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

Many people that claim to have witnessed ufo or extra terrestrial activity also claim to have been threatened by military officials. It happened at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and it happened in Stephenville, Texas in 2008, just to name a couple of famous examples. People were threatened with incarceration or worse if they were ever to speak to anyone about what they saw. Based on eyewitness accounts, its clear that the government has been suppressing information as to the true nature of the ufo activity.

The original "uncle sam" painting.

The classic uncle sam image always seemed a little bit threatening to me anyway, so I thought it would be a perfect mascot for this secret side of the government going around and bullying people about keeping quiet. I didn’t want to use the original color painting directly, so I printed out a high resolution version of the image and started to work with that. There are programs like Adobe Illustrator that will take a photo or graphic and automatically trace the contours for you, producing a line graphic or shape that you can then color, or have the software choose the colors for you based on the colors of the image. That will work, but I like to have the most control over the amount of detail, and the amount of “style” put into the traced image. Illustrator will give you a slider that adjusts how much detail will be in the final line drawing, but what if you want to block out some areas and put a lot of detail in other areas?. That’s why I go with the hand traced step in between. You can decide where you want the detail and give that area more emphasis. Since I know I’m only going with black and white, I also have to decide where my shadow line goes. I have just a cheap tracer like this one and that usually gets the job done.

The pencil version.

I gave the face more detail because that’s where most people look first. If you think to yourself “hey, is that Joe down the street?” probably the deciding factor is going to be the face. I knew ahead of time that I was only going to go with two colors: white and black, or white and some other dark color. (Neither white nor black are technically colors, but that isn’t important.) Most human faces are made up of curvy, lumpy parts, and those parts move softly into shadow through a range of tones. I don’t have that option here, so I have to look at the grade and decide at what point its going to clip into black. When I’m working through this process, I really don’t know if its going to look like the dude or not, you just give it your best shot.

So once I’ve gone over the original once with my tracer I have some light pencil marks. If you’re totally confident in your abilities then you wouldn’t have to do this step, but I darken the pencil lines and fill in all the black shapes, just to see what I’ve done more clearly. It looks fine to me, so I need to do one more step to complete my process. I need to go back to the tracer again and go over it in ink. I suppose I’m paranoid, but I like to save the pencil drawing and put the ink version on a separate sheet of paper. That way if I fudge up some line or something I can just scrap the whole thing and start tracing again from the pencil version. I’m also extremely picky about lines and curves, I’ll nudge a line just where I want it in pencil, and if the ink version isn’t exactly right it looks lame to me and I have to scrap it. Well depending on how complex of a drawing it is, some amount of lameness can be tolerated (or fixed in Photoshop).

An ink trace of the painting.

When you have a nice inked version, you can scan that and bring that into Illustrator for an autotrace on a very high resolution setting. That way I get very good vector copies of the lines I want, and the stuff I don’t want was already removed in the earlier steps. Once you have it in illustrator the way you want it you’re pretty much done. Slap your tag on there and its ready to be worn.

The finished shirt.

For Dark Designs on Dark Shirts…
This design is made for lighter colored shirts. When you put a black design on even a blue shirt, there isn’t enough contrast and you can barely see anything. When you’re designing for tshirts if you want to sell a variety of colors, generally you need a light and dark version of the design. Since I’m dealing with just one or two color designs usually I can just invert everything, the white becomes black and the black becomes white, but that doesn’t always work. You can always chump out and do the white outline surrounding everything, but depending on the design that doesn’t work either. I’ve had the problem with a couple designs where I tried to do a white outline and it just didn’t work right. Think about varying the width of the outline, go way fatty if thin isn’t working, or don’t follow the same curve. Straight lines loosely following the shape like a scissor cut out comes to mind.