Mens Tee

Womens Tee

This was the first on the alien abduction phenomena. I think everybody knows what that’s about more or less. My first thoughts were of the title sequence for the mini series Taken where the guy gets lifted up, but I didn’t want it to be as serious as all that. I thought another way to go would be a kind of comical pose.

My original sketch for the floating guy

So the first thing was to sketch out a blocky kind of guy. I knew it was going to be small and in shadow, so I needed a simple form that you could tell what was going on by the limbs flailing about in an awkward position. I could have used a stick figure or simple shape for a person, but then it feels kind of cold, like the guy is asleep or paralyzed or in a trance or something. I was going to make him completely black in shadow, but have two white dots for eyes. So either he is awake or it’s a reflection off his glasses. I think that gives it a more lighthearted feel to it. I don’t want all the designs to be downers.

To make the ufo I tried several methods, but its just an illustrator graphic. Although I do have a 3d model of it if I should need for something someday.

The other issue is with color. The ships usually seem silver, or metallic in color, so gray seemed like the obvious choice for that, and knowing that I’m getting charged by the color why not just limit myself to four colors (or four shades of gray in this case).

The final image.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

Do you remember that scene at the beginning of Ghostbusters when Dr. Peter Venkman is conducting his research on “the effect of negative reinforcement on ESP ability?” If you don’t its a classic, go rent it. Basically Bill Murray holds up what look like large playing cards with different designs on them, and people try to guess what the design is. They’re called Zener Cards and they were created by Karl Zener in the 1930’s for ESP test conducted with J.B. Rhine.

There are 5 symbols, the star, circle, square, plus and wavy lines. I believe that’s the order they show up in the movie too. So that’s five symbols and five copies of each for a total of 25 cards in a deck. Too bad the gal in the movie didn’t know that, or she wouldn’t have bothered guessing “figure eight.”

The finished design.

The test that the cards were originally designed for was meant to test for ESP ability. One guy holds the card toward him and mentally tries to project the image in his mind. There’s another person sitting opposite who cannot see the card, but tries to receive the mental image. The test isn’t designed to tell if the sender is telepathic or the receiver is clairvoyant, but instead just validate the existence of ESP ability. A book was written by J.B. Rhine in the 30’s stating that after 90 thousand runs of this test ESP ability did in fact exist.

Since these are all basic shapes, the design didn’t take more than a few minutes. Probably the most time was spent on the wavy lines. How wavy should they be? How many humps? How thick? Anyway this is what I came up with.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

Throughout history there have been many credible accounts of strange things falling out of the sky with the rain. Fish, frogs, worms, snails and even stones have been reported and in some instances photographed. Whether there is a natural or supernatural explanation for these falling objects has been debated for a hundred years or more.

A 16th century graphic depicting fish falling from the sky with the rain.

One possible explanation is that a waterspout, or tornado over water, can pick up a large volume of water with these creatures in it, and transport them up into the clouds possibly over miles away. Then when those clouds produce rain the fish or frogs or whatever come down with it. These are not large animals keep in mind, the fish would be about the length of your finger and the frogs are even smaller. I’ve seen some hail come down in Texas that was pretty large, and neighboring towns had some the size of golf balls or even larger, so the clouds can keep small objects suspended up there for a quite a while. I don’t think waterspouts would explain the worms or stones.

A 16th century graphic depicting frogs falling over a small Scandinavian town.

I like the simple graphics representing the fish and frogs, but the overall scene I thought was too cluttered, so I needed to simplify everything down. I wanted almost an icon for rain, but with fish and frogs. You can get pretty detailed with Spreadshirts digital direct printing method, but its nowhere near the quality of a full color photo in a magazine or something like that. It is a t-shirt after all.

My first sketch of what it might look like.

I couldn’t decide whether to do fish or frogs, so I just did one of each. In order to see what was actually falling from the clouds, I had to scale it up pretty big. If the fish got big enough to see, then the clouds were really big.  If I scaled down the cloud, and just reduced the number of fish at the same size, then it really didn’t feel like rain to me.  Just two fish falling from a cloud didn’t seem like rain.  I don’t put labels on any of these shirts, so I’m putting all my hopes on somebody being able to pretty much get the meaning of it just by looking.

The final design.

The method was pretty much the same as the others, scan the drawing, trace it in Photoshop, importht the Photoshop file into Illustrator and trace the line drawing by hand with the pen tool, then save that file as a PNG file for Spreadshirt.  Even though the design has flat shapes, I didn’t go with flex printing because of the amount of detail and the width of the stroke on the lines.  In order to meet the minimum width requirements I had to increase the width of the lines so fat I didn’t like them anymore.  The width they are now is about as fat as I wanted to go.  I didn’t add any texture or anything at this point because I didn’t think it needed.  I may change my mind down the road.  I also reversed the line/fill color for the clouds because I thought black clouds gave it a more ominous appearance.  Falling frogs isn’t necessarily evil, but it certainly is strange and would likely make one nervous and possibly bring up images of biblical plagues.  White fluffy clouds just didn’t seem right.

Also, these shirts are filed under oddities because the are not strange creatures, they are ordinary creatures discovered under extraordinary circumstances.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

I’m calling this shirt the ESP shirt, but its just as much about remote viewing as it is about extrasensory perception in general. So far people get the idea just by looking at it, so whatever you see in it, that’s what it is.

The government has put money into remote viewing research and programs, but I don’t know if they are doing it anymore. I think they officially stopped funding, but who knows what they are doing in secret. I believe it wasn’t that the US thought remote viewing was so powerful, but that other countries like the Soviet Union had psychic spies, and we didn’t want to be left out. From what I’ve heard they did develop a program that could be taught to the average person, so you didn’t have to be natually psychic to be a psychic spy, although I’m sure it couldn’t hurt. There are people who still claim to teach this method, and I’ve always wanted to try the courses, but I never have. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was all bogus, and it also wouldn’t surprise me if it was for real.

So for the graphic I wanted to have somebody looking at something and somebody else seeing a picture of that object in their mind. That isn’t exactly remote viewing, but any images of remote viewing didn’t exactly read as paranormal. They think of a place and then that place exists? How do you know they aren’t just remembering some vacation or something. So I needed two people sort of transmitting thoughts to one another. So I sketched out a couple guys I found on the internet.

A pencil drawing of the guy receiving the message.

Then those pencil drawings are brought into Illustrator and traced. Then I chose a flower for them to look at, because its a simple graphic and easily recognizable. Also I think I remember them doing a similar experiment with two twins in the series Taken when they are trying to find people who can power the spacecraft they found.

Outline view of the vector graphic.

The line work was too thin for flex printing, so I had to save it as a png with an alpha channel. I’ve ordered this shirt though and it looks pretty good.

The finished design.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

Do most people know that the Men In Black are a real thing or does everybody assume it was thought up for the movie? If you don’t know, reports of men wearing black suits, white shirts, black ties and black hats, showing up and intimidating people about UFOs have been recorded since the 1950’s. Even my old Time-Life Books series from the 80’s Mysteries of the Unknown has a page on the MIBs. I think they do exist and these witnesses probably have encountered some being, but I couldn’t say if they are extraterrestrial in origin or if they are government agents or just weird hoaxers. Even Dan Aykroyd mentioned a strange encounter when he was filming a video series on UFOs.

Its much more likely that these guys are government agents. They do take humanoid form, and every aspect of their strange behavior could just be a put on I guess. But why? Maybe the point is to be confusing. Government guys show up and threaten somebody who’s been talking about experiencing something paranormal, maybe acting like a robot or putting on weird white makeup and shaving all your hair off is all part of the plot to make these people seem crazy. It’s like killing two birds with one stone. They freak the witness out, AND if they do tell anybody what happened they just look even more looney tunes.

Outline view of the vector graphic.

This design is patterned after the neighborhood watch signs. If you don’t live in the us, or maybe have never seen the sign, some neighborhoods have these signs for “neighborhood watch” up on some of the residential streets and they look just like this, with a sort of cartooney style shady guy in all black lurking around. It’s supposed to serve as a notice to all shady characters who might read the sign to stay away, this is a neighborhood where people look out for each other, and any suspicious types will be monitored closely. I wish we had that for secret government henchmen too. I gave the character a sort of slanted grey alien eye to tie in the E.T. elements too.

The finished design.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

I’d like to do a whole series of different common UFO shapes. Other than the standard flying saucer, the big black triangles were the next form that came to mind.

I doubt that is an actual UFO, but it seems pretty close to what people describe seeing. These large black triangles fly silently overhead, often at night, even in populated areas. According to this space.com article, they’ve figured it out, and they are actually secret government blimps that use silent electric motors. Ok. I guess that’s just as possible as anything else, but since there’s just as much disinformation as there is real information about UFOs, I’ll keep my perch right here on the fence.

The design for this shirt is pretty easy. I set up the triangle flat first, then used the 3d transform tool in Illustrator to give it perspective. I started with the design for light colored shirts first, with the lights and the surrounding triangle outline. I thought I could just delete the triangle background for the dark shirts, but I should know by now its never that easy. I had to recreate the whole thing from scratch and transform it again.

The design for light colored shirts.

The design for darker colored shirts.

I like the darker design much better, but I wasn’t sure if it actually read “triangle ufo” or not. Perhaps the light colored design is overkill, I don’t know.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

So this is really a two parter, wrapped up into one design. The first is that the Nazis had a working flying disc craft in WWII, the second is that they had (and possibly still have) a secret base in Antarctica. It seems the Nazis did grab a chunk of Antarctica between 1939 and 1945 and named it New Swabia. Some UFO researchers will say there is evidence to support the creation of an Antarctic base, others say no there isn’t. According to Wired, that’s all garbage and the myth was finally put to rest here. We each sort of pick and choose what we want to believe, so believe what you want.

As for whether the Nazis had built a working UFO, it’s just like everything else. If some old guy emphatically says I saw a German UFO while I was flying on a mission, or I worked for the NAZIs building experimental models and prototypes, you can either say, ok I’m willing to go with you on this, or say no, that can’t be true because I know that those events could not have happened. I say honestly what difference does it make? I’m just making shirts that I think are interesting, it doesn’t really matter if you believe it or not. I’m having trouble keeping myself on track at the moment so I’m just gonna leave it at that.

Moving on to the design, I wanted to make a shirt sort of resembling those old postcards I’m sure everybody has seen on the racks on any store in just about any tourist town. They often say “Greetings from Charleston” or San Diego or Branson or wherever. In my mind I saw “Greetings from Antarctica!” right away with german ufos flying around.

A typical old timey post card.

So I found an image of Antarctica and I used the trace option in Illustrator to convert it to a vector object. I suppose this wasn’t a good move because it produced an image with more resolution in the coastline than I or Spreadshirt needed. I should have just printed the image and traced it by hand, but I was lazy. So I have a vector Antarctica, that’s the first step. The second step is the titles. Usually the “Greetings” is in a handwritten script type of font so that was pretty easy to figure out. The big 3d letters were pretty easy too, because you can just use the 3d filter in Illustrator to extrude the letters out and tilt them to the side.

The finished design.

The weird part was the text for Antarctica. I struggled with that for a long time and I’m still not sure I got it right. My original idea was to use one color flex printing for the design. So I offset the stroke to all the letters and used pathfinder to cut out the outline from the background shape, using the t shirt as the other color to separate the elements from each other. Anyway the design was rejected for flex printing by Spreadshirt because it didn’t meet the minimum requirements. So now I’m using digital direct. As an afterthought I put a gradient on the background shape to help the text stand out, but I don’t know if it’s working or not. I still think it’s a really good idea, and I’ll continue to tweak it and probably modify this post if there are significant changes. If you like the shirt as it is and would like to purchase one, I wont stop you.

The finished design.

On the other hand I can sort of see a path forming and that does make me a little bit nervous. The prophecies that describe the events that take place in the apocalypse in the last book of the Bible do parallel modern events in a lot of ways. According to some people who study Biblical prophecy, a small powerful group wants to control many because they are influenced by negative spiritual forces. In order for the Antichrist of the Bible to rise to power, this “new world order” environment needs to be set in motion and it all gets into some really scary stuff.

I had a few images in mind for a shirt regarding the Illuminati, but nothing really panned out. Again I resorted to using a slogan. I’m sorry. But I think these shirts will need a slogan, just so we don’t miss the point here. Even if the Illuminati doesn’t exist, we still need to be very careful not to give our elected officials too much power. Personal responsibility is key here, because once you give those guys the power, it’s very very hard to get it back.

The skull was just an image of a skull that I converted to black and white through my usual detail reduction process. Tracing and going over and over until you’ve got something that looks good to you. The text wasn’t messed with too much, but I didn’t like the idea of creating a vertical stripe down the shirt instead of just the plain old horizontal text blob.