Mens Tee

Womens Tee

H.A.A.R.P. stands for the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, and is not a secret or classified project. On their website it plainly states that the site is “a premier facility for the study of ionospheric physics and radio science,” but many people believe it has another purpose not so benign. Many people believe HAARP is a potential global weapon that can control the weather.

The finished design.

Trying to control the weather isn’t all that crazy of an idea. Weather Modification Inc. has been around for 40 years. Other countries have spent tons of money in weather manipulation throughout the years. HAARP is a big clump of radio antennas in Alaska that can be linked together to focus there combined energy into a target in the ionosphere. There are about 180 individual antennas, with a total size about 35 acres and combined they can spit out about 3,600 kilowatts of energy into the atmosphere. That’s 3.6 million watts. A radio station is 50 thousand watts max. The people running HAARP say it’s not a weather control project or any type of “star wars” weapon. What they don’t say is exactly what will happen when they shoot the energy into our atmosphere. Since its a research project, they figure just turn it on and see what happens, so it’s not that hard to see why a lot of people are concerned about this.

I was given a book a long time ago on concept art for old Disney films and one of the films they had sketches for was called Victory Through Air Power. One of the sketches was of the earth with a black octopus curling around the earth from above and the same coming up from below. I always thought this was a striking image and it was one of the first things that came to my mind when I was thinking about HAARP as a potential global weapon.

This was my initial sketch, inspired by an old concept sketch for the disney film Victory Through Air Power.

I chose oranges and browns for the palette because orange is traditionally a color signifying caution, like in road construction, and putting the earth in browns give it a more gloomy feel. I put the octopus over the northern hemisphere, but I didn’t put it over Alaska just because I didn’t think the view of the earth from that perspective was as interesting. I used google earth to position the earth underneath the octopus.

This was the first attempt to figure out how to build it.

In a Fibonnaci number sequence, which goes back hundreds of years, each number is equal to the last two numbers. So it goes 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on for as long as you want to keep adding numbers. The sequence is found all over in nature, so its really more of a discovery than an invention.

One square and curve unit

Creating the graphic wasn’t all that hard, its really a series of squares, with a smooth arc from one corner to the other. You can keep growing it out as large as you want, but I thought 10 would be good for percentages of black. The centermost square is 100 percent white, then I add 10 percent black to the value until you get to 90 percent at the largest square. It never gets to 100 percent black unless the design is on a black shirt.

The end result

Really the best way to build the graphic is to make one square with its corresponding curve, then group those, then duplicate them and scale them as big as you like.

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

Do you remember that scene at the beginning of Ghostbusters when Dr. Peter Venkman is conducting his research on “the effect of negative reinforcement on ESP ability?” If you don’t its a classic, go rent it. Basically Bill Murray holds up what look like large playing cards with different designs on them, and people try to guess what the design is. They’re called Zener Cards and they were created by Karl Zener in the 1930′s for ESP test conducted with J.B. Rhine.

There are 5 symbols, the star, circle, square, plus and wavy lines. I believe that’s the order they show up in the movie too. So that’s five symbols and five copies of each for a total of 25 cards in a deck. Too bad the gal in the movie didn’t know that, or she wouldn’t have bothered guessing “figure eight.”

The finished design.

The test that the cards were originally designed for was meant to test for ESP ability. One guy holds the card toward him and mentally tries to project the image in his mind. There’s another person sitting opposite who cannot see the card, but tries to receive the mental image. The test isn’t designed to tell if the sender is telepathic or the receiver is clairvoyant, but instead just validate the existence of ESP ability. A book was written by J.B. Rhine in the 30′s stating that after 90 thousand runs of this test ESP ability did in fact exist.

Since these are all basic shapes, the design didn’t take more than a few minutes. Probably the most time was spent on the wavy lines. How wavy should they be? How many humps? How thick? Anyway this is what I came up with.

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.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

I’m calling this shirt the ESP shirt, but its just as much about remote viewing as it is about extrasensory perception in general. So far people get the idea just by looking at it, so whatever you see in it, that’s what it is.

The government has put money into remote viewing research and programs, but I don’t know if they are doing it anymore. I think they officially stopped funding, but who knows what they are doing in secret. I believe it wasn’t that the US thought remote viewing was so powerful, but that other countries like the Soviet Union had psychic spies, and we didn’t want to be left out. From what I’ve heard they did develop a program that could be taught to the average person, so you didn’t have to be natually psychic to be a psychic spy, although I’m sure it couldn’t hurt. There are people who still claim to teach this method, and I’ve always wanted to try the courses, but I never have. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was all bogus, and it also wouldn’t surprise me if it was for real.

So for the graphic I wanted to have somebody looking at something and somebody else seeing a picture of that object in their mind. That isn’t exactly remote viewing, but any images of remote viewing didn’t exactly read as paranormal. They think of a place and then that place exists? How do you know they aren’t just remembering some vacation or something. So I needed two people sort of transmitting thoughts to one another. So I sketched out a couple guys I found on the internet.

A pencil drawing of the guy receiving the message.

Then those pencil drawings are brought into Illustrator and traced. Then I chose a flower for them to look at, because its a simple graphic and easily recognizable. Also I think I remember them doing a similar experiment with two twins in the series Taken when they are trying to find people who can power the spacecraft they found.

Outline view of the vector graphic.

The line work was too thin for flex printing, so I had to save it as a png with an alpha channel. I’ve ordered this shirt though and it looks pretty good.

The finished design.

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

I’d like to do a whole series of different common UFO shapes. Other than the standard flying saucer, the big black triangles were the next form that came to mind.

I doubt that is an actual UFO, but it seems pretty close to what people describe seeing. These large black triangles fly silently overhead, often at night, even in populated areas. According to this space.com article, they’ve figured it out, and they are actually secret government blimps that use silent electric motors. Ok. I guess that’s just as possible as anything else, but since there’s just as much disinformation as there is real information about UFOs, I’ll keep my perch right here on the fence.

The design for this shirt is pretty easy. I set up the triangle flat first, then used the 3d transform tool in Illustrator to give it perspective. I started with the design for light colored shirts first, with the lights and the surrounding triangle outline. I thought I could just delete the triangle background for the dark shirts, but I should know by now its never that easy. I had to recreate the whole thing from scratch and transform it again.

The design for light colored shirts.

The design for darker colored shirts.

I like the darker design much better, but I wasn’t sure if it actually read “triangle ufo” or not. Perhaps the light colored design is overkill, I don’t know.

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.

As for whether the Nazis had built a working UFO, it’s just like everything else. If some old guy emphatically says I saw a German UFO while I was flying on a mission, or I worked for the NAZIs building experimental models and prototypes, you can either say, ok I’m willing to go with you on this, or say no, that can’t be true because I know that those events could not have happened. I say honestly what difference does it make? I’m just making shirts that I think are interesting, it doesn’t really matter if you believe it or not. I’m having trouble keeping myself on track at the moment so I’m just gonna leave it at that.

Moving on to the design, I wanted to make a shirt sort of resembling those old postcards I’m sure everybody has seen on the racks on any store in just about any tourist town. They often say “Greetings from Charleston” or San Diego or Branson or wherever. In my mind I saw “Greetings from Antarctica!” right away with german ufos flying around.

A typical old timey post card.

So I found an image of Antarctica and I used the trace option in Illustrator to convert it to a vector object. I suppose this wasn’t a good move because it produced an image with more resolution in the coastline than I or Spreadshirt needed. I should have just printed the image and traced it by hand, but I was lazy. So I have a vector Antarctica, that’s the first step. The second step is the titles. Usually the “Greetings” is in a handwritten script type of font so that was pretty easy to figure out. The big 3d letters were pretty easy too, because you can just use the 3d filter in Illustrator to extrude the letters out and tilt them to the side.

The finished design.

The weird part was the text for Antarctica. I struggled with that for a long time and I’m still not sure I got it right. My original idea was to use one color flex printing for the design. So I offset the stroke to all the letters and used pathfinder to cut out the outline from the background shape, using the t shirt as the other color to separate the elements from each other. Anyway the design was rejected for flex printing by Spreadshirt because it didn’t meet the minimum requirements. So now I’m using digital direct. As an afterthought I put a gradient on the background shape to help the text stand out, but I don’t know if it’s working or not. I still think it’s a really good idea, and I’ll continue to tweak it and probably modify this post if there are significant changes. If you like the shirt as it is and would like to purchase one, I wont stop you.