Their founder Chaz explains the design…

The idea for the occultist design has been around since I started Vicious History in early 2012. My vision for the piece was to capture ideas and symbols of 19th and 18th century American heritage and combine that with bold graphic styles. Matthew Skiff designed the artwork and I think that he was the perfect man for the job. He has a very clean style which features large areas of bold, solid colors.

This design is somewhat connected to shirt we had printed from a previous release called Scholars & Thieves. The Scholars & Thieves design was sort of a crest/logo for an imaginary club I envisioned for Vicious History. A private gentleman club for the historical elite from all walks of life, both good and evil. The Occultist is my vision for what a member of the Scholars & Thieves would look like. If you look closely at the design, you will notice some symbols that directly represent the Scholars & Thieves, including a monogram “S&T” brooch. At the bottom of the design, there are roman numerals representing the year 1891, which represents the founding year of the Scholars & Thieves. The Scholar & Thieves is a concept that will continue to evolve further down the road as we release new goods and products. For instance, later this year we plan to do a Scholars & Thieves membership patch for denim jackets.

Thanks goes to Chaz for explaining his design. You can see more Vicious History designs at their store

The creative director (who also designed this issue) at T-Post tells us more……

“The story I had to illustrate for T-Post was about piracy in the music and film industry. I wanted to design something with a clear retro touch so I played around the VHS phenomenon and the movies I was collecting when I was a kid.

At the time of this drawing I was quite tired of working with my computer so I decided to take some time off the screen and draw with my pencils. I can’t describe myself as a great illustrator with outstanding skills. I am more like a painter who needs to compose the still life he wants to reproduce on canvas. So I bought old VHS movies (including an original Star Wars Trilogy) and a tape player in a second hand boutique. I made a composition on a table and started drawing with my pencil. After that I did the inking with black pens even though my idea was to
print the t-shirts with blue.

As the artwork was on an A3 paper I had to take a shot with my camera instead of scanning which I think it was a good choice because that shot was keeping the original flavor of the hand drawing better that a scanner can do. Then I did some retouching on Photoshop like for example with the Highlander label where I accidentally wrote the name of Mel Gibson as part of the cast when of course he wasn’t.”

The guys at T-Post also kindly provided us with a step by step process of their T shirt making process…

Checking The Placement

Printing The T shirt

Frame detail

The dried T shirt

T shirt test print done

Final T shirt

Many thanks to the guys at T-Post for sharing their processes with us!

Usually when I create something that isn’t illustration based, it could involve anything from elements of designs I haven’t finished, sketches, vector shapes or even photos I’ve taken. I tend to do these types of designs after a long illustration. It’s taking a break while still being creative and having some fun. This turned out to be a better example of that process and while I don’t have a formula for doing this kind of work, it always begins with an element I think would make a good foundation for a design composition. In this case a diamond shaped navajo pattern…

I had been experimenting with Native American symbols and imagery for a while in some illustrations, and had planned to do something with textile patterns, however the initial idea for this one came while watching the movie, “Dumb and Dumber”. Jim Carrey’s character was wearing a shirt that really stood out to me. I really dug the colours and thought to do something with it. I had seen the movie before, but wasn’t paying attention I guess…I thought to give it a go and if it worked out, could maybe have a cool design, if not I would chalk it up as another experiment to possibly mine for future use.

At the time I had a couple of WIPs to pool from and thought to try some of the elements in it with the diamond shape. After rotating the design 90 degrees, I added elements from a Work in Progress called “Four Winds”. From this point I felt pretty good about the main elements. That isn’t to say anyone of them could be taken away. One bad habit of mine is I get stuck on an element and it’s hard to let it go. Looking at the screen for so long sometimes I stop seeing what to others may be an obvious design solution.

I took a break from the design and came back to it thinking the moons looked out of place outside of the diamond shape. I still liked the animal silhouettes and the landscape background but thought the contour lines didn’t go well with the textured surroundings. At this point, I’m moving things around and trying different arrangements within the main shape.

I experiment a lot and I was on a splatter brush kick for a little bit and really liked the look they give. It’s very much like stippling and I usually mask out areas for this cool effect. The outside angular fades were done by making a shape with the pen tool and coloring one corner edge with a splatter brush. The rest of the piece was completed by building on the elements as well as adding the fade to compliment the diamond shape. Also towards the end I like to add final textures using a combination of ones I made and free texture brushes.

From there, it was a matter of finding the right color scheme. On simpler color counts I try as many color ways as I can think of. After starting this one and working on it off and on over the course of a few weeks. I had almost forgotten the movie shirt so it was a cool coincidence the final color way was similar to it.

When this design won at Threadless I was super thrilled! It’s one of my favorite designs and it was awesome one of my experiments finally succeeded! I think the end result is a very wearable tee and still feel that way after receiving the shirt and seeing the print in person. Threadless did an awesome job with the print.

Big thanks to Jorge Garza aka Qetza for sharing his creative process with us and showing how inspiration can come from the most random places. You can see more of his work at his work here.

If you are a T shirt designer and would like to share your work with our readers please drop us a line with a link to your work.

“Matt from Bad News Boards contacted me earlier this year and said that they wanted to work with me. I heard about them before and I really like the decks and shirts that Killer Napkins made for them. So I was already excited about this project because I knew they are into weird surreal illustrations. They liked some of my previous designs for High Five! Clothing and Artanky and were looking for something like that. So I combined a few things and showed them this sketch:

They loved it and they gave me a lot of creative freedom for this project. I started working on the linework in Manga Studio and changed some parts of the design along the way. And this is how the outlines turned out:

I always try to do as much work as possible in Manga Studio before I make the switch to Photoshop to color everything. So I added a lot of layers for the textured parts, the tattoos, the blood drops and the shading. This can get a little bit complicated and my files are usually pretty messy at this point but everything I drew will make sense in the end.

I cleaned everything up, made sure everything overlaps the way I wanted it to and then it was time to add colors. My first color option was something on a mint colored background. I made around 5 different other versions so that they had something to choose from. The mint one wasn’t very popular and they also wanted to stay away from using pink. So we ended up using a blue/red version on a white shirt and a yellow/purple version on a grey shirt.”

Big thanks to Nils aka NVasion who took some time out to share his process with us. You can view more of Nils’s work over at his rather cool portfolio – www.nvasion.net.

If you are a T shirt designer and would like to share your work with our readers please drop us a line with a link to your work.

“I was approached by Scott, the creator of The Select Few Clothing, after he came across some of my previous work. Scott is an avid Photographer so he wanted to capture that in his first design. We discussed his idea of creating a large graphic for a t-shirt that would portray a DSLR Camera that would look like it’s hanging around the wearers neck. Once we agreed on some fundamental points for the design I started the process by collecting several pictures of different DSLRs to choose the best fitting perspective for the camera. After looking through a lot of Images, I found that it would be best if I just took several pictures of my own Canon 7D to get the exact perspective I was going for.

Once that was done I created a quick digital sketch to show off the perspective and in which direction I’m taking the design in to Scott.

After he approved it, I contemplated in which style to render this piece in. I decided to go with an etched look, with a lot of hard shadows. As you can see in the details, I represented different shadow values with varying the frequency of horizontal lines.

To achieve greater depth in the design I painted over with a very low opacity feathered brush (that I later halftoned) and added a hint of texture.

After that was done, I focused on putting his brand name into the camera’s cap with hand lettered typography, along with the finishing touches that include highlights and initials on the body and the strap.

The final colour scheme was chosen by me, which pleased Scott, so I separated the design for the printing process and sent him the final file.”

Big thanks to Serji for taking time to share his creative process with us. Hailing from Toronto, Canada, Serji runs his own brand, Dream Gold full-time with his girlfriend, while doing freelance graphic design on the side. You can view more of Serji’s work at his portfolio – SerjiGold or contact him at SerjiGold@gmail.com if you would like to work together.”

If you are a T shirt designer and would like to share your work with our readers please drop us a line with a link to your work.

Matty from VF gives us the full lowdown on the concept behind the Propaganda T shirt design…

“Propaganda” is a t-shirt designed to uplift the nostalgic past of the 1960’s and 1970’s where individuals couldn’t go a day without reading, “the city of tomorrow”, “the transportation of tomorrow”, or “the world of tomorrow.” This constant reminder through media spawned an era of dreamers and thinkers. We currently live in the product of those dreamer’s inventions and imaginations.

As the smartest mammals on the planet, I think it is beyond crucial for humanity to embrace technological progression and use its exponential growth curves to usher in a new era of health, prosperity, and galactic evolution. Supporting space exploration not only brings our species to new worlds, but we progress so much further in the process via breakthroughs in STEM fields: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. The only problem is that politics present a heavy burden to our space program. With recent budget cuts to NASA, the U.S. Government continues to dig its own grave as we halt the advancement of not only science, but also the entire well being of mankind. As natural resources continue to deplete, it is only a matter of time before the U.S. is forced to revert to a time similar to the sputnik revolution.

On a global scale, I believe nation’s should be collaborating and institutionalizing a forward movement of science on a level that is awe-inspiring and positive for the public to accept. The name of the shirt is in fact, ironic, and used as a parody of popular media exploited by governments to communicate with the masses.

Ultimately, the goal of this design is to simply make the fan feel positive about our future and all of the potential that coexists within our imaginations. For VF, there is a heavy visionary importance placed over any monetary standard. When fans buy a shirt, I want them to feel like they’ve donated to a cosmic charity within themselves more so than, “Awesome, I just bought a sweet design.” If I can connect with fans on that level of emotion, I consider my mission successful! ”

Thanks to Matty for explaining the design to us! You can view more T shirts from the VF Clothing store

If you are a T shirt designer and would like to share your work with our readers please drop us a line with a link to your work.

“All of my designs are pretty much hand drawn, so I always start with a loose sketch. I usually don’t get too precious over getting everything exactly right at this stage. I then fix the sketch up bit by bit and once I’m 100 percent happy I then take it to the inking stage.”

“I use a dip pen for all the line work. Sometimes I’ll edit the line work in Illustrator, but in this case I was pretty happy with how the original drawing looked so I left it how it was.”

“Once in Photoshop I spend ages trying to figure out a colour scheme. Getting the colours right is what I usually spend the most time doing in the whole process, although sometimes I’ll have a good idea of what kind of colours I want to use during my initial sketch / inking stage. But thats pretty rare.”

Hi Tony. Thanks for sharing your sketches and design process with us. Where did the inspiration for this T shirt design come from?

I remember the night I got the idea for this design I was at a friends house playing Street Fighter (even though I’m terrible at it)! Anyway I always wanted to do something based around the phrase “Fight Or Flight” but didn’t really know what to do with it. A lot of ideas I get are completely out of the blue, but once that idea popped in my head I knew it was something I wanted to make a design out of.

Whats your usual illustration process?

Usually I draw a bunch of really crappy rough sketches over and over again. The first thing I try to get right is the general composition of the piece, all the little details and stuff come later. Sometimes my design ideas just come from improvised doodles I do in my spare time.

Is designing for a T shirt any different from other mediums?

When it comes to T-shirt design my perspective is that anything goes, as long as it looks good of course.

Which stores do you usually sell and buy your T shirts from?

Most T-shirt designs that I’ve done are for small independent brands, so most are just sold online rather than in big stores (apart from my Threadless print). When it comes to buying tees I go for a lot of different styles, but most of the ones I have are from Upper Playground, whenever there’s a sale on chances are I’m down there.

Which other t shirt designers do you dig?

it’s hard for me to pick a particular favourite to be honest, but I’m a sucker for a cool character based tee, anything with a mascot of some sort.

Are you going to start a label one day?

Its always been at the back of my mind, but at the same time I always feel like a lot of the ideas I have might be too strange for people to actually wear. Most of my designs submitted on Threadless are completely different from “Fight Or Flight” which is a pretty mainstream idea compared to most of the stuff I do.

What sort of person will wear this t shirt and why?

I have no idea, but anybody who is wearing it is cool with me!

Big thanks to Tony for talking to us and sharing his T shirt design process. You can see more of Tony’s work over at www.behance.net/TonyRiff and www.flickr.com/photos/tonyriff/

If you are a T shirt designer and would like to share your work with our readers please drop us a line with a link to your work.

“When i was asked to create a t-shirt design for Admirals Arms i was very excited. the bass player Matthew Rigg and I are friends and we had talked about putting a merch design together in the past so it was great to finally get the opportunity.

This t-shirt was designed for the recent “evil-tiger-vulture tour” which featured Norma Jean. The Chariot, Dead and Divine and lastly Admirals Arms; with such an impressive line up i knew i had to do something that represented me as an artist and looked fantastic and bold from a distance. Matt and I had talked about a sold out print i had previously released and how he loved the aesthetic of the type and wanted to push for a similar style in the Admirals Arms piece. Aside from that I had free reign to do something cool.

I loosely themed the design around an autumnal/woodland/lumberjack theme but wanted to focus more on the composition rather than the storytelling. Keeping the composition as a loose shield shape helps it sit comfortably on a body and looks aesthetically pleasing. All of my t-shirt designs begin their adventurous life as pencil sketches on paper. Once I’ve worked up something I am happy with I often take a trace of the basic line-work off the top in order to show the client as clear of a “plan” as possible which I scan in and email to do so. At this point we work out if anything is working well and if anything needs changing or adding to. I added some red arrows and pointers to indicate places where I would change things or at least intend to.

Luckily this sketch was totally approved from the outset so I was able to move onto the next stage: Inking. I ink all of my drawings traditionally on a type of translucent paper called Velum using a variety of pens and brushpens and inks. I feel its important to retain a hand generated line quality in my work despite being able to draw competently digitally. The image shows the inks scanned in and cleaned up in Photoshop, ideally I want a stark black and white image at this stage as I intend to pull the line-work onto its own layer in Photoshop. I do this by going to select Color Range then pipette the black. Once selected I open up a new layer and fill the selection with black.

From here it is a simple case of painting under this layer. We decided to go for a two color print on a black t-shirt and went with a creme and blue print (as was Matt’s request). The image below shows the two layers that would be printed and it is important to make sure that you Pantone reference your layers if they are to be screen printed. These two are: 600C and 3245c.

The next image shows the design set up on a black background. Notice the type in the bottom banner says France 2012, we decided to alter this at the last minute to “Chapters Unfold” as you can see on the final print.

Additionally Matt and I had decided to also try and re-purpose the design as a limited edition tour poster that would be taken on the tour. For this i needed to add in some more drawings, and amongst other additions two of them were my old favorite…skulls. By adding these elements into the design the composition became more rounded and a tour poster was born

I had the opportunity to meet up the guys in Admirals Arms on the Sheffield date of the tour and got to see the shirts in the flesh. The print came out fantastic and i was super happy with the entire project.”

Big thanks to Craig Robson – a designer and illustrator from England. You can contact him at tattoowings@hotmail.com if you are interested in working with him.

If you are a T shirt designer and would like to share your work with our readers please drop us a line with a link to your work.

Read about how this T shirt design was created from the designer himself…

“Free To Ride was originally inspired by and designed for a Threadless contest sponsored by Chrome, the producer of exceptional messenger bags. The goal was to create a tee inspired by urban bike culture. I discovered the contest just after moving into a tiny apartment in the heart of Boston, Massachusetts, where my treasured bike commute to work of the previous year was no longer necessary. Desperately deprived of 2 wheels, I had to give Threadless a shot. I wanted to create a badge emulating those people who I pedaled alongside everyday, navigating the endlessly unpredictable maze of cars, pedestrians and intersections, and were happier for it.

After many sketches, slogans and text treatment concepts, I arrived at “Free to Ride”. It seemed appropriate as it encapsulated a variety of themes: the sustainability and exhilaration of the experience, the steadfast cyclist attitude, and even a mild innuendo. I wanted the graphic to be bold, visually rich and worn in.

With the sketch in hand I gathered a variety of source images for style, inspiration and reference. I began my work in Adobe Illustrator compiling the reference images so I could construct the elements of the design, starting with the bike centerpiece.

I prefer Illustrator for this type of work as it’s incredibly fast and vectors are infinitely flexible. You can achieve fine detail and create repetitive elements with ease. For example, I used the Pattern brush to build the bike chain by simply repeating a shape along a vector path, creating a effect that would be a freehand tracing nightmare

Once the most detailed components, like the bike, were finished, I begin compiling them together into the final image, playing around with scale, placement and pattern. At this stage it was all about silhouette, shape and font – color and value taking the back seat. In the working file there were MANY iterations: different text treatments, sunburst effects and banners. Instead of a solid graphic object I created the cassette to place behind the bike, reinforcing the cycling theme.

Satisfied with all the elements of the design, I tested out some Threadless tee color swatches and chose grey as my primary shirt color. I was then ready to export the Illustrator file to Photoshop. By carefully separating the vector shapes into manageable working layers I saved a copy of the file as a Photoshop document. This took some trial and error as the export process can improperly flatten certain pieces, but was incredibly valuable in the long run – copying and reassembling all the pieces by hand as Smart Objects in Photoshop was NOT worth the hassle for a complex design.

Once I had the Photoshop file how I wanted with the correct layers, color mode, and resolution for printing, I began one of the most satisfying steps: distressing. Using a high resolution texture from a lithograph print of mine, I applied it at a variety of angles as layer masks to select design elements. Instant gratification!

When I had the all the pieces just right, I saved off a print-ready file and combine the elements down into just 2 layers, one for each color. This allowed me to completely change the colors of the graphic with a couple clicks if ever wanted to design for a different color shirt.”

And here it is: the final design, Free To Ride.

Big thanks to Chad for sharing his work process with us! You can view more of his work at his website

If you are a T shirt designer and would like to share your work with our readers please drop us a line with a link to your work.

You can read more about Budi from Concrete Rocket here

This was also featured in our 21 cool Stone Roses Tshirts list!

Farofa Nation is a collective of t-shirt lovers, designers and people who simply want to aid the poor kids in Brazil escape the poverty that exists there. We want to mix the creativity and goodness of people from all walks of life to help these kids get off the streets and onto the path to a better life.

You can find out more about the cause at Farofa Nation,

The graphics for this tshirt was inspired the iconic imagery of classic war films, whilst the subject is influenced by the ‘competitive and often brutal nature of the workplace environment’.

Remember if you think you’ve got a cool tshirt don’t hesitate to send it on to us. (Don’t be alarmed if your submission doesn’t pass first time though, we are pretty strict with what we pass as cool!)

John says his inspiration for this tshirt came from the bull sculpture on Wall Street, NYC. He was taking pictures when his friend posed in front of it with the international sign for ‘Rock On’

You can view some more cool Stone Roses Tshirts in our featured list!