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More bleached T-Shirts

All > Fashion > Clothing > More bleached T-Shirts by tsmaster

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Continuing to draw inspiration from jesse, brenda, sykora, and aliya, I did a second batch of shirts, burning through my pile of new shirts.

This time, I used some fancier imagery, requiring the use of adhesive. I used 3M spray adhesive, and got good stickiness, but the nozzle velocity was way too high - it blew a number of the smaller pieces off the counter. So I ended up using a glue stick for the blue shirt (below).

I consider this a mixed success - I'm psyched to have a cake shirt, and the teapot pleases me. The other two aren't all bad, but they didn't quite turn out as I expected.

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The Utah Teapot, a classic from computer graphics. To make this, I fired up an OpenGL Shading Language demo program, which has the teapot amongst its selectable models. I took a screenshot, printed it out on regular printer paper, cut out the pieces (two pieces, easy!) and used the 3M spray adhesive. I was going to follow sykora's suggestion of letting the adhesive dry for 15 minutes, but I was worried that the pieces would end up gluing themselves to what they were resting on, so I stuck them on the shirt pretty much right away. I had no problems getting them off again after the spraying.

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This is imagery from the "Portal" game by Valve.

To get this, I grabbed a screenshot ingame, cleaned the screenshot up quite a bit, printed it out on cardstock, and used spray adhesive.

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A stylized wizard logo of my own design.

I already had this artwork in a number of formats. There were many small pieces here, and the use of the red shirt didn't work as well as I had hoped. I ended up using a lot of bleach, which meant that the printer paper I used got soaked, which led to seepage around the edges. It almost looks like a "fire" effect, which isn't what I was going for, but it's not bad.

Like aliya, I wasn't entirely happy with the effect of the bleach on the red shirt. I might try again with a simpler design, or I might hold out for a darker red that might afford greater contrast when bleached.

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An eye.

This one took the most work, and it's almost as good as I hoped for. The intended effect is a sort of "half toned" eye.

The subject matter is a picture of an eye that I cropped to a circular shape in Photoshop. I proceeded to downsample it to a small number of pixels in height, which I would use for my fake "raster" lines. I converted to greyscale, and saved this image out. I then wrote a small Python program to open this weird image up and convert each horizontal slice of the image into a varying-width line, which I wrote out to a PDF file, and sent to my printer on cardstock.

By this point, I was frustrated with the spray adhesive, so I found some glue sticks in the cupboard - I think the last project I used glue sticks for was 9 years ago, so at least one of them had dried to glue stick jerky. But I found a good glue stick, and it did a great job of holding the narrow slivers in place.

I knew that lining them up would be important to get the emergent image correct, so I printed out another version of the pattern (this time onto normal printer paper) as a positioning template. I folded the paper along the horizontal center of the pattern, which allowed me to lay the slivers down on the positioning template on the left side and let the glue affix to the shirt on the right side. After I had placed all the slivers, I removed the template, and applied extra adhesive to each sliver on their left sides, which worked much better than I expected.

As sykora had suggested, if you've got long, narrow details, you're going to want to use heavy paper, and you're going to want to use adhesive. This design proved that to me most of all - without the adhesive, these slivers would have been impossible to position, and they were curling up to a great degree before I put them on the shirt.

As I was cutting out the slivers, I was unsure if the emergent image would be viewable at all, or if the details would be lost between my less-than-perfect scissorwork, or if the bleach process would destroy them. I'm pleased to discover that I can see the design, but I know what I'm looking for. I'd be interested to read in the comments if you see the eye, too.

If you need help, the eyebrow is visible(?) at the top of the circle, the iris and pupil are the darkest part, a little to the left of center, and about a quarter the height of the total circle. The white of the eye is to the right of the iris (not surprising), and there's a dark upper and lower eyelash line surrounding the iris and the white.

I'm betting people will look at it close up and think it's an AT&T logo.

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EDIT:

This is the source for the eye pattern.

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