Only a tiny number of times in the many years I’ve been a graphic designer has an idea occurred to me that was fully resolved the moment it fired the appropriate synapse. Usually it is just the unresolved outline of an idea that arrives unexpectedly. I must quickly document the idea in the form of a quick sketch. If I fail to record a good idea when it happens, later I’ll remember only that I HAD a good idea, but not what that idea was.

It is not necessary for me to draw an intricate and refined sketch to record an idea, I just need to get down the basic shape. Often the finished product is quite different from my first drawing. This difference is what I discover and resolve during the mysterious and intangible Creative Process. An idea that became a T-Shirt crept up on me one afternoon while I was waiting for something or another, I don’t remember exactly what. Probably on hold with tech support, waiting for a bunch of files to upload, coffee to brew, or just for the clock to strike 5pm.

The Pout-O-Rama is a winter fishing expedition to northern Minnesota to catch burbot, commonly known as eelpout. As per usual my mind drifted to my next fishing expedition and the beginning of the official Pout-O-Rama T-shirt took shape.

I have some idea what an eelpout looks like, but can not draw one from memory accurately enough to satisfy the many sharp-eyed anglers who would one day wear this shirt. So, I found a photo from a previous Pout-O-Rama showing an eelpout at the appropriate angle, and traced it using Adobe Illustrator.

Once I had created the shape of the eelpout, I added it to my art board and began building some of the other elements that would be a part of the artwork. It’s not necessary at this stage to be concerned with the color of the various elements. I just use colors that contrast with one another in order to keep track of everything.

I experimented with different typefaces, looking for one that read well but didn’t appear too serious and refined. The type would, after all, say “Pout-O-Rama”. Elegant, laboriously hand-kerned, serif type just wouldn’t properly reflect the feel of this event. I paid particular attention to the shape of the capital letter “O”. I intended to use the “O” as a design element and hoped to find one that was basically symmetrical. However, while every capital O is basically round, very few are perfect circles. I would eventually substitute an set of actual circles for the cap O. The mysterious and intangible Creative Process at work.

The basic elements of the Pout-O-Rama art are assembled. The idea of using the center of the “O” as a hole in the ice occurred by accident. I was scaling the circles that form the “O” and a set accidentally remained in the original position. Knowing which accidents to later attribute to artistic inspiration is an important part of the Creative Process. If the Pout-O-Rama shirt ever ends up in the Guggenheim,  I’m going to claim the idea struck while I was meditating on man’s inhumanity to man over a pint of absinthe.

The most frustrating and important part of any project is when you realize the art is just not coming together the way you originally sketched it. I was monkeying around with the colors and shapes of the type trying to make “Pout-O-Rama” very prominent. The horizontal format was keeping the type too small when constrained to the width of a T-Shirt graphic (about 10-11 inches). That doggone eelpout in the center draws the reader’s eye into the center of the design, and the type just flaps in the breeze on both sides. Cover your ears kids, I’m about to start cursing…

The discovery that your art is going to need a date with the wrecking ball is not easy to take. Sometimes it’s best to just begin the delicate editing process, also expressed as “Slash and Burn! Spare nothing! Yar har har har!!!” Other times you need to ease into it, by developing some textures and color ideas that will eventually be useful. I used lines and a few circles in a lighter blue to suggest scratches, ridges, cracks, and bubbles seen in natural river ice. I simplified the shape of the ring of ice chips around the hole and tightened up the auger marks and cracks running down the hole as well. Still, this thing was going to need a major restructuring.

As it turned out, I needed to break the type out of the horizontal line I originally sketched and stack the words so that they could be larger in relation to the other elements. Now I felt the art was looking good, it made good use of the available space and balanced nicely. I had to carefully simplify everything in the art so that it could be printed with the tacky silkscreen ink that goes on T-Shirts.

The T-Shirt will be printed with five different inks. Since I selected a dark blue shirt, white ink needed to be printed first so that the lighter colors would look correct. Almost all printing inks are formulated to be printed on a white medium such as a white T-Shirt or white paper. Printing this white base first takes this into account. I built a separate ‘plate’ that gave the printer the exact shape, size, and position of the area each ink would cover. The printer uses this art to make silkscreens which are used to print the finished T-Shirts. The large picture to the left is the white plate. Ink is printed where there is white, nothing is printed where there is black. The black part of the file is just used to position the inks in relation to a fixed size frame.

The pictures to the left are the dark blue, light blue, dark tan, and light tan plates. These inks are printed one at a time on top of the white base layer.

Here is the final art printed on a shirt, complete with fabric wrinkles and flare from the camera flash. Isn’t it amazing how simple the process is from the first idea to finished product? Only several hundred steps!