Mens Tee

Womens Tee

The term “Bigfoot” as we know it seemed to originate in 1958 in the Bluff Creek area of California. In 1957, workers begin clearing a path for a new road in Bluff Creek. The workers there report finding 50 gallon oil drums and 700 pound tires thrown around, and throughout the site extraordinarily large human-like footprints. The Humbolt Times reported on the story and published photos of plaster casts of the first “Bigfoot” prints. That’s the beginning of Bigfoot in popular culture , but stories of the creature goes back much further than that. Native Americans have legends and pictographs of the creature going back hundreds of years.

The original pictograph, with my layer of sharpie marker on top.

I first heard about Sasquatch cave art on the popular MonsterQuest program on the History Channel. Not the most academic of resources, but I think it’s a great show. It was the “Legend of the Hairy Beast” episode on season two. Kathy Moskowitz Strain was on the show talking about pictographs found on the Toule River Indian Reservation that predate any European settler by at least 500 years. Other tribes across the US have legends of a similar creature, but this is the first pictograph I had heard of.

My initial vector outline of one of the pictographs.

So the pictograph on the MonsterQuest program was kind of fuzzy, and had a lot more line work on it, so I sort of simplified things. I thought it was a cute image, but the original had this large markings under the eyes that I didn’t think added to the cuteness so I removed them. What’s left is just the curvy form with the furry paw like hands and feet, and the two dots for eyes. It sort of reminds me of a scooby doo villian. Anyway as you can see above thats just the paths in illustrator with a simple stroke on it. That’s a start but not cute enough. I wanted to have a varying line weight, so to do that I wanted to make a couple custom brushes in illustrator.

This is the artwork view of the hairy man paths and custom brush shapes.

To make a custom brush that looks like a brush or quill stroke (fat in the center and skinny at the ends), all you need is a basic oval to start with. You just drag that oval to your brush palette and it will ask you if you want to make it a brush and you say yes. That’s it. Well that’s almost it. What I just said will work, but I added a few more steps in there. A circle in illustrator is made up of one continuous path with four vertices. (Those little square dots along the path.) Depending on what you want to paint with your brush, 4 vertices for your custom brush may not be enough. If you have some fancy curve sometimes you’ll get weird effects if you have a low number of verts. Never fear however, but it is really simple to add vertices without even touching your artwork. Just go to the path menu in Illustrator and hit the “add anchor points” option and what that will do is double the amount of vertices you have on your shape. You can click this as many times as you like, doubling each time.

Once you have a suitable shape, the next step is to just try it out. It’s hard to predict exactly how things are going to look, so it’s a trial and error process. On mine, I found that the ovals were too pointy on the ends when I stretched them out, so I just simply removed some of the vertices from the ends of shape and that rounded things out for me. Also shown in the graphic above is several different sizes of ovals for several different brushes, intended for several different lengths of strokes. There is a “proportional” option in illustrator custom brush settings that will scale the shape up or down to fit the size of the path, but scaling the shape isn’t always what you want. His little hand tufts had really short strokes, and if I had just used a proportional setting on the larger brush, it would have scaled them so small you could barely see them. Since I’m dealing with a minimum width requirement for vector designs on spreadshirt, I needed a short brush that was still thick enough.

The artwork view of my custom brush outlines and the original path used for a fill color.

The other addition I made was sort of a solid fill shape for his body. This is used in cartoons all the time for hair and such, where the lines don’t touch each other, so you just sort of take the general form and average things out for the colored fill shapes. One very convenient way to do this is to save a copy of your paths without a brush setting on them, just a plain stroke. As long as you don’t mess with anything, this should naturally follow the center of your custom brush lines. Just connect the end points and fill.

The final design.

Since I was able to use a vector design, I had more flexibility with the printing processes used on the shirts. I can interactively choose which color combination I want for the design, depending on my shirt color. I also experimented with some flock printing too, although I haven’t ordered any yet. Flock printing is just a fuzzy vinyl that’s cut and then pressed onto the shirt fabric. This is the first paranormal shirt that was cute enough to warrant it. Not all of them have it, just a few womens shirts. You’ll have to check in the shirt details.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

Loch Ness is the largest fresh water lake in Scotland. It has murky black water going as far down as a thousand feet in places and the debate about whether or not it is home to a population of unknown aquatic creatures has gone on for many years. Many people have seen the famous surgeon’s photograph and when it was later discovered to be a hoax, just a modified childs toy with some dramatic lighting, the debate was over. The loch ness monster is bull. The end. But for those who have seen the creature first hand, no amount of photographic fakery is going to change their mind about it.

The completed design.

Many people have seen a very large creature in and around the waters of loch ness and what they describe fits the description of no living animal. Either the animal is a new species, unrecognized by science, or it is a living fossil, a Plesiosaur, which has lived in those waters for thousands of years. Animals once thought extinct have turned up before, the Coelecanth is a famous example. To science this was a huge discovery, but local fisherman had been catching and eating the fish for years and to them it didn’t seem like such a big deal. The same could be true for Nessie. Science has yet to discover what many people in Scotland already know. Loch Ness can support, and is supporting a sustainable population of these creatures.

One of my Plesiosaur sketches.

For my shirt design, I looked at images of Plesiosaurs for inspiration. I don’t have a lot of trouble believing that dinosaurs could still exist, because many similar creatures have been spotted for years in other parts of the world. I wont go into that now. To keep up with my strange creature theme so far, I took the same approach to creating the Nessie design that I did with Bigfoot and the Thunderbird. The sketch was cleaned up in Photoshop, then traced in Illustrator, then brought back into Photoshop for the final texture you see in the image. I’ll be working on other famous lake monsters in the future with slightly different styles, but this seemed like a good starting point. I produced two graphics for most of these designs, one black for light colored shirts and one white for dark colored shirts. For now I’ve been keeping it white or black for digital direct printed shirts.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

I think most people have heard the name thunderbird, but I dont think we really make the connection between the creature that inspired the car (or mail application) and an actual living bird that may still exist in our own back yard. Thunderbirds are common symbol in native american tradition and folklore, so you’d have to ask yourself was this thing a living creature or purely a product of their imagination? If they did in fact see a giant bird flying around, is it possible that some of them still exist today?

The finished thunderbird design.

Several versions of the thunderbird are competitng for acceptance, some of them describe the creature like a pterosaur and others desribe it like a large vulture.  The image I”ve used is just more of a symbol of a large bird, I dont go into much more detail than that, such as providing scale or coloring or anything.  The bird does have sort of a square wing, which I believe is similar to what vultures have, and if I had to pick sides as to which type of bird I would support in the running for official thunderbird, I would go with the vullture, just because I’ve heard more sightings describe a vulture type bird.  Also one of the most popular accounts of a thunderbird in modern times was the “Lawndale Incident” which took place in Lawndale, Illinois in 1977 when a young boy was attacked and almost carried away by an enourmous bird resembling a vulture.

The method for creating the bird is pretty much the same as the bigfoot design.  I started with a popular image of a thunderbird reconstruction in a museum, then sketched out the rough form.  After the sketch was finished I scanned the image and cleaned it in Photoshop, then traced a vector version of the outline in Illustrator.  After I had a vector outline of the bird, I brought that image back into Photoshop and filled it with a hand painted texture.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

Even if you don’t know what the Patterson-Gimlin film is, I think just about everybody has seen some part of it. It’s probably the most iconic image in cryptozoology. I suppose the Patterson film and the hoaxed image of the loch ness monster are tied for first. I’ve been interested in bigfoot, skunk ape, yeti, etc since my parents first told me about it some time in grade school.  Since bigfoot was my first entry point into the world of the unknown, it seems fitting that the designs start here too.

The finished design.

If you know anything about bigfoot sightings, you know that they have been seen in just about every state in the U.S., and there are variations in terms of its general appearance.  Some photos would suggest that the skunk ape is more orangutan looking than the famous bigfoot or sasquatch creature.  I just started with one of the most famous poses from the film and went from there.  I wanted all the designs in the shop to be as simple as possible, so I took the original image and basically sketched out the rough form as best I could.  I had intended for this design to be a flex or flock print, but my lines seemed a little too clean for what reports claim is a giant, hairy, smelly creature so I kind of roughed things up and added little jaggy edges in places and gave him a couple eye holes.  Well at this point Spreadshirt rejected my design for flex printing.  You have to follow their design standards for flex or the machine wont actually be able to reproduce the picture.

It was still looking a little plain to me at this point, so I added a painted texture from my library and threw in some crack lines in illustrator.  I haven’t received my prototype from Spreadshirt yet, but so far this is how I’m leaving it.