Take one sweatshirt

We gave four artists a week to customise a boring grey sweatshirt. The result is four unique pieces made with different materials and through different methods, that prove the immense creative reserves we have at our fingertips, writes ROISIN AGNEW

1: MARIO SUGHI (aka nerosunero) Illustrator and digital painter

Girl standing in an empty room

I’m originally from Emilia Romagna in Italy but I’ve been living in Ireland for 20 years. I’m not sure why I’ve stayed, it’s one of those things I think you can understand only retrospectively, once it’s over. It’s a great place to live, for what I do. I don’t really do fashion. What I do is elegant images that I think possibly translate well for fashion. One of my favourite subjects is young, beautiful women and that probably works well for the sweater idea. This image is from one of my digital paintings and it has a front and a back to it. I work with lots of different materials and mediums – I’m an illustrator and a painter, but I do prints too. Today I’m doing a painting for the interior of someone’s house and during the week I was working on the sweater and other projects, so it’s an ideal way to live and work. As an artist, I feel I can lend myself to everything, so long as it lies within my craft.

MASERGraffiti artist

Every good man needs . . . A good woman

One night my girlfriend Lou and I got drunk in a pub – we were dancing and I put my jumper over her and that’s where we got the concept for the sweater. We’re also fascinated with Audrey Hepburn, and there are great pictures of her squeezed into coats and jumpers with men she was in love with. I’m a graffiti artist so I don’t often work with fashion, and any time I’ve done prints of my graffitis for T-shirts it hasn’t worked well, it doesn’t transfer. But I do lots of different kinds of art work, and fashion is something that was missing and that I wanted to get into. In the next month I’m launching a clothes line in collaboration with a friend. It’s called Homebird, with reference to Dublin, as we wanted to keep it a strictly Dublin label. I’m really excited, what I’ve done for it works really well because it’s specifically for clothes, but it still fits in with my other work. It’s good for me to get out and see other people and their work, so I like little projects like these.

NATALIE B. COLEMAN Designer

Love you blew me up like a balloon ... and then you made a pincushion of my heart

I just came up with a little saying. It’s just about love, I suppose – cute, romantic, dark. I’m working on some prints for my spring/summer 2013 collection that will have this logo. It’s going to be called Sarah’s Suitcase after my grandmother who recently passed away. I’m concentrating on my line at the moment, but I love collaborating with people. I worked on a book about artistic processes with a typographer which was nominated for the British Book Design and Publication award last year. I also do these crazy, fun collaborations with a dancer. I live in the countryside so I’m often quite isolated, but I find there are so many people doing interesting things in Ireland, and all very open to different types of work. As a designer, I feel there’s a real history of craftsmanship in Ireland. My generation of designers are lucky in that they have had more opportunities to showcase their work. I travel a lot for work, and it’s great to do so as an Irish designer.

KITTY MOSS Fashion illustrator and designer

Maud Minet

I went to Maud Minet for inspiration. I design for this ghost, her name is Maud, and she’s my muse. I draw her at parties and going around town with her cat Minet, and I design clothes for her. I loved translating the idea for the sweater, as I’d never done it before and generally work with paint or designing clothes. There’s everything – there’s a bit of paint, a lot of embellishment, and it’s very me. I design clothes for her and this is definitely something she would wear. I know a few people who said they would want one, so I might keep doing them. I work in a lot of different mediums but I have one concept and anything I do around that just counts as art, I wouldn’t pigeonhole it into one particular form. It’s creating an image basically, creating little art-works. I’ve just finished an exhibition in Brown Thomas called ArtStyle and it’s been really successful for me. I’m always interested in new collaborations, and this was a nice opportunity to do something different.

WIN

To win one of these four sweatshirts, see our fashion blog irishtimes.com/blogs/fash-mob