how i’m currently working with Apparel
I wanted to give a little explanation of how I’m working with apparel right now, given changing economic and environmental considerations. In 2015 I started making t-shirts with my illustrations on them. The first one was the Bart Rose, which I printed myself in my apartment in Brooklyn on found white tees, heat-setting in the dryers at the laundromat. I then had runs of some other Bart illustrations professionally silkscreened by my friend Alex Dondero of LQQK Studios. The magnum opus of these designs was Bart Smoking Snoopy, an instant classic literally born from stoned thoughts.
Over the years, I made many runs of tees and sweatshirts of these designs, but became more and more uncomfortable with the waste involved in producing apparel. Some of this was post-production: problems with ordering the correct size amounts, being left with too much of one size and not enough of another, all of which I had pre-paid for, whether it sells or not. Pre-production, the process of making new cotton blanks seemed so wasteful, especially when thrift stores are full of already made clean dead stock blanks (and I love to thrift so I’ve seen a lot).
I studied silkscreening in art school, but I never wanted to make my own professional runs. Ceramics is the only manual labor artwork I’m interested in doing. I do go to thrift stores a ton though, and have access to a lot of blanks. I started hand-printing the Total Zodiac shirts on found shirts as a way to be involved in a more eco-friendly apparel cycle. There is so much clothing waste, it feels good to incorporate some of the waste into art. Using small individual block prints, I can also fill the whole front space of the shirt with imagery, which is harder to do with other commercial printing techniques.
One solution for professional printing has been to use print-on-demand companies. These shirts are not silkscreened, but are digitally printed onto a high-quality shirt. This is good to not have overruns that sit collecting dust and to allow for a larger size run (up to size 4XL!) These work really well for black on light tees, but I didn’t like how the white on dark tees came out, it wasn’t saturated enough. So I have the Bart Rose design (among other non-Bart designs) available via print-on-demand, and the quality is just as good as silkscreen. I always envisioned the Bart Rose design as black on white, or black on the gray sweatshirt. But the Bart Smoking Snoopy design, which I prefer to be on black shirts, didn’t work with print-on-demand.
I am doing a pre-order of Bart Smoking Snoopy for the whole month of August, and then getting a limited run silkscreened (by LA-based Family Industries) in early September for this holiday season. Pre-order guarantees you a shirt; I will print more than the pre-order amounts but not many.
