I took a break from other projects for an evening to whip up another shirt pattern. The Eldrazi titans were a tempting target, but I ran into the problem that almost none of the art shows what their leg-tentacle-appendages. Also, across artists, the details on each titan tend to change a little each time. Octopus-like walking-tentacles are what I settled on.
Note - I'm working on getting all the stencils I've generated into a consistent format, as I do intend on posting them here! It could take a bit, but I wanted to get these shirts and the process post up this weekend. Also, I definitely don't own the original images, they're posted here only for illustration / education purposes.
These might be the last shirts for a while, been on a bit of a tear with them lately. The shirts used for these two (depicting Etched Oracle and Sheoldred, Whispering One) were Hanes Premium X-Temp V-necks, which yielded a more orange color when bleached. To not bury the lede too much, here are the final results!
At this point I've settled into a workflow for generating designs from art, which breaks down into five steps -
First, isolate the subject. In GIMP I end up using the lasso-select tool and color-select tool as necessary to delete the background. This can take a while if the edges are hard to see, or if the subject blends slowly into the background, like Sheoldred does.
Second, create two new layers. The first is a block of black that fills the entire subject, providing a silhouette for later, but is kept "off" for the intermediate steps. Second, a "highlights" layer that sits at the very top of the stack for providing the "gaps" between pieces. These gaps create depth in the final design by allowing objects to pass behind each other, so it's important to grok how the original image is arranged.
Third, as the art on most cards is cropped by the frame, as need to expand the canvas enough to complete the figure. This usually means adding feet, tendrils, arms, etc. so the finished shirt doesn't have an artificial "frame" imposed on it.
Fourth, and most time-consuming, adding the gaps. On the highlight layer I've settled on using 3-5px wide pencil and pen-curve tools to trace out the boundaries of each piece. Inevitably there's some iteration as I apply these at high zoom, and have to zoom out to make sure it all still parses at a distance.
Lastly, moving the file (usually in png format) over to Adobe Illustrator, to convert it all into paths. I fell into using the "black and white logo" setting on live trace as it has produced good results so far, but your mileage may vary. The only thing left to do at this point is to expend the resulting object into paths, un-group them, and delete the unnecessary segments. For me, this usually means retained islands of white. If kept, during cutting the laser will attempt to cut the boundary multiple times, isn't ideal.
For the cutter I'm using it expects vector cuts to be 0.01 pt black stroked paths, so I set everything to that and no fill color. I've also found that the speed-power-frequency settings needed to produce good results is about 80/5/2500, on a 150W cutter. After cutting the pieces of freezer paper are taken back home, and the host-shirt is laid out on an ironing board. After centering things up, I can start placing pieces and "gluing" them down with brief contact from a hot iron. Be sure to check you don't iron the wrong side of the paper, it WILL glue itself to your iron. Both of the patterns in this post took about 45-60 minutes to position all the fiddly pieces, tweezers were definitely a must. I've dropped an in-progress shot below.
After it's all ironed down, a plastic poster-holder is slotted into the shirt to prevent bleed-through and bleaching of the back surface, and it's set outside either on the concrete or a protected work surface. I've settled on 4-6 fine sprays, quickly dabbing the excess off of the papered regions with a paper towel, followed by a five minute wait. I did that twice for each of these, followed by a minute or two agitating it a bucket of ice water to halt the bleaching. The water definitely turned orange. Lastly they were both thrown into the washer for a short cycle and dried. That's the whole thing!
This is a short post, but I did want to show off the Phyrexian Obliterator shirt I made, as I managed to get it signed by Todd Lockwood (the original artist) at Emerald City Comic Con this year! There are two big differences between this and the previous designs I'd done. First was the sheer number of independent pieces of wax paper that had to be positioned relative to one another, thankfully I was able to position and then "fix" a few pieces at a time, and they were generally well behaved. Second was the amount of pre-processing that went in. Rather than starting with someone else's stencil, I started directly with the card art, first isolating the beastie from the background, and then adding breaks to highlight each plane of depth within the image, and eventually pushing it all to illustrator to generate paths. The laser cutter also had a bit more power than intended, so a few pieces that came out charred had to be re-made by hand with a hobby knife. That all said, I'm really happy with how this came out! Now that it's signed, I'm not sure I'm going to be wearing to on the regular, but might try to frame it somehow.
A quick update; I cracked out another bleached shirt, this one based on the moogle-in-magitek-armor image by DeviantArt user Camac, straight out of FF6 for the SNES. It took some tweaking to make the pattern contiguous for the laser cutter, but not too much. A quick observation: the brand of the shirt seems to have a big impact on the minimum realizable feature size. We couldn't find the soft fancy v-necks we'd been buying, so settled on a four-pack of Haynes crew-neck shirts. They're comfy enough, but noticeably thinner and bleached substantially faster (think 10-20 seconds rather than 2-4 minutes to transition from black to maroon-pink). I stuck with the same freezer-paper and ironing method I've described previously.
For future patterns on these shirts I'll probably aim for thicker features and a finer spray at a larger distance, as I'm not totally happy with the the blurring on this one. Still, more SNES nostalgia is always good.
With a whole week off around Thanksgiving, Ouliana and I finally had time to test out a method for templating bleached shirts we'd seen online. It needs freezer paper, which as far as I can tell is butcher paper with wax on one side only. The plan consists of cutting out your pattern, and ironing the waxed side onto the shirt, applying your bleach-water solution, and peeling off the mask. The twist being that cutting precise patterns is a pain, but a laser should be able to make quick work of it!
For the pattern, I came across this image of Samus from the Metroid games, posted by terrorsmile on DeviantArt. I wanted the pattern to be a true stencil, meaning having at least one totally contiguous region to be the "mask". That took some doing, about an hour of work in GIMP, but I ended up with an inverted stencil that could be cut without producing "islands". I'm a bit reluctant to share the file, as it's based so closely on someone elses's work, but the process is fairly straightforward (the magic-wand selection tool will immediately show you any "islands" left in your image.)
The other issue that came up was the freezer paper tends to curl (it does come on a roll), so it had to be taped down at the edges to a rigid substrate, scrap acrylic in this case. The second pattern was a manually made stencil of the "doom guy" dolls from the 2016 Doom game that Ouliana made, seen getting ironed on below.
The positive-stencil of the doom guy did end up having "islands", meaning a few pieces of freezer paper had to be carefully place and individually ironed on. Also, having a positive pattern mean needing to block off the rest of the shirt with extra paper to prevent any stray bleaching. The negative stencil, shown below just after ironing, needed no additional masking.
I opted for a slow and regular application of 50/50 bleach in water solution, spraying a few times, and giving it 5-10 minutes to act and dry, and repeated that roughly three times. The shirts were then rinsed out in the shower, and immediately washed. We noticed that setting the iron too low resulted in poor bonding, so the paper would "pop" off the shirt, and ironing too hot resulted in small beads of wax around the edges of the stencil that remained after peeling away the paper. They can be picked off by hand, but it is a pain. The final result of my shirt attempt is below!
On a recent trip to Berkeley I helped my girlfriend learn to bind books, starting with a few comics she had on hand. Given that single comic books are essentially built like the signatures of a larger book, this turned out to be fairly easy. The method for binding is available in many books and on many other websites , so I'll spare the details and get to the photos. The cover was printed at a FedEx location using their color plotter for a few dollars, but the paper does seem to attract fingerprints and smudges. The biggest difference between the result and a commercial trade hardcover, aside from the whole custom aspect, are the advertisements, which are fairly irritating.
On a recent visit to Berkeley I was given the chance to take a stab at assembling a stained glass piece. To be clear, I wasn't staining/coloring the glass myself, though I have done that back when I had access to the materials science glass blowing shop. The first step was to choose a design, and given my background I chose a rather suspect flower. Next the glass was picked out at a local stained glass craft shop near the bay; a bright blue, a purple, a green, and a reddish-purple provided all the colors I'd need. All said and done, about $20 worth of glass. Next we printed the design and outlined and numbered the obvious segments, and with a pair of three-bladed scissors (designed to remove a narrow strip of paper from between the segments to allow for solder and copper tape) cut out all the segments.
The next step was to take each segment, keeping track of the color it was supposed to be, and gluing it down to the appropriate glass using an middle-school style glue stick. Each bit of glass was then broken out into the approximate shape of the segment using a glass scorer and pliers. Then came the grinding. The grinder sported a metal grinding post with a constant feed of water to keep the dust and heat down, and proved to be the most fun part of the entire process as there was little to no risk of breaking the pieces. After each piece had been ground to a more-or-less perfect shape, the segments were re-assembled into the original shape to check their fit. A few places had to be re-ground, but overall it came together nicely.
Now that we were convinced that the pieces all fit well, we were able to wash away the paper and finally see the design in the colors we picked out earlier in the day. The challenge here was to keep everything in order, as the pieces now had no identifying features and could easily be confused for similarly shaped pieces.
A bit of materials science wisdom comes into play here. Glass and metal rarely play well together, and soda-lime glass and solder are no exception. In order to get the solder to effectively glue the segments together an intermediate metal has to be applied to the edges of the segments. Copper tape, being a strip of copper with adhesive on one side, serves this purpose beautifully. Each piece of glass had a stripe of tape straddling it's edge such that the edge and a few millimeters on both sides were covered. You'll notice in the photo below that two of the petals on the left had to be broken into two parts as they broke during cutting, but the visual impact of this is quite minimal. I attribute this to my poor choice of shapes during the initial drawing process, as I didn't think about how easily the shapes could be realized.
With everything taped, the remaining steps were to solder the pieces together, patina the solder to a darker color, and protect the whole thing with wax. Having soldered before this was an easy process, the only non-intuitive part of which was tapping. Tapping refers to dropping little blobs of solder around at key points to lock the pieces in a single orientation before trying to fill the gaps in a continuous manner.
A quick rinse with flux remover left the surface clean. The patina, with plenty of labels reminding us that it is very toxic, was quick acting and gave the solder a nice pewter look. Lastly the liquid wax was rubbed onto both sides, and the whole thing was washed in soap and water to remove any excess flux, patina, and wax to make it safe the handle.
An early flight left me without a good source of packing materials the morning I flew back to Tucson, so I trusted that my portfolio was sturdy enough to protect the piece for a few hours. When I got home I discovered that it apparently wasn't good enough; several cracks had formed in the central pieces. They were not enough to compromise the piece, and it should hold together for some time while looking awesome in my window.
