Mens Tee

Womens Tee

This was something I had wanted to do for a long time, but I couldn’t think of how to use it. Ink splat ghosts. A year or so ago I started a design company called Thunked Up Media, and one of my ideas for marketing was to create a tshirt with original ink blots on them. You know the ones you see psychiatrists using in movies where you look at these abstract ink blobs and describe what you see? I can’t think of the name right now. Anyway we were experimenting with a method to create one of a kind ink splat shirts and they would say Thunked Up Media on them and everything. I guess what I’m saying is that I”ve been flinging paint on stuff for years now and trying to figure out how to turn those blobs into things.

This is a page of ink splats that will be the basis for my ghost designs.

When I started to put designs together I knew I wanted a ghost design, but the standard pac man style ghost wasn’t doing anything for me, and I wanted something with hard lines on it, so I couldn’t do a mist or anything like that.  And I wanted to stay away from anything cheesy.  Well anything that was cheesey to me, the subject of cheese in design is completely subjective.  It wasn’t hard to  connect the dots and see that with only a few modifications, I could create a unique ghost design that had the sort of gooey ectoplasmic feel I wanted and wasn’t a pac man stereotype.  A cutesy ghost for the kids that wasn’t completely tired.  Not that I take the existence of ghosts lightly, but trying to create a scary design on a shirt usually just comes out looking dumb.

I have a good collection of abstract paint splats that I use for textural elements in design and illustrations, but to get one that actually look like what I saw in my head took a lot of trial and error mixing paint and water, paper angle, paper stock, etc.  I wanted kind of a splat type look with little streams of ink running down in solid lines.  I never got exactly what I wanted, but it was a start.  I picked a few good ones out of say a hundred or so then scanned those into photoshop.

A page of eyes waiting for bodies.

Once they were in photoshop I evened out the tones so they were a mostly solid shape, then brought that into illustrator for tracing and exporting.  The first ghost designs are just solid shapes, but I will probably mess around with textures  in the future.

Oh yeah on thing they were missing was eyes.  I felt like too many features would be overkill, but you gotta have eyes.  Windows to the soul and all.  I messed around with paint blob eyes, but it wasn’t working.  And simple circles in illustrator were just too perfect.  That why I do almost all my work on paper first, because the computer has a tendency to make things too clean and perfect.  So I did a page of just eyes and scanned them in.  I used just a blank oval for body shape as a guide.  Once those were scanned in I just traced those in illustrator and created a compound path with my ghost bodies and they’re all ready to go.