Flowers of Blood

I created these two designs inspired from the work of Jackson Pollock. Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter and a major force in the abstract impressionistic movement. Since Pollock's work has always polarized critics and has been the focus of many important critical debates, in the same manner, we hope our own work and the mix of the flower theme with the blood stain will also create its own controversy within the t-shirt community. If you find the subject a bit too gory then bookmark the links and you can visit the site again during Halloween! The t-shirts will make excellent gifts. If you like to entertain yourself using the Pollock style of action painting there is an excellent web site where you can paint on screen using your mouse. The outcome is paint splattering. You will find this extremely entertaining and relaxing! http://www.jacksonpollock.org/

Some design tips and ideas

During the past year I have created two squidoo lences ( squidoo is a blogg style community sharing the knowledge of it's individual members ) explaining in detail some of the techniques I use while creating my t-shirt designs. You can visit the following pages for more information about these tutorials and my designs:

• How I make my t-shirt designs.
• Thick and thin lines in Photoshop

These are good methods to start creating clean looking, professional desings and don't forget that these methods can apply to any kind of digital artwork created via Adobe Photoshop, not just t-shirt designs.

Beethoven

I always wanted to make a portrait of Beethoven using just notes to describe the dark and light areas of his face. I tried to see if there was any way that Photoshop could do this automatically, without me having to place each note by hand. I could not find anything that could work this way. I end up using After Effects to achieve what I wanted. After Effects is a compositing program but it has a set of nifty effects , like the Photoshop filters, and one of them, particle playground, was what I needed for my design. I first created nine notes and other musical symbols. Then I created a layer that is a set of many particles, each particle will be a note or musical symbol. In order to arrange the notes and musical symbols in the likeness of Beethoven I used a grayscale public domain picture of Beethoven as a guidance. The filter reads the grayscale values of the image and it randomly places one of the nine notes or symbols in every particle position adjusting the size of the note or symbol according to the grayscale value. White pixels create small notes and black pixels create large notes, with gray values creating the in-between sizes. The image on left is the grayscale image of Beethoven and the image on the right is the output of the effect: If you click on the image it will take you to the various products.

New Japanese Style Design

Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai was distinguished for the variety of his styles, his extraordinary technical excellence, and his observant delineation of contemporary life. His landscapes reveal a startling imagination and a dramatic sense of composition. One of his most famous pieces of his woodcut work is the "Behind the Great Wave at Kanagawa". You can see the original piece at this image:

Since Hokusai’s work dates to the 19th century his images don’t carry a copyright. Hokusai’s work has inspired many artist in many styles including animation. It is said that the waves in Disney’s Pinocchio’s wale sequence have been inspired from this same piece or artwork! In this case I have used his basic layout and replaced the foam with little skulls. I created 3 different skull brushes in photoshop and I used them in a scattering mode. I used the original piece as an under layer to follow as close as possible the foam formations. I also tried to keep close to the original colors and tones but I also added a grain to make the image look old. The skulls as well as the pirate ship in the back were an inspiration from the 2007 summer movie “Pirates of the Caribbean-At word’s end”. When I exit the theater I felt the two pieces could work well together.

Click on the picture to see the design in various products.

A Big Thumbs Up to Katrina!

The Teeteaser team is very proud to announce that its main blog writer and big supporter of Teeteaser's work, Katrina, is being honored today by the Blogger Team. Her personal t-shirt blog "T-shirts Around the Internet" just became the "Blog of Note" at the Blogger! This is huge Katrina! Congrats! We are proud and lucky to have you in our team... Love, The Teeteaser Team
www.teeteaser.com