My last two years at Portland State I learned how to screenprint and it was one of the best things I ever took from college. It’s a highly unforgiving medium with so….much….trial and error (emphasis on the error part), but when it works you feel a satisfaction unlike anything else. I have a DIY studio in my garage, and while I am a one man operation without a lot of bells and whistles, I love doing shirt runs for clients. Fall 2024 I did my first pre-order run for myself on my Big Cartel with 13 different variants and I’m so thrilled with how it went. It’s one thing to have people buy a shirt design I do for another place, but the fact that one of all my designs sold meant the world to me.
I did a series of Earthbound shirts where each color was based on a menu flavor you could pick in game. Banana, plain, mint, strawberry, and peanut. I took a cheap craft frame and made my own tiny screen to print a Mr. Saturn on a random spot on every Earthbound tee I did. I didn’t advertise this, so I hoped that everyone had a little chuckle when they opened the shirt and found a friend saying hi 🙂One of my first designs I sold on Etsy back in the day—My other designs were illustration based, so this was my first time doing a text based one. Right out of college at the height of my Overwatch obsession, I did a pennant and two color shirt representing a bunch of the heroes from the game. As time went on, the shirt became more and more outdated, so I ended up retiring it. Admittedly with my setup being as DIY as it was, the two color was sometimes incredibly difficult to line up and I was spending way too much time doing tweaks until it lined up just right…I was relieved that the screens for that design finally got put out of commission. ^^;
Art and Design by Ernie Wood 