Archive for the 'Birth of a T-Shirt' Category

The Birth of a T-Shirt (I’m Ready For My Close-Up!)

Published
by
Greg
on September 26, 2007
in Birth of a T-Shirt, Fantastic Bonanza, industry, real world and t-shirts
. 4 Comments

Series installment roll call! Part 1! Part 2! Part 3! Part 4! Part 5! Part 6! Haven’t read ‘em? You might want to! Since, you know, this is a series an’ all.

Note: if you want to skip my explanatory ramblings and get straight to the pictures, head on down to the bottom of the post (past the cut) for a veritable bonanza of photographs.

First, an Explanation

Okay, I have to admit something to you guys: by this point in the shirt birthing process, the shirts have already technically been birthed. Assuming the printers have done their jobs, the shirts should be… well, printed. Ergo, they have been birthed, right? So why are we still doing these ‘Birth of a T-Shirt’ posts?

Why, because there’s the ever-important final task of getting the newborn shirts from us to you, of course! And we can’t very well put our shirts up for sale unless we have some good pictures of them to show to prospective buyers, now can we? That would be madness! And not the good kind of madness, either. The bad kind. The very bad kind. So, to take an already-overworked analogy and snap it in two, think of this part of the process as getting the shirts to take their first few steps. Or something like that.

The Photo Shoot

Since we didn’t really have immediate access to an indoor studio or anything like that, we decided to conduct our photoshoot at nearby Gilson Park. It’s a pleasant beachside park in our hometown of Wilmette situated on the shores of beautiful Lake Michigan, with plenty of good spots to take photos. In fact, it’s where we took the product shots for our first line of shirts and where we had that piñata festival that was featured on the rotating image gallery on the front page of our old store.

The best time to take pictures is probably early morning or late afternoon—this way, you can avoid the bad shadows that get cast when the sun is directly overhead. We went with a morning photo shoot, hoping that the diffuse morning light would make for easier exposures.

Difficulties

We had two cameras—Joe’s and mine—and we used Joe’s almost exclusively for roughly the first half of the shoot. Big mistake. Upon returning from the shoot, we discovered that all those pictures were practically unusable!

Why? Well, it turns out that Joe’s camera had been set to take pictures at a resolution of only 640×480 pixels, which meant that the photos we took with it were too small and blurry for us to use. As a result, we had to toss out practically every picture of one of the models, our good friend Elyse. And that’s a cryin’ shame. Sorry, Elyse!

Fortunately, we used my camera for the second half of the shoot, so we still got plenty of good pictures of the other models—that’d be the three of us and Becca, another friend of the Bonanziers.

What’s the lesson here? If you’re taking photos, and you have more than one camera, use both of them! The whole time! You’ll be glad you had those backups and supplemental photos. Also, check and double-check the settings on your camera. Use the highest-quality settings you can. It might take up more memory, but remember—there’s no point in being able to take a whole ton of pictures if none of them are any good. Even though web resolution is 72dpi, you’ll find that you’ll be taking advantage of as much resolution on your photos you can, so the bigger, the better!

Ooh… Lookit the Purdy Pictures!

Okay, enough of my yakking. The rest of this post will primarily be photos, interspersed with a little commentary on my part. When you see a thumbnail image, click on it for a bigger photo. Continue reading ‘The Birth of a T-Shirt (I’m Ready For My Close-Up!)’

The Birth of a T-Shirt (Let’s All Go to the Printer’s!)

Published
by
John
on September 18, 2007
in Birth of a T-Shirt, Fantastic Bonanza, industry and t-shirts
. 2 Comments

Series installment roll call! Part 1! Part 2! Part 3! Part 4! Part 5! Haven’t read ‘em? You might want to! Since, you know, this is a series an’ all.

For this batch of t-shirt designs, we outsourced the screenprinting to a local printer. As such, we can’t provide an in-depth look at the actual printing process, but we can at least tell you what to prepare if you contact one of these places yourself.

The Graphics
We obviously had to send them the shirt designs somehow. Since we traced all of our designs in Inkscape, the designs were already saved as handy SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files — no muss, no fuss. (Well, there was some fuss, but that’s been covered in previous posts.)

A note on the colors in your design: you might want to make sure they correspond to hues found in the Pantone Color Matching System (we used this handy online version). Essentially, providing your printer with Pantone colors makes it easier for them to match the color you’re looking for, whether you want an exact or an approximate match. We opted for an approximate color match (it’s cheaper and often just fine; try to get a sense of how good their color matching person is, though!), and honestly, I have an almost impossible time telling the difference.

The Screens
Now that the screenprinter has digital copies of your designs, they can go ahead and make the appropriate screens. While it might be possible for you to provide your own screens, it’s usually a whole lot easier to let the screenprinter make them for you — especially considering that the screens will have to conform to their production processes. There are also a whole host of variables that go into selecting the appropriate screen, so if you don’t know what you’re doing you can easily pick the wrong one.

The Blank Shirts
As for the t-shirts themselves, we had the option of buying shirts from our printer or providing our own. We purchased our blanks from Continental Clothing and had them shipped directly to the printer. Often you will be charged less for printing if you buy your blanks from the printer, and some printers won’t print on customer-supplied blanks. If you are providing your own blanks, be sure to talk to your printer about an acceptable percentage of misprints. Nobody’s perfect, and it will make things much simpler in case something should go wrong. Trust us.

The Printing Process
Since we didn’t print the shirts ourselves, Joe suggested I look for an appropriate and informative online video to fill in the gaps. The best one I came across is a do-it-yourself-er and consequently not an inside look at a business printing shirts in mass quantities. Regardless, it’s entertaining and it offers a general idea of the methods involved. Also, one of the hosts is a member of the perpetually dapper Etsy, which we’ve featured in the past. Take a gander:

The Final ProductOctopus Tree Print
Isn’t it beautiful? Yes. Yes it is.

Well, that’s all for today’s installment of BoaTS. (Joe dropped the initial T during an email conversation. He was right to do it.) Hold on to your pants in anticipation for the subsequent installment: I’m Ready For My Close-Up!

The Birth of a T-Shirt (Culling Chromatic Configurations)

Published
by
John
on September 10, 2007
in Birth of a T-Shirt, Fantastic Bonanza, industry and t-shirts
. 2 Comments

You know the drill: click the respective links to read Parts One, Two, Three, and Four of this hard-hitting investigatory serial.

By this point, the Bonanziers had their line art. The next step? Infuse that bad boy with some colors, of course! Preferably less than five — you gotta keep those production costs in check.

Had we designed Octopus Tree a year ago, we most certainly would have stuck with a single color design since, at that time, we printed all FanBon designs ourselves. With the newfangled advent of “outsourcing,” though, we were able to expand our chromatic palette by a considerable degree and let someone else worry about the grunt work. The only thing standing between us and a fantastic shirt design was the fact that we never really had to worry about color theory before.

As I recall, we decided upon the scheme for Octopus Tree within a single afternoon after fiddling around in Photoshop and Inkscape on a trial and error basis for a while — the three of us hunched in front of our laptops, occasionally glancing at another’s “progress” (usually to say, “No, that’s not it”). Some of the earlier drafts had less chromatic variety than others:


I like to think that Picasso would have approved of the one on the left — even though my only reason for thinking this is that it is blue. Click for bigger pic.

We decided that this was probably not the best route to take. Soon after, we decided to proceed more naturalistically, producing a few images with lots of green and brown:

These didn’t seem quite right, either. I forget who tried it originally, but at one point, we ended up with an octopus tree colored yellow. For whatever reason, it clicked, and we were one step closer to our final destination, though we didn’t know it:

At some point — I don’t remember precisely when — someone must have mentioned Dr. Seuss’s truffula trees. It either informed our final decision or explained why it seemed so appropriate in retrospect:


BEHOLD. KEEP BEHOLDING. FOREVER.

There’s a certain logic to it, really. With a concept as fantastical as an entity that is both octopus and tree, why not use some outlandish hues? Why not, indeed.

That’s the end of today’s installment! Stay tuned for the next one: Let’s All Go To The Printer’s!

The Birth of a T-Shirt (From Paper to Pixels)

Published
by
John
on September 3, 2007
in Birth of a T-Shirt, Fantastic Bonanza, industry and t-shirts
. 1 Comment

Whoa! Whoa! Hold on there! Have you read parts one, two, and three of this series yet? Because you should really do that if you haven’t.

Applying a thin reservoir of black pigment to the processed remains of a dead sapling is all well and good, but how do you go about shoving this modest illustration into the realm of the digital — ethereal, intangible, and forever beyond the humble grasp of the human mind?

Why, Here’s How
Admittedly, the answer isn’t that complicated — though it has the potential to be woefully expensive. At the outset, we considered two options, essentially: A) draw the design with a fancy graphics tablet or B) get a scanner. We opted for option B, although a graphics tablet of some kind would have saved some time.

There’s actually a third option, but we never really pursued it. As these tutorials attest, we could have drawn the darn thing in Inkscape at the outset. I’ve never worked with much other than pens ‘n’ paper, though, so I didn’t (and don’t) imagine that the image would have improved drastically had we pursued that route.

Yakkin’ About Tablets
I haven’t done a whole lot of research regarding different graphics tablets, though I hear a lot of people pining after Wacom’s Cintiq tablet — mainly because holy crap you can draw directly on the screen dude. Personally, I’m torn as to whether I’d prefer using a tablet to draw things as opposed to pens ‘n’ paper. There’s a certain spontaneity with the latter that can be lost if you introduce a technological artifice to the process. Still, there’s less mucking around of the sort I’ll describe shortly. Also, drawing an octopus doesn’t cost $2000 if you use a sketchbook!

The Wonders of Option B
No graphics tablet for the Bonanziers, then. This leaves the mighty Scanner, whose type and quality don’t particularly matter, considering the subsequent step. You see, after we scanned the image, we proceeded to trace the entire image in Inkscape. (You remember Inkscape, don’t you?)

Yakkin’ About Inkscape
Admittedly, laboriously tracing an image in Inkscape also eliminates a great deal of the aforementioned spontaneity. It certainly cleans the image to a supreme degree, though — a crucial fact considering the hefty resolutions necessary for screen printing. And as far as “tracing images vs. buying a tablet” goes, not only is Inkscape freeware, but my brother’s printer/scanner/copier was purchased by someone who is not me. Zero dollars vs. hundreds of dollars — not much of a contest there.

Anyhow, this was my first time tracing images in Inkscape, although Joe had endured the process a year prior when refining The Birthday Party and Mustachio. As you can probably imagine, I didn’t find the process particularly engaging, though an increasing familiarity with hotkeys and the like helped to speed things along.

Marginally Technical Vector Graphics Stuff
If you really want a brief visual summary of the tracing process, feel free to take a quick gander below:

octoinkscp.png

Nodes! Overlay! Substrata!

You can see a few things at work here, though I don’t want to cover the process in too much depth. We imported the original black-and-white scanned image into Inkscape and traced the lines on a new layer with a contrasting color (usually red) set at a lowish opacity (so’s we could see what we were tracing). In this image, the juxtaposition of black and red especially highlights our rearrangement of underground objects. Those gray nodes encircling the octopus essentially tell the computer where a line begins, how it curves, and where it stops. While I managed to trace most of the image with lines of consistent width — a pretty straightforward process — parts of the image, such as the grass, proved to be more complex:

octograss.png

There are so many.

Industry standards would regard the project as relatively simple, surely — not so for someone using this software for the first time. Things turned out pretty well in the end, though.

The End Result
Anyway, after some quantity of time elapsed, we ended up with the image below:

octotree.gif

BEHOLD. For real this time.

Not much content difference between this one and the last one, besides rearranging the junk in the ground and excising the gnarly knot on the tree.

That about sums it up, really. Stick around for our next installment: Culling Chromatic Configurations!

The Birth of a T-Shirt (Onto Paper)

Published
by
John
on August 29, 2007
in Birth of a T-Shirt, Fantastic Bonanza, industry and t-shirts
. 10 Comments

Did you miss Part I and the introduction to this groundbreaking series? Then follow the respective links and be amazed.

So, the legendary Octopus Tree of Oregon had appropriately inspired Joe with an idea for a shirt design. He imparted his insights to me, but I could not quite picture the design Joe had in mind. This forced the Lead Bonanzier to transcribe this ethereal vision with the aid of good ole pen ‘n’ paper:

Joe’s Octopus Tree
In an email correspondence, Joe mentioned that I could “include [the drawing] with a note about how I can’t draw at all” if I were so inclined. So I guess I am.

We had a starting point, then. Some time later — these ideas gestate while the three of us laboriously trawl our way through collegiate bureaucracy (in other words, I’m kind of lazy and use College as a scapegoat) –– I managed to scrawl a few hasty sketches based on Joe’s canonical Starting Point.

Octo-Concepts
Unfortunately, I’m not a Levels whiz, but you get the idea. (Click for bigger pic!)

We all took a liking to the guy in the bottom right, so I spent a little more time whipping up the subsequent drawings, ceremoniously regarded as First and Second Drafts. Things sure are getting official!

Octopus Tree Drafts 1 & 2
Click for Bigger Pic, Yo

Joe and Greg initially remarked that the underground in Draft 1 struck them as somewhat bare. I apparently overcompensated a bit. The first octopus’ kissy-lips promptly elicited cautious disapproval and were consequently excised. It was Joe’s idea to have the octopus tree seize an unsuspecting fowl, though I had some trouble drawing it properly.

Some time passed before I finally sat down and drew the image below — the final iteration of Octopus Tree to appear on paper and the drawing that would serve as the basis for the finished design:

Penultimate Octopus Tree
BEHOLD.

You’ll notice a lack of bird-grabbing. I’m simply not talented enough to have made it work.

We changed the above image slightly before giving it our Final Approval of Decisiveness Felicitating Shirt Production, but this is as appropriate a place as any to conclude this installment of our TBoaT-S series. Hah — TBoats. Anyway, stay tuned for the next chapter in the series: From Paper to Pixels.

The Birth of a T-Shirt (Inspiration)

Published
by
Joe
on August 26, 2007
in Birth of a T-Shirt, Fantastic Bonanza, industry and t-shirts
. 4 Comments

If you don’t know what this is about, you missed the introduction, which you can find here.

Sometimes ideas just come to us. Sometimes we all get together and brainstorm until our brains can storm no more (this happened about a week ago). Sometimes we get inspired by the thoughts and ideas around us. This is a case of inspiration.

On a vacation to the coast of Oregon, I first saw the words ‘Octopus Tree’ on a road sign. Even though it took over a year for me to finally get anything on paper, images of octopus trees percolated in my mind since that first sighting. I can’t really explain why, but this phrase just clicked. That’s the thing about inspiration: it just happens.

The Octopus Tree is pretty cool, but it wasn’t really how I imagined it would look.

Octopus Tree at Cape Meares
image courtesy of Lighthouse Friends

This tree itself could have been a decent model for a t-shirt design, but I chose to think about the phrase ‘Octopus Tree’ itself. After all, if nature made something pretty sweet, couldn’t three Bonanziers make something even more awesome in every way? The answer, hopefully, is yes.

Next: Onto Paper!

The Birth of a T-Shirt (Intro)

Published
by
Joe
on August 22, 2007
in Birth of a T-Shirt, Fantastic Bonanza, industry, meta and t-shirts
. 4 Comments

Here are all the other installments in our Birth of a T-Shirt series:

Well, we at Fantastic Bonanza have decided to do something that we’ve seldom seen done before: follow the process of creating an original t-shirt, from start to finish. Intrigued? We hope so. There should be a goodly number of pictures involved. So stay tuned! The excitement should ensue shortly.

Next: Inspiration!