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.

A lot of people are against “the chip” though, and that may not be the only way big brother tracks you. RFID chips are also in millions of products including clothing. You probably have many RFID chips in your house without knowing it. They also have a special ink that can be colorless, but read by RFID readers and tracked that way. If I was going to make a shirt about RFID tracking, I like the little bean chip for a graphic better than the others, at least to start with.

So I used my own hand again, and just stuck it on the flatbed scanner.

A scan of my hand.

Then after a simple desaturate, invert, and find edges, you can see we are well on our way…

The same and, after some Photoshop button pushery.

Then its just a matter of touch up. If I wanted to only print on black shirts I’d be all set, but I wanted to print on other dark colored shirts, then a little more is needed. If you copy the touched up black and white file into a channel, then create a new blank layer, load the new channel as a selection then fill with white, you’ll have the white outlines of the hand with a transparent background. Was that too fast?

1. Copy black and white layer to a new blank channel (make sure the white in the layer is what you want to keep). That’s as simple as select all, copy, paste.
2. Create a new blank layer.
3. Load the new channel as a selection. That’s usually under the “Select” menu at the top, then click “Load Selection” and select the channel you want. That will give you some ant trails around the white parts of the channel you just filled in.
4. Then fill the ant trails with white or whatever color you want.
5. Save as a png with alpha

The finished design.