Thumbelina Shirt Project

To those of you who are not familiar with Threadless, it is a digital mecca for amazing t-shirt designs. Designers submit their ideas and the whole online community critiques and votes on it. If there are enough favorable reviews, Threadless will produce the shirt, sell it on their website, and cut the designer a nice big check for their work.

I am currently in the progress of incorporating my Homeless Thumbelina image into a shirt design, but this deceivingly simple task is proving to be much more time consuming than I'd bargained for...

Threadless only accepts designs that use 8 colors or less, so I've been simplifying like mad. After a fruitless attempt to reduce my palette using nothing but Photoshop, I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that I really need to recreate this image using vectors if I want to keep it from getting too grainy.

The original piece is not graphic at all, so taking it from colored pencil into vectors has been a tricky undertaking.

Here's what the original looks like:

And here's how far I've gotten with the vectors:

*sigh* So many details...
Anyway, here's how the shirt will look in the end:

The fireflies might be printed in glow-in-the-dark ink, since I know that's something they can do... I just need to decide how ambitious I can afford to be before I risk pricing myself out of the race...

I really do feel that Thumbelina is one of my strongest illustrations,

I just hope it doesn't lose too much of it's appeal in the translation.

I'll probably post a step-by-step animation of my progress when it's finished. And I'll DEFINITELY post links to the Threadless submission when it's up for review! I'll need your help to make it past the submission stage, so get ready to vote early and often!