Turning your photos into sweet t-shirt designs

Home-made t-shirts are awesome gifts to give to your friends. They're personal, cheap, and when I give them out people always love it. This recipe will teach you how to easily turn a photo into a hip hi-contrast image that you can stencil onto a shirt.


Stenciling a t-shirt isn't hard - in fact, you probably already have some of the materials lying around your house somewhere.

Ingredients:

• A shirt
• Acrylic paint
• Acrylic fabric medium (can be found at most craft stores next to the acrylics)
• Rolling brush
• X-acto knife, box cutter, or other dangerously sharp object
• Tape
• A thin piece of cardboard (I use a manilla file folder)
• Photoshop, or another image editing program (there's a free one called GIMP which you can download here)

1. Prepare your picture

Import your picture into Photoshop, and adjust it to the proper size. I'm using a grainy mugshot of Charlie Sheen for my stencil. Convert your image into greyscale by opening the Image tab, then going to adjustments: desaturate. 

Next, lets separate Mr. Sheen's head from the background. You could trace around it with the pen tool, or just use the magic wand and eraser tools to remove the background. 

My original picture was a little dark, so I fiddled around with the brightness and contrast (Images:adjustments:brightness/contrast) until the shadows on Charlie's face stood out a bit more.


2. Make a Silhouette Stencil 
All I had to do was go back to the Image tab: adjustments: posterize and slide the bar all the way to the left. If that doesn't work for your picture, mess around with the brightness and contrast some more, or go to Image: adjustments: threshold and slide the bar around until you find something that works. 

Now we're going to get rid of the "islands". These are any white spots that aren't connected to the rest of the negative space on the stencil. Get rid of them with the paintbrush tool, add a little french mustache, and you've got a sweet stencil design. Print it out!


3. Cut out your stencil
If we cut out the stencil from printer paper,  paint could bleed through the paper and ruin your shirt.

So lets cut it out of something a little bit thicker. Tape your design FIRMLY to a thin piece of cardboard. Then, just cut out the black parts with your knife, making sure to cut through both the printer paper and the cardboard. 

If you got rid of all your islands, you should now have a kickin' rad stencil that won't fall apart when you pick it up.


4. Painting your shirt
Go get your t-shirt and iron it until there are no wrinkles on the area you'll be painting. 

Next, mix your paint with just a smidgen of fabric medium. This will help the paint bond to the fabric so it doesn't flake off in the dryer. 

Put your shirt on a flat, hard surface. Put a piece of cardboard in between the top and bottom layers of fabric to prevent any paint from bleeding through. 

Finally, just put down your stencil and roll some paint over it, making sure that the stencil stays in the same exact spot while you're painting. Let it dry for about 30 minutes and voila! 

Photo Slideshow: The Week in Review

Tyrant style report: Spring 2011

As the spring fashion season kicks off, it's time to take a look at the hottest men's styles being worn by the sexy dictators and tyrants of the middle east. Hold onto your keffiyeh, because I'm about to show these emperors a lesson in dressin' for suppression! 

Bahrain

Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa (on the right)

 If there's one thing that any tyrant needs to project with his clothing, it's power and manliness. Sorry Hamad, but a suede vest with a beige mandarin-collar shirt doesn't exactly scream "I deserve respect". Khalifa looks more like a guidance counselor circa '95 than the glorious king of Bahrain.
However, I will say that a keffiyeh is a good choice in headwear. Not only is it functional and a symbol of traditional Bahrain, the headpiece does a good job of drawing the eye toward the face... a good thing since the rest of Hamad's outfit is so blah.

Libya

Moammar Gadhafi

 One of the great things about being a malevolent dictator has to be the ability to wear whatever you want. Kim Jong Il, for example, can wear high heels and diva glasses without anyone raising an eyebrow. This is the only logic I can find behind Gadhafi's Miami Vice revival outfit here. 

Egypt

 Hosni Mubarak

I only have one thing to say: big guys do not have to wear big suits. Mubarak (seen here being supported by the US) would do well to wear something with a more fitted cut. The clean lines and smooth look would make him look more slim than all the pinstripes in the world could. Maybe then he wouldn't have lost his country to a bunch of people throwing rocks.

Iran

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad

I love it! The relaxed fit of the overcoat, the dashing scarf for those cold Iranian nights, the rakishly untied sports shirt... Mahmoud, you can kidnap and torture me anytime. 

Seriously, he's a horrible, horrible human being. 

AktarAktar at the Beat Kitchen

           

           Wheaton band AktarAktar has been steadily gaining a reputation as one of Chicago's best local groups, and their show last Friday at The Beat Kitchen didn't disappoint.

Just A Band - Ha-He

This isn't a music blog because I know absolutely nothing about music. In fact, I don't even really have a ton of music on my iTunes... mostly just stuff I've downloaded using gift-cards. But I found this video through Cracked the other day and I'm kinda hooked on the beat. It's a song from Kenyan funk group Just A Band, called "Ha-He".
The video interested me mostly because I've been reading a lot of cinematography textbooks, and it serves as a good example of how to get a cinematic look with digital video through the use of long lenses and color-correction. Also, the dialogue is great.
Oh, and the music is good too. Enjoy.

Movies That Are Actually Awesome: Part 1

I watched Jim Jarmusch's wonderful film Coffee and Cigarettes last night, and considered writing about that and talking about Jarmusch's influence on American independent film. If you'd like to read that article, I direct your attention to any book about the history of American independent film.
Instead, I'm gonna talk about an under-appreciated gem of a film about Jason Statham murdering a series of ethnic stereotypes.
Seriously, though; go see Stranger than Paradise.

Crank: High Voltage
Crank: High Voltage and its prequel (Crank) are pretty much interchangeable. Personally, I prefer the second one because everything really gets cranked (HA!) to 11.

The film picks up from the end of the first, with Jason Statham as LA hitman Chev Chelios (good God what a name) falling thousands of feet out of a helicopter and miraculously surviving. While he's incapacitated, some chinese gangsters remove his heart and replace it with a prosthetic that runs on a battery (Don't ask me why). After waking up, Chelios battles gangsters across LA looking for his heart... while repeatedly electrocuting himself in order to keep the battery on his prosthetic heart charged.

The story is, obviously, not the movie's strong point. But, I wouldn't relegate this film to that long list of movies you have to turn off your thinking bone to enjoy. In fact, I'm telling you to never watch movies that require you to stop thinking. Those movies suck and are actually really bad for your health.

That being said, this film made me feel 13 again. And not just because it's trying really hard to look and feel like a video game.  This is one of those movies that captures the joy of low-budget filmmaking with a fairly large budget and some big name stars. There's a refreshingly manic, slapstick tone that runs through the whole thing, recalling the early work of Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi. Also, it's got some razor-sharp editing and a fucking great score, composed by Faith No More's Mike Patton. Put it all together and you get a movie that's stark-raving mad yet surprisingly coherent.

Ok, so why did this movie get terrible reviews? First of all, I don't think most reviewers were looking at Crank as a comedy. But after the sex scene set on a horse track during a race, Jason Statham performing a shotgun enema, and Dwight Yoakam's role as a heart surgeon/pimp, it's pretty obvious that we're not taking ourselves seriously here. One criticism I can understand is that the movie lacks any ambition. It's not trying to do anything besides make you laugh, but it does a damn fine job of that. It's also tremendously well put together and entertains me to no end.

So go see it. If you're afraid of losing your indie-cred, just tell your friends that it's like Run Lola Run.

Ben Yagoda on "Y'all"

As a southerner living in the north I've had to defend my use of the perfectly reasonable word "y'all" on several occasions.
Ok, that's a fucking lie. I've yet to meet somebody who cares enough about linguistics to even consider the validity of that particular second-person plural pronoun. But that's probably a good thing, since I'm really only equipped with the knowledge to discuss the weathe.
Anyway, here's an article by linguist Ben Yagoda in defense of "y'all." It's from a magazine called Stop Smiling that did a lot of cultural preservation-type articles... I used to have a subscription, but it went out of normal print about a year ago. They do it in some weird hardcover format that's sent out four times a year now. Fuck that. The back issues are still entertaining, though.
Enjoy!