Make Your Own Ironic Tees

It’s the cornerstone of your post-modern/hipster aesthetic: The ironic tee. But we’ve all encountered the problems associated with these tees haven’t we? Someone else having the same shirt as you, or wishing someone made a tee featuring your favourite obscure art house film or existential essayist, or worst of all the shirt becoming to mainstream to be tolerable.

The ironic veneration of dictators is very popular currently

We all want to push the boundaries of the exclusivity of the wit of our Tees, but how do we do this? My solution to these problems was to make my own.

What you’ll need:

• An idea of epically ironic proportions
• Photoshop (or another photo editing program)
• A printer
• A projector of some description (if your printer prints on a3 paper you won’t need one)
• Cardboard (thick but not corrugated)
• A thin sharp blade, like a stanley knife or one of those disposable blades you get in craft stores that you break off to get to a new sharp bit.
• Blank tees
• Screen printing gear: ink, screen and squeegee (you can improvise the squeegee out of old windscreen wipers, and the screen fabric stretched tight over a frame.)

Step One: Decide what image you’re going to create. There’s three important words to consider when creating your tee.

Appropriation: This is when you borrow/steal an image from another media source to place it in a different context to alter its meaning. Appropriation is the backbone of the ironic tee aesthetic; it’s very rare that you see original imagery on one of these shirts. Generally people will borrow a well known image like the face of a dictator or am obscure character from a well known children’s TV show and combine this image with a caption to change the connotation or message of the image.

Juxtaposition: This is another popular technique; it’s where you place two images together to try and make the viewer compare the two. For example if you wanted to communicate dissent towards your nation’s leader you could get a picture of Josef Stalin and place it next to him. (thats what I’ll be doing as an example)

Subversion: This is achieved through the other two techniques. Through appropriation and juxtaposition its possible to turn the meaning of the image on its head. Previously positive characters can become scary and emblematic of the potentiality for malevolence in everyman.

Combining these three elements should guarantee your shirt comes across as witty, playful and ironic.

Step Two: Create a representation of your idea on Photoshop.

Once you’ve decided on the image you want to use (keep it simple it will be easier to get the image onto the shirt if you do.) you need to start putting it together in Photoshop.

For an example I’ll be creating a very clichéd image that demonstrates each of the techniques I’ve talked about above.

First get photos of the subjects off Google then bring them over to Photoshop. Place them both on different layers.

Cut the background out of each image using the polygonal lasso tool and adjust the positioning of the figures so it works visually.

Then you add whatever witty slogan your amazing mind has thought of. Mines pretty average because I’m creating the image for the article and not to wear on my shirt in reality, yours will (hopefully) be much better.

Note that this image employs both appropriation of political Icons and juxtaposition.

Step Three: turn the image into a stencil

You do this by going to Image/adjustments/threshold and then adjusting the image as to look right as a tonal dropout. Do this for all the image layers.

If the image is a bit rough or pixelated run a Gaussian blur then adjust the curves into roughly an S shape.

Step Four: Print and cut out the stencil.

You can do this step a number of ways, the easiest is to use an a3 printer and just print the image. If you don’t have access to this you can use either a digital projector or old school overhead projector (to enlarge the image you print it onto a clear sheet of a4 plastic project it onto a wall) and trace the image onto the cardboard.

Then you cut out all the black sections with your knife/blade; Being careful of islands, you’ll probably make this sort of mistake heaps of times but we learn through mistakes.

Step Five: Use the stencil to transfer ink to the shirt. There’s a couple of ways to do this, a really easy (but not as professional) way of doing it is to use black aerosol spray paint and just spray the shirt while holding the stencil over it.

Using basic screen printing gear achieves much better results (most art-rooms at unis or high schools have this stuff, so befriend the art teacher). To do this you just lay the stencil over the shirt put the screen over the stencil and use a squeegee to spread the ink. The stencil allows the ink through the holes you cut out, if you’re using black ink (which I suggest) it should recreate the image you printed or traced onto the card.

Step Six: Set the ink.

Inks vary, but generally if you blow dry and then iron the ink while holding thin material over the image it should set nicely.

Step Seven: Rock your amazingly cool ironic tee like there’s no tomorrow.

Have you made your own shirts? If so feel free to share links to them in the comments section.

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