Grim up North Heath

Tag: t shirt design

  • Return to Cabot Cove – murder capital of the world!

    Return to Cabot Cove – murder capital of the world!

    Cabot Cove, Maine, USA, witnessed a murder spree like no other from 1984 to 1996. 64 murders in a population of 3,500 puts it above any place in the USA in terms of murder rate1. But who was really to blame?

    Murder, She Wrote

    I’ve blogged before about Murder, She Wrote, the detective series that starred Angela Lansbury as the successful mystery writer Jessica “JB” Fletcher.

    We like to joke that Jessica is the real killer in all the episodes and manages to frame some poor schmuck who is gaslit into confessing. I made a design that celebrates Murder, She Wrote and uses a snowclone to explain this.

    ‘Cabot Cove is calling’ design.
    Redbubble design
    wordpress shop

    Snowclones

    There is a rhetorical device that you will be familiar with, but may not know the name of: the snowclone. These are sayings where the sentence format is well known enough that the subject can be changed2. For example:

    Orange is the new black

    In space, nobody can see you boogie

    Have spacesuit, will travel

    Horsey McHorseface

    A phrase I’ve seen on a lot of t shirts is a variation on the original “The mountains are calling, and I must go.” This comes from a letter the naturalist and mountaineer John Muir wrote to his sister, Sarah, in 1873. On t shirts, ‘the mountains’ is replaced by Australia, London, Lagos, the ocean, adventure… anywhere, really.

    The design

    This is a simple enough design. It features an image of Angela Lansbury as Jessica, a New England-type scene in the background and the phase ‘Cabot Cove is calling and I must kill’.

    The font choice was the main sticking point. I’ve used Badhorse here, though I used Art Nuvo in the previous Murder She Wrote design. The show itself used Art Gothic, but that’s not available in Canva.

    The ‘Cabot Cove’ t shirt, modelled by the model I think of as Ryan.

    I’ve added a white outline to some of the designs to help it stand out against some backgrounds. As it is, it works well with light backgrounds, but I like a colour on things like mousemats and phone cases, so a white outline and a default sky blue background is what I’ve gone with.

    1. Above anywhere in the world. The Turks and Caicos Islands have a homicide rate of 76 per 100,000 inhabitants. For the twelve years of Jessica’s spree, that figure was 143 per 100,000 in Cabot Cove. ↩︎
    2. According to Wikipedia, they are a phrasal template based on a cliché. They are both memes and clichés. ↩︎
  • Let’s make cartoon noises!

    Let’s make cartoon noises!

    I do struggle to find a consistent theme for the shop. It doesn’t help that my mind rarely settles long enough to think about business plans and that sort of thing. I think everything falls under the heading ‘Stuff I like or that I know other people like’, which is neither useful nor concise.

    Cartoon effects t-shirt.
    Buy the t shirt!

    So this is another in the ‘General’ pile of designs.

    Comic sound effects

    I read a lot of comics when I was a boy, that’s not unusual. I even read one comic when I was a young man (Viz) and dip into it occasionally. One of the visual elements that I loved in comics was the sound effects. I stumbled upon a library of comic sound effects while I was researching this design.

    The original sketch (below) is most of the way there. I need to find a way to convert that into something that I can upload to RedBubble and put onto t-shirts and stuff.

    Original sketch for the cartoon noises design.

    Process

    I redrew the sound effects, using the same rough off-white paper as above. Then I took a photograph of the page, uploaded to my computer and then pondered how best to get the image into a form I could manipulate digitally.

    Inkscape was my first call. I have had a lot of use from this app, it’s great for removing background (for patent images) and has an easy-to-use colouring-in function that I use for pop art-type designs. However, the paper I used is off-white, so it was a challenge to get a crisply defined edge to the lines.

    I used Blender in the end. I added the photo as a background and traced over the lines using the drawing function. The lines are easy to edit and move around, just as well since my lines were a bit wonky. Once I was happy with the lines, there is a “Fill” function that fills the shapes. I did a few different colours for variety.

    I exported the lettering from Blender and then used the images in Canva to do the final composition. The lettering used the font Waterlily. This isn’t the comic book style I was after originally, but seeing this with the sound effects made sense to me.

    Comic letterers use India ink to get the clean, crisp letters that carry the text. There is a font called whizbang which I could have used, if I’d known about it before I finished the design.

    Tiled version

    I’ve recently learned how to make tileable designs. So I took the noises I’d made, copied them, changed the colours a bit and made a tilable alternative to the ‘straight’ design.

    For clothing, you need an all-over print. In RedBubble, the options are the Graphic Tee and the A-line dress.

    Tiled version on an A-line dress and a t shirt. Can you see the join?
    A Line Dress
    Graphic T Shirt

    Making this pattern – and the others I’ve made recently – means I can put the design onto items where the other images (like rubber ducks – see below) wouldn’t look so good. Large items such as shower curtains, scarves and bedspreads, work well with a repeated pattern. Some smaller items – mugs, mouse mats, desk pads – also look good with certain repeated patterns.

    Beach towel with lots of rubber ducks. The ducks are a tiled design, the towel itself is for sale through the Grim Up North Heath shop, since RedBubble don’t do towels.
    Ducky towel
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