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.

The beginning and end of this design.

It’s basically a Post-it note with the ghost and text written in ball point pen. I scanned the note in, removed the text from the background and added a new yellow square that was warped to look like it was curved with a light shadow underneath. I saved the file as a png with an alpha channel and that’s about it. I put it the image on the back of the shirt to sort of resemble a “kick me” sign. I don’t know if anybody else would like it, but I do.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

The Close Encounters of the Third Kind motion picture came out a little early for me, actually one year before I was born, but it’s one of my favorite films. I like everything about it, but in general I like how Steven Spielberg and the producers of the film took the subject of UFOs and alien encounters and abduction seriously. There wasn’t anything camp or tongue in cheek about it. I’m not gonna go into a whole big thing about it, but all the movies involving extra terrestrial life that are on my favorite list are almost all there for that reason.

So I wanted to do a shirt about it, simply because I wanted to wear it, but I didn’t want to steal any frames or graphics directly from the movie, but rather use one of the ideas, so that if you saw the move you’d say “hey, I remember that” but it wasn’t a walking advertisement for the movie. That isn’t what the site is about and that just plain isn’t my thing. I want to do a design on the different levels of encounters, first, second, third, but I haven’t come up with anything good yet. My second idea was the hand gestures that they use to represent the different sounds and ultimately communicate with the aliens. If you play those notes anybody who has seen the film instantly knows what that is so I thought that’s a pretty good place to start. This time I didn’t sketch anything out. I watched the movie again to make sure I had the gestures in the right order, and I just photographed my own hands with my digital camera.

A photo of my own hand, in front of the wall in my office.

I didn’t know what exactly the final design was going to be, but I was thinking about technical manuals and instructions and the little line drawings they use when depicting people performing different functions, and I kind of imagined like a written instruction manual for communicating with aliens, but without the words. So the first thing I needed was line drawings of hands. My own hands were available and willing to work for free. After I had photographed the hands, and messed with the levels in Photoshop, I just bought them into Illustrator, put them on their own layers and locked them, and just started tracing whatever I felt was important.

The digital photo with the paths in Illustrator on top.

The biggest issue that I think came up was fingernail or no fingernail. That’s a road everybody has to walk down and some time or another, but I went with fingernail this time. Those line drawings of people often times don’t have color to them to save money on printing, so I didn’t add any color to mine either. As you can see my arm just cuts off at the edge of the photo, and I wanted the arm in there, so I needed to enclose the hands somehow so that they framed the subject matter, and made you think mayber there was the rest of the dude standing just beyond. It was either a square or a circle, and I went with circles just cause it reminded me of Chipotle.

The finished design.