Underground Printing Campaign Tees
These shirt designs were created for various campaigns, read more in each section to learn about my thought process.
Rise Up!; The Teen Project
This design was created for a charity drive to support The Teen Project, which helps support young women who have aged out of the foster system. This charity started because of the story of a Lauri Burns, a woman who was failed by the foster care system and rose up from rock bottom, then made it her mission to take care of girls in the same situations.
They wanted a simple and inspirational design to showcase their charity.
I went with the idea of flowers growing up in the cracks of pavement, growing there despite all of the challenges that face them. These women fell through the cracks of the system, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t grow strong or bloom brightly.
The flowers I chose were carnations, which symbolize love, bravery, and strength, and the iris which symbolize hope. I put the logo of the charity in the background because it reminds me of a starburst, and looks like arms raising up, a low key reminder of what the charity drive was for, but not garishly so.
Kinky Boots!
Be Who
This broadway musical has had many interesting musical leads throughout the years, Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters, Brendon Urie of Panic! At The Disco, and Tyler Glenn of Neon Trees. I’ve never seen it myself but I know that there is one iconic pair of red thigh high boots.
You Want
The prompt was very open ended, just giving a few lyrics and quotes as inspiration. Reading the synopsis on Wikipeida helped give me an idea about how the musical was finding yourself, and commonality with your fellow man. We all walk different paths but the same flowers grow along everyones path.
To Be.
I wanted my design to showcase the iconic boots and feature one of the more simple lines from the musical. Sometimes it can take a while for you to figure out who you are, but its never too late to be who you want to be!
Purdue Wildlife Society
Starting Point
This shirt design was for the Purdue University Wildlife Society and came through our system as a standard order. This was the supplied art that the customer wanted to recreate similarly, as they created the concept with found stock images.
I picked up this job because I love to work on orders with animals on them, especially birds, and identifying the animals exactly is part of the fun of it. The animals included on the shirt are; the American Badger, a Great Horned Owl, a Red Fox, a Field Mouse, a Northern Bobwhite Quail, a Swallowtail Butterfly, an American Bullfrog, and the Common Snapping Turtle, all North American Species.
Final Outcome
Upon seeing this design the customer responded with this “…since this is The Wildlife Society, they can identify every animal on this shirt to species. I was very relieved to see you still have a bobwhite quail (the bird) and a native species of butterfly on the shirt, so pass along my compliments to the artist. ”
What a great compliment because when I work on shirts, especially ones with specific animals or bird species on them, I try to pay attention to the little details that make the design unique or special to the customer. Identifying birds is one of those outside skills that rarely comes in handy at work, but it sure is satisfying to see that it does matter!
For the whole design to work cohesively, instead of just looking like stock art slapped on a shirt, I worked hard to find woodcut images of each of the animals to layer into the design. For the pond and trees I had to remove a meadow and bridge that was worked into the background of the original woodcut image to make room for the animals on top. I also added vertical lines to mimic the style of these wood cut images to bring the design together as a whole.
Just Be You Campaign
For this design the art studio was tasked with creating exclusive campaign shirts for the a charity drive to meet Darius Rucker, lead singer and rhythm guitarist for Hootie & The Blowfish, and supporting his wife’s charity called Just Be You .
Just be You is a group focused on helping adolescences and young adults to understand and implement self-esteem and self-compassion through meditations in a safe space, joined by skilled, knowledgeable, caring leaders.
The prompt didn’t give us much to go off of, just that we could use the charity logo, and that they would prefer to have something that tied into Darius Rucker. I came up with a design that capitalized on Darius Rucker’s tour with Lady Antebellum that you could win tickets to attend with your donation. I kept it simple by highlighting the key performers names that would be more recognizable to fans, but also made sure to include the logo and name of the charity organization as part of the design.
Green Dot Stables
Slider joint with a chill vibe serves bite-sized eats with global flavors & bottled beers.
For the design I wanted to mimic a vintage beer bottle label.
Angels In America:
A Gay Fantasia on National Themes
A two-part play by American playwright Tony Kushner, Angels in America is a complex, often metaphorical, and at times symbolic examination of AIDS and homosexuality in America in the 1980s. Certain major and minor characters are supernatural beings (angels) or deceased persons (ghosts).
Reference Wikipedia
I have only read a synopsis for this play, but instantly a design to represent it came to me. The pink triangle has been a symbol for various Queer identities, initially intended as a detrimental marker of homosexuality and other “sexually deviant” crimes by the Nazis during World War Two, it has been reclaimed by the LGBTQIA+ community as a positive symbol. The pink triangle was used extensively during the 1970’s and 1980’s during gay protests and became an iconic symbol of the movement from that era. The symbol was also used in AIDS protests in the late 1980’s.
Combining the Pink Triangle with a woodcut of an angel of victory showcases the title and characters of the play, Angels in America.
