Before's and After's

I've had this shirt for a LONG time. I think I got it when I was 18. I loved this shirt. Mainly for that stupid monkey, the "clever" message was always funny and struck up convo, but I think now, I don't want people touching the monkey on the shirt, or any other meaning for "monkey" they can think of. So it was either going to become a new shirt or a coaster....

Here it is. Number one monkey, Ichiban!

This is a shirt Sarah picked up many moons ago, when I first said I wanted to start doing shirts for other people. I opened the doors and said bring me some shirts, I want the practice. Well I forgot about it, and now found it in the famous shirt stock pile. So I decided to do it.

Here it is after. I carried over the Number one symbols just because they were on my desk, and the rest was quickly cut inspirations from the shirt itself. Kinda bummed that I accidentally hid the cat.. but he's in there. I like all the giant Doris Day faces though, that's neat. Came out really collage looking, and I hope sarah likes it. If she doesn't, I'll eat it.

Bamboo

I found a shirt my size in the shirt stock pile, in my room. So this one is for me.

If I felt like doing the bleaching again, I'd have the bamboo go to the back of the shirt as well.

I felt it needed at least one more element, so I added 2 bright blue circles, painted sort of "rough".
That's house paint :)

Shell Shirt, Black n' Bleach

Well I'm back to doing Bleach. Last night I was going through some areas of the home where things piled up, and found my "stock" of shirts. So I started doin stuff.

Originally this shell shirt was to be a shirt for Ross. Then we realized it was much bigger than the size he wears, so I posted it up for sale on etsy.

and it sold in two hours!!!
Crazy..
I've done 3 shell shirts now. This was the first, but I liked the design so much, I did one for Ross and then one for me....

Blue Octopus

This is a shirt that was picked up at a thrift store. It was two dollars. It is brown and blue, and neat. But it didn't have any thing of interest, and the pattern was just kind of... boring. So, I like brown and blue together, so I added a blue octopus. He is cool. I added the tricycle logo on the back shoulder, but I don't know if i want to keep that anymore. what the hell am i going to call the shirts? and when will I stop keeping them?

Chocolat-ay

This is a shirt i re-did. I felt it looked fine before, but I only bought it for the white sleeve stripes, and it was like 4 bucks. Clearance rack style. However, I have nothing to do with basketball, even remotely, nor Staten Island. I thought, who cares, right? like anyone cares.

no,

this shirt, for some reason, begs people to inquire. Do you play basketball? Are you from Staten Island? And when I tell them no, they are just... totally thrown off.

So i said, let's ditch this bitch. So we covered it here and there, and let the old shirt show through just a little bit, as a reminder that it used to be something else.

Above is the shirt before surgery. Brittany asked me to do a little diddy for her daddy, and she said he really enjoys cacti right now. So, I went that route.

I tried to bleach those rays in, but I quickly learned that it's not cotton. woopsy poopsy.

splashed paint helped. This is the front.

This is the back.

Sea Urchins?

Shirt Two for last week-how productive! I had this lavender button up that I had been meaning to do something with for about 2 years. I wouldn't normally wear lavender, unless it had something kind of neat on it.

I tried to make this into a shirt that had a few sea urchins. I wanted something simple, just sea urchins silouhettes. Well after cutting the stencils and painting the first one, I realized that this more looked like I had been attacked with a paintball gun, or a 1950's comic book fight scene. Instead of fighting it, I went with it, and just made an interesting pattern/design out of it.

I will try again to make a sea urchin shirt one day, but I think I will just make the image in photoshop, and pass it on to a print shop for silk screening. Detail is pretty hard in stencil and airbrush, but damn it.. I want an urchin shirt!

Hope you likey

Space Ants

OK today I did a shirt modification. this is a shirt that I have had for a while. Someone once told me that it reminded them of a picnic blanket. It used to be a favorite of mine, but I just kind of "wore" it out... ar ar ar. So I gave it some new life, and put these space ants on it. The picnic comment gave me the idea for doing ants. Originally it was just going to be tiny ants, like a trail of ants, going towards some food somewhere. Maybe i'll do that on some other picnic blanket shirt- god knows there are plenty. Anyway, space ants are more fun and gave me a chance to make those little helmets. Which was my absolute favorite part of this shirt. Here are the before and afters.

Shamrocks, Clovers, and Crickets

So yes, a little late for ye old St. Patrick's Day, but I've wanted to do something for this shirt for a while. It had to be green. A few years back, when I lived in the quaint town of San Jose, my roomates and I hosted a drunken ball for the celebration of Saint Patrick. The house looked like a bar, and many many people came. Well, I wanted something green to wear, but felt like wearing something more than a polo, or a t-shirt. So I wore this shirt, because it has green stripes. Certainly not impressively green, but it was technically green, and that was enough to save me from harassment. Now, this shirt, not only has several kinds of green, but it has four leaf clovers for luck, shamrocks - are they lucky? and crickets. The crickets are my favorite :)

Gingko Bilobo-o-o

Well, I guess I made another shirt finally. What's interesting, is that I wanted a ginkgo bilobo shirt for a while, and then when my younger brother Daniel passed away, the school he went to planted a gingko for him. Isn't that interesting? So now, it is his tree, and i have a shirt covered in it's leaves.

I think this took me about 2 hours, and 3 shots of vodka, chased with heineken. It feels good to be doing shirts again, I'd forgotten them :)

Or this one

Or do you think this one is better, with the windows? Those are the actual windows.

Shirt number ONE!

SO! This is it. I'm going to start doing shirts a little differently than I originally planned. Though I still plan on doing (and selling!) my one by one stencil shirts, I want to do some mass productions since the others take soooo long! So, these I will be able to affordably sell them at an affordable price. Hooray! So, soon I will be printing this image onto navy blue t-shirts. The ink will actually only be the yellow sun. I was going to make about 12 of them, but depending on how much money I have, I may make more. I think they look pretty neat. The picture this was all taken from, is from a picture that I took of the lighthouse for the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce, which is now on their tourist map thing. Hope there isn't any copyright probs hahaha just kidding... it's my picture. So, any comments, suggestions, complaints? Hahaha..
As soon as it's all set up, the shirts will be soon ala a store that i'm doing in collaboration with Ross and Sarah and anyone else, called Tricycle Tees.
www.tricycletees.etsy.com

Pontiac GTO

This was around Christmas, and I painted this GTO on a red shirt for Pamela, who owns a GTO. I used a stencil that I cut from a photo. Printed two copies, one got the details, the other was just the outline of the car, so that I could do that neat fadey sprayey effect. I don't normally do that, but I like how it came out, and it's another way to show the border on something. With stencil it can be really tricky since you need to keep everything connected to one sheet of paper.
Here it is!