Tell me what you see

Saw this video clip for Gnarls Barkley's 'Crazy' and loved it. It's basically ink blots that move around like sillouhettes and create different images but they are almost always mirror images of each other. It just made me think about trying the same idea with some T-shirt designs - mirror images - could look quite effective centered on a shirt.

Fun Fun Fun!

Found some fun stuff on the net - mostly via Wooster Collective which you should all check out especially if you are interested in street art.


I like these funny little people. They are in Bogata Columbia.. I think they are made even better by the way they were photographed here too.

This is one crazy stencil! I won't be doing anything that detailed but I wanted to put it up here to show what different people are doing with stencils. This looks like a pencil sketch! There is more of 'Ace's work here - flicr.com/photos/ace_vancouver/



Textual Healing - a public performance. These people somehow got people to sms messages to put into speech bubbles that they projected on the wall. I thought this was a clever way of interacting with people and with the buildings.


These are posters in bus shelters for Amnesty International. They are not clear windows with people stuck on they are full posters that are just amazing visual illusions. You can see more of them here: http://amnesty.ch/f/eminf/2006/celaexiste/01.html

This is a short-film I thought Steve would be interested in with his Podcast project but really it's great and everyone should watch it! It's at this address: http://guilherme.tv/tyger/


And lastly go look at this artist's website. Eirian might like it for ideas for her online magazine project. This guy Blu does these absolutely massive paste-ups and the website is pretty cool - www.blublu.org

Website Woes

So having decided the last website design is not really for me I have spent much time on new ideas of which most are crap! I need help - if you know of any inspiring sites please let me know.
From some advice I got from a couple of you guys I have been trying to eliminate the 'boxes' from my site layout. Obviously I am Not going for a cluttered site with no room to breath, However, I keep coming back to the fact that a gridded layout is the easiest, clearest, cleanest and most organised way of creating the site if it is to work how I want it to. Feel free to disagree. I need to be able to add more designs to the site as I go along as well as making it easy for viewers to see all the designs/shirts and navigate further to be able to buy them. So with that in mind and many failed ideas behind me I have tried the following idea. Please let me know what you think.

The idea here is to use the colours I've decided on for my brand (black, grey, and a little hot pink) and use bold black and white photos of the actual stencils I'll be using to create the shirts. When the viewer rolls over the photos they will switch to a coloured version of the full design as it would appear on a shirt (as above where you can see the bang bang bang design). Then they could click that to be taken to a more detailed page about that shirt with the option to buy. This is a rough layout and I would like to make the final if I chose to pursue it a lot rougher with a more hand-made feel and obviously navigatinional buttons in the top bar and exploit the black and whites more in the photos. Colour comes into the site as the user rolls around it.

And one I prepared earlier...

I'm really inspired by comic style drawings at the moment, especially Frank Miller's drawings - he drew the Sin City graphic novels. I love them because they are so black and white - as in just shapes of either black or white that make up a picture which is exactly how I have to work to make stencils. I also love the way they show action or something happening including using action or sound words - so that's where this design came from. Let me know if you like it or not and if so which is the better one?

T-shirt Drawings

A few drawings/ideas for some T-shirts. Please let me know what you think - whether they should go further, turn into shirts or they need something else etc.


A vintage car zooming down a shirt, a gridded collection of audio equipment and a comic style scream fading or falling down a shirt.


A simple please-cut-here symbol and line and an angry mob boss ready to pounce out of the shadows.

Friday Frustration Joy

Discovered lots of exciting things today in amongst the frustration of software! I got some stuff on my site working and I'm actually starting to see how I can make the damm thing work! And... for fun I typed in BlackHotPink into Google and guess what was number 1! This blog!... wow. i love the net.

until next time... keep blogging

Refined Website Layout

More refined layout for the webpage - hopefully it will start moving faster from here. Have a look and let me know if you think it's too big, squashy etc.

Evil Smile Shirts

Some very rough ideas for a new shirt design. They need to be changed into stencils obviously but the idea/look is there. Really want to try the two colour style - perhaps with different colours though.

Refined Logo

Here's a refined version of the logo. I'm much happier with it. I cleaned upt the letters a little, deleted the heart and added the asterix. Maybe spacing still needs work and also I want to actually stencil it, print it etc and rework it from there to make it a little more relevant, but it's coming along.

Angel Boy

I think this is beautiful! It's a really nice way of using the background colour under the dark stencil. This is sprayed onto a boarded over window on a falling down abandoned building and I think they've put this grill over it to stop people getting in or spraying onto it but I think it just adds to this image.

A late Friday walk

Some interesting images I found while walking around last Friday:


I think these are good examples of two colour or layered stencil images. Which is something I want to with my shirts too.


These are also good to see what can be done with one colour too; lots of detail and also a strong graphic approach.


I love these. They look like the old images from the Aztec and Maya stuff that I find really interesting. Love their images and would like to explore that as an inspiration too.

Site Plan

The map of my future site. This is how it will hopefully work...

Super cool Sites

T-shirts sites - my competition... and inspiration, have a look:
- www.amesbros.com
- www.threadless.com
- www.spamshirt.com
- www.graniph.com
- www.safetypindesign.com
- www.stitch.com.au
- www.defunker.com

Some stencil sites:
- www.stencilrevolution.com - lots of stuff from Melbourne. You can post your own stuff, read artist profiles and there's a T-shirt stencilling tutorial
- www.twentyfive.org
- www.stencilinternational.com
- www.areyougeneric.org
- www.woostercollective.com
- www.melbournepixel.com
- www.stencilgraffiticapital.com - all about the scene in Melbourne

Also there are so good and some CRAP fonts here, if you're interested:
- www.dafont.com

A walk around the city

I love these - they are great. Especially the white spray under the power cord stencils. How did he know where to spray?


cool characters I found out and about in the streets. I really like the way the little boy illustration works with the wall/corner it was put on. I wanna do that sort of thing with my shirts - make shirts that are designed to go with the folds of a shirt


repitition looks good and is so easy to do with a stencil. Ideas for shirts or maybe promotional posters? Also i like the look of the white sprayed underneath. Seems to be a lot of people doing it. Maybe there'd be a way of incorporating that into some shirt designs?


really lovely mural - nice combination of styles.


two different stencils I found by 'carnival'. I think both look really good and there is so much detail but they are so small. The evil luna park is awesome and the other one is a nice use of a yellow wall.