Tag Archives: shirt

Design

New Blood

Who’s ready to for way too much back story on how a shirt got made? Sure you are.

Back in 2010, I started this word art project. Part of it was because I was working somewhere that I didn’t get to do any design work, and I was bored. So I wanted a small project that I could do on my lunch breaks. The other part was that in 2010, I got sick again. Because I thought we were sort of done with that whole mess, it was a lot harder the second time. Early in the project, I was making my own brand of little inspirational graphics to use as desktop wallpapers. The “hang in there” kitty wasn’t really my style, I guess. One of the very first ones I made was this:

newblood1

Distressed fonts were super trendy four years ago maybe. It’s from a Pinhead Gunpowder song called New Blood, and it’s a pretty literal thing – six PICC lines later, and my arms are scarred up. I lost a non-essential organ, so there’s a few more.

Cut to 2014, and I’m still on meds for Lyme. This past winter I really hit the skids, and had some of the worst pain I’ve had in a long time. One night my hands were killing me, and keeping me awake, so I thought “fine, I’ll draw some bones that DON’T suck.” I started drawing some skeleton hands, and I remembered that I’d been wanting to make myself a PHGP shirt, since they don’t really sell their own. I pulled the heart from my original word art piece, and ended up redrawing it and adding the text.

I made a pretty badass shirt, constructed entirely from sadness.

phgp

I ended up printing a few to send to the guys. Billie’s and Jason’s got sent to their manager, so I don’t know if they ever saw them. I mailed Aaron’s to him directly, and he sent back a very nice letter on some stationary that he found in a junkyard, which sounds about right.

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