Blood Is The New Black

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     Blood, Google.com, Stumbleupon, T-Shirts, Velvet Underground, art, art shirts, blood is the new black, funny tees, strange tees, weird

I only stumbled this one last night, yes at 3:30am, but luckily I still felt exactly the same about Blood is The New Black after a long sleep and an even longer grey British morning of slogging away at my (f)art. So what’s BITNB all about? God knows, but I love it. It’s like I’ve accidentally bumped into The Velvet Underground of the t-shirt world and I couldn’t be more pleased (with myself :p).

There’s flash. there’s plush, there’s cool, there’s funny, there’s crazy, and then there’s these guys, their style? Well if you can call it that, a ragtag muddle of crazy artists and designers, their style is so way off the scale I’m all out of adjectives (for once). All I can say is they make me feel sick in a good way, not sick with envy, not sick of the sight of anything in particular, but a strange and rather wonderful home sickness for a life I’ve never had.

If only the friends of my youth had been as together (and untogether) as this demoniacal motley crew I’d have probably started a revolution of some sorts by now, oh to be as reckless and carefree as these loonies. read more

Akumu Ink aka Japanese Nightmare Tees!

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     Akuma T-Shirts, Blood, Edgar Allen Poe, Japanese horror, Japanese t-shirts, The Raven, gore, grudge, ju-on grudge, nevermore, the ring

I have left Dora from AkumuInk.com waiting in the wings for a few days whilst I took a brief but well deserved miniature t-shirt sabbatical -the truth is the best thing you can do when you’re hilt by the stultifying presence of mortality is to carry on doing what you did before, a little wiser, a little more focused than before, and so I want to give a mention to AkumuInk.com – a small but thriving independent Canadian t-shirt label offering something a little off the wall compared to most.

Akumu means Nightmare in Japanese. As Dora states – “We get our inspirations from Japanese horror movies and hardcore music. We translate these inspirations into large graphics that we screen print onto American Apparel t-shirts.” I’m a big fan of Japanese horror, in fact most Asian horror of the 1990′s and beyond have trashed anything on par from the States. Japanese horror dwells in places you wouldn’t want to dream, confronts ideas you’d rather not tackle, and delivers images that imprint on your subconscious far more deeply than any trash gore flick could manage. I was expecting to see some references to Original Japanese versions of The Ring or Ju-on: The Grudge, (not the awful American remakes), but copyright concerns mean t-shirt designers have to think “outside the box” when it comes to appropriated influences. read more

BBC’s Blood sweat and T-Shirts

admin    T-Shirt Articles     BBC, Blood, Charities, Enterprise, Sweat, T-Shirts, Third World

It is true I am a self-confessed t-shirt designer, I admit it, I do design tees, I don’t make them, I don’t print them, but if I did I would be calling as many fair trade operators as I could find.

So what’s the big idea Paul? I suppose it began with the ordeal of watching the recent BBC series “Blood, Sweat and T-shirts“. Not the ordeal of watching a Third World country slowly climb into it’s rightful place in the Second World and perhaps before long The First World (do any of these glib Western references still apply to the current world economy?). No, my problem was having to sit through the sulks, fits and tantrums of the spoiled British student types shrugging their collective shoulders and sneering their top lips in uniform fashion every five minutes. The smell! The dirt! The noise! There are no toilets and there’s no coffee machine, and all the sewing machines are powered by a gas guzzling home-made generator that really must cost an absolute fortune to run these days. You know, oil crisis, world economic depression, Middle East conflict, China’s expansion, and so on… read more