefit of showing up in the highly trafficked CafePress Marketplace. A quick search for carp shows Erik's design among the top selling carp related designs.

As t-shirt designers, we like to make sure that our t-shirtdesigns and artwork remains our intellectual property. It's a bit of a dual edged sword in that by sharing your t-shirt artwork with the world, it exposes it to not-so-honest folk who will try to copy ideas but also you get exposed to a worldwide group of potential customers who may be interested in buying your design.

What to do, what to do? In this case, Erik decided to add a copyright notice on the design, which is fine, however, he also added a web URL under his copyright. For this type of artistic design, it seems like the web address might be a little too much. I'm all for making sure folks know how to buy more of your shirts, but your branding has to be in line with your design.

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I think a better way to do this would have been hide or embed the copyright notice in the actual artwork, so it blends in with the design and then just leave out the web address all together. If you're going to have a web address, it should definitely be your own (like yourname.com) instead of a third party service.

Maybe a compromise here would have been to register his full name as a domain name and then add the copyright as © 2006 hisdomainname.com which would give him the copyright notice and let people know where to get more cool designs. An additional benefit to this method would be that he could build up the domain name to serve as a portfolio to link to all of his current and future artwork projects (and where to buy them).

Even with the extra copyright line, I think this shirt is definitely worth buying. Although I'm more a fan of t-shirts with a print on just one side, I think this design works as well when printed on both sides of the shirt.

If you're a fan of Japanese Carp (more commonly known as Koi fish), be sure to check out this great design by Erik Lukacs. I hope to see more designs from him in the future.



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