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.

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

This was something I had wanted to do for a long time, but I couldn’t think of how to use it. Ink splat ghosts. A year or so ago I started a design company called Thunked Up Media, and one of my ideas for marketing was to create a tshirt with original ink blots on them. You know the ones you see psychiatrists using in movies where you look at these abstract ink blobs and describe what you see? I can’t think of the name right now. Anyway we were experimenting with a method to create one of a kind ink splat shirts and they would say Thunked Up Media on them and everything. I guess what I’m saying is that I”ve been flinging paint on stuff for years now and trying to figure out how to turn those blobs into things.

This is a page of ink splats that will be the basis for my ghost designs.

When I started to put designs together I knew I wanted a ghost design, but the standard pac man style ghost wasn’t doing anything for me, and I wanted something with hard lines on it, so I couldn’t do a mist or anything like that.  And I wanted to stay away from anything cheesy.  Well anything that was cheesey to me, the subject of cheese in design is completely subjective.  It wasn’t hard to  connect the dots and see that with only a few modifications, I could create a unique ghost design that had the sort of gooey ectoplasmic feel I wanted and wasn’t a pac man stereotype.  A cutesy ghost for the kids that wasn’t completely tired.  Not that I take the existence of ghosts lightly, but trying to create a scary design on a shirt usually just comes out looking dumb.

I have a good collection of abstract paint splats that I use for textural elements in design and illustrations, but to get one that actually look like what I saw in my head took a lot of trial and error mixing paint and water, paper angle, paper stock, etc.  I wanted kind of a splat type look with little streams of ink running down in solid lines.  I never got exactly what I wanted, but it was a start.  I picked a few good ones out of say a hundred or so then scanned those into photoshop.

A page of eyes waiting for bodies.

Once they were in photoshop I evened out the tones so they were a mostly solid shape, then brought that into illustrator for tracing and exporting.  The first ghost designs are just solid shapes, but I will probably mess around with textures  in the future.

Oh yeah on thing they were missing was eyes.  I felt like too many features would be overkill, but you gotta have eyes.  Windows to the soul and all.  I messed around with paint blob eyes, but it wasn’t working.  And simple circles in illustrator were just too perfect.  That why I do almost all my work on paper first, because the computer has a tendency to make things too clean and perfect.  So I did a page of just eyes and scanned them in.  I used just a blank oval for body shape as a guide.  Once those were scanned in I just traced those in illustrator and created a compound path with my ghost bodies and they’re all ready to go.