I took a quick shot at yesterdays Daily Create, which was make your own damn assignment 🙂 I noticed Terry Greene had suggested creating your own band t-shirt, and I was off. T-shirts are my business these days, so I figured it was time bavatuesdays got a t-shirt! Fact is, before it was a “b” blog, bavatuesdays was divined for dual purposes: both a Mario Bava film fanclub as well as a band name. So, this post is about squaring old debts.
The resolution and detail there is pretty bad, but I actually used a t-shirt generator site rather than GIMP or Photoshop for this one—although I did use GIMP at one point. I’ve played with the idea of using t-shirts for assignments in the Harboiled course I taught with Paul Bond many years ago, and I like the idea of hijacking an e-commerce site for art. Students were asked to use shirt generator sites like cafepress or zazzle to do the assignment. For this one I found My Custom Band Merch, and gave that a whirl. But before I go into that, I needed a design and I had an idea. Many, many years ago I think boing boing linked to a monster letter generator, but I can’t find the original. Anyway, I created a bavatuesdays lettering filled with cool monsters many a year ago and figured that would be a perfect band shirt aesthetic:
Now, I needed to get this onto a black shirt because any self-respecting bava band would use a metal-band inspired black shirt, I mean black shirts rule! In fact, the grandaddy of Metal bands, Black Sabbath, took their name after a 1963 Mario Bava movie titled, you guessed it, Black Sabbath. The things you learn on the bava. Anyway, the lettering was perfect, but it was a JPG which means it carried a white background, and that will not do. So I opened it up in GIMP and used the magic wand tool to select the white area and then used the Select–>Inverse tool to select the letters and cut them out. I then created a new image with a transparent background and pasted the lettering in. From there I exported it as a PNG to preserve the transparent background. Tricks of the trade!
Now I was ready to upload that image onto the simple canvas My Custom Band Merch provided.  I did as much and I got a fairly bad resolution version of the lettering. This was good enough for the Daily Create, I got my point across, figured out the inverse select trick, and was able to Tweet it out in no time at all. And for me that is a successful Daily Create: you have some fun and pick up a trick or two in a tool like GIMP. But, I can never leave a good thing alone, I have to keep pushing. I had the transparent, decent resolution version of the lettering, so I gave the shirt another go, but this time in GIMP. As you can see, the resolution is much better, and it might highlight why an editing tool is probably a better choice for the final version I’ll be selling on this site sometime soon 🙂
Nice! Can I get that t-shirt in red?
Smart ass! NO RED FOR YOU!
Haha sweet shirt! I used a t-shirt generator site too for mine and then screenshot it. It was uberprints or something. My band’s gonna be industrial rockabilly. I just need to learn those 3 chords now.
Industrial rockabilly? I think mine has to be Italian Gothic 🙂 Thanks for the inspiration, Terry!
I have a better name for my band than my one from yesterday in my memory somewhere so when that pops back up, I’ll be making another shirt. Looking forward to the Bava album!