My Cock Is Smarter Than Your Honor Student

Ok... so here is my first real post on this thing. I have completed a new tshirt for my etsy shop, and I thought it might be cool to show the process etc. I got the idea for this shirt one time when I was stuck in traffic behind a bad driver, and I was forced to see their honor student bumper stickers. I mean great thats wonderful; but Long Island is filled with proud parents who can't drive. So I had an epiphany, and this shirt is the result.

All my artwork is done by hand, one at a time. I started with a pencil sketch on vellum which I inked with a Faber Castell Brush Pen. I love these pens, they are filled with India Ink, and really are like using a brush.

Next I scanned my drawing into the computer and I used Adobe Illustrator to add some text to my image. I didn't take pictures at this stage 'cause well.. I forgot. After viewing many fonts I settled on one called Rosewood. It has a cool 19thcentury vibe to it, and I think it worked well with the illustration. I then printed my drawing out onto a transparent sheet of plastic. I placed this transparency backwards over my silkscreen to be developed.

The image was burned onto the screen after 12 min and 30 seconds. I use a 500watt halogen light, suspended on 2 broomsticks, on 2 chairs. on each broom stick I use 12 DVD cases as support...6 under each broom stick. After exposure, I rinse my screen clean with cold water in the shower or a garden hose if I am at my friends studio. I also use an old house painting brush to wash and lightly scrub away any particles that would clog the design.

I let the screen dry and then used my heat gun to wick away any extra moisture. I have a one color screen printing press that I set up at my buddy's studio but I was stoked to print today so I rigged up some ghetto fabulous methods to print. I basically took my shirt and put an 18x24 picture frame inside of it. I taped newspaper to the one side of the frame so the ink doesn't screw it up. So yeah its a decent support for the shirt. The inside edge of the frame even provides a support for your screen to rest on when lining things up. I didnt have my squeegee either, so I used a linoleum block that I would normally carve out. I used it as my mock squeegee.


I chose yellow because I haven't printed with it yet and I thought it would look neat against the brown shirt. My print has kind of a vintage distressed look to it which I like. I think I will print this with white ink on black tshirts, and also gray shirts with black ink. Check out my etsy store OddmanOutPress, I can do all kinds of custom stuff. Well thats it for todays blog