Mens Tee

Womens Tee

This was the first on the alien abduction phenomena. I think everybody knows what that’s about more or less. My first thoughts were of the title sequence for the mini series Taken where the guy gets lifted up, but I didn’t want it to be as serious as all that. I thought another way to go would be a kind of comical pose.

My original sketch for the floating guy

So the first thing was to sketch out a blocky kind of guy. I knew it was going to be small and in shadow, so I needed a simple form that you could tell what was going on by the limbs flailing about in an awkward position. I could have used a stick figure or simple shape for a person, but then it feels kind of cold, like the guy is asleep or paralyzed or in a trance or something. I was going to make him completely black in shadow, but have two white dots for eyes. So either he is awake or it’s a reflection off his glasses. I think that gives it a more lighthearted feel to it. I don’t want all the designs to be downers.

To make the ufo I tried several methods, but its just an illustrator graphic. Although I do have a 3d model of it if I should need for something someday.

The other issue is with color. The ships usually seem silver, or metallic in color, so gray seemed like the obvious choice for that, and knowing that I’m getting charged by the color why not just limit myself to four colors (or four shades of gray in this case).

The final image.

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.

Mens Tee

Womens Tee

So this is really a two parter, wrapped up into one design. The first is that the Nazis had a working flying disc craft in WWII, the second is that they had (and possibly still have) a secret base in Antarctica. It seems the Nazis did grab a chunk of Antarctica between 1939 and 1945 and named it New Swabia. Some UFO researchers will say there is evidence to support the creation of an Antarctic base, others say no there isn’t. According to Wired, that’s all garbage and the myth was finally put to rest here. We each sort of pick and choose what we want to believe, so believe what you want.

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.

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.