This is a T-shirt that I designed and screen printed for a friend’s birthday. This isn’t the actual shirt, but another one with the same design.
I had a hard time coming up with what I wanted to put on the shirt. I had the vague idea that I would do something with tentacles. I tried at first to draw a picture similar to this, but I just couldn’t get it to look right.
One of my main problems was that the difference between the monster and the page was unclear. On a screen print you can only use two colors. The color of the shirt, and the color of the ink. So in order to make things look like different colors you have to use some sort of alternating pattern.
My first solution was to draw stripes for a background, but while this works just fine on a page, on a shirt the stripes wouldn’t cover the whole thing, and it would look weird. So I put a border around the stripes, which sort of worked, but the idea was that the monster was coming out of the shirt, not out of a wall. The final solution, suggested by my mom, was to make the monster have the pattern, not the background. So, after going through a long and complicated process in order to only get the dots where I wanted them, I was able to shade the monster.
When I was working on this picture I titled the file for it “squidipus shirt pattern” and the name I mentally assigned the creature was “squidipus.” This is a name which I use for tentacled monsters in general, and is not a cross between a squid and an octopus as it sounds.
katieconradart 