My apologies for what look like extremely in-fashion jeans. The "stress" in them is actually holes from wearing them every day and riding a bike - I didn't buy them like - they're just the only pair of jeans I really have.
I know it looks glamourous, but when I was passed out in an alley-way with the shirt on, later that night, I felt anything but.
And I couldn't find anyone yet to model these shirts - maybe I'll try to sell them, or punt them off to friends, if I can find anyone that wants them-
Senior Friends:
Helena's Angels Dance Academy:
These t-shirts were all made using parts of designs of t-shirt screens that I picked up in Thorton, Colorado of all places, one day. I bought them by the truck-load - $5/each. They're all from a screen printing business that was sold and 300 of the 900 or so screens they had were being sold off. I picked up around 60 of them.
Some of them are really beat up and I haven't needed to reclaim all of them yet - a lot of them are still covered in Plasticine screen print ink, which is a bear to get off and extremely sticky, old tape, which is even harder. So, they sit on my tables, for a while
The other day, I bought some t-shirts - a few $3 shirts from the thrift store and a few shirts from American Apparrel - THAT bill come to over $100 (#$%&^%#!!!) and I took them to my studio to print.
I had the idea to do collages from all the old designs - some of these original designs are just too golden to pass up and I started making a simple, one-color t-shirt press for this job.
Before that, I've been literally, stealing a board from somewhere - large enough to fit a t-shirt over - but not any larger and I'd put that t-shirt/board on the ground and just sort of, eye-up the design with the shirt and have someone else press down on the screen, over the shirt/board as I squeegeed the design on. I'm not really one for special techniques...
The t-shirt press I made wasn't too much more than two boards (shelves really - the kind with that slick white coating), around 16 inches wide attached by a 2 x 4, also 16 inches wide on one side, so you could slip a shirt on one side, and attach to hinges to the other and be able to bring up and down your screen onto the shirt.
I was getting pretty near to finishing my little crafty endeavor and I thought I was pretty damn smart for making such a simple little thing -
when I realized, it wasn't going to work with what I wanted to do with this project. You see, the designs on these screens aren't in any sort of logical place and I was going to put them on the shirts, well, wherever the hell I wanted and the wiggle room my little press (and any t-shirt press, really), was going to be measured in sixteenths of an inch. I needed feet. Fuck.
In a stroke of dumb luck, I realized, that if I don't attach the hinges to the bottom board of my press, but rather on the table, I could have a solid and stable place to put my screen, and the press itself could be completely mobile - all I had to do was find the perfect place to put the press underneith where the screen would be dropped down and I could put the design that could be anywhere on the screen, anywhere on the shirt.
This worked really well. It was also extremely time-consuming and my entire day, including making the press, yielded only three completely unique shirts. Ha.
One of the problems is that for each design I put on, I had to clean off the screen and the squeegee, put back the unused ink, dry the shirt and clean up the area on and around the table enough, so when I move everything, I'm not inadvertently putting ink where no ink belongs. That first shirt is screened front and back, with six different colors and seven different designs. Talk about an insanely fun thing to do. Going this slow - a pace that would bleed a professional screen printer is somewhat a way to meditate. I didn't necessary plan any of these designs - I just lined the screens up against a wall, lined my inks on a table and went, "hmm..." and fifteen minutes later, another part of a design was on another shirt.
I also gave up the idea of getting these designs aligned just so perfectly, since you can't see the shirt well underneath the screen you're going to line up and my hinges are really shaky and lame and it's just best to give up some anal-retentiveness and pop a color down.
A lot of screen printing is involved with the craft of getting a good registration of the designs separate colors onto the shirt well. This couldn't ever be a goal, since none of these designs belonged with each other. There was no wrong way - everything could just be accidental. You also really only have one chance to do it - there's no easy, "undo" in printing like this.
I know at least, I'm heavily absorbed in a world of computers with multiple levels of undo's and histories, version control systems, branches, forks and backup copies saved on disks, tapes, DVD's, CD's and printed out. Making one of a kind collage from tools that were invented to facilitate the mass production of an item is certainly an interesting idea.
I'll have to say one of my greatest influences for making these shirts was from Ryan Wheelbarrow's (We_RD f_Ck_R) designs - and a shirt I bought from him, a very very long time ago. His designs, though are more deconstructive than mine, I obviously tried to make sense and create relationships from the collages images and the collages words - perhaps to a fault. I think Ryan is also a lot more free in how he manipulates and uses the screens. He also takes far more drugs than I do and hangs out with many more pretty women.
