Comic-Con, Redbubble, and a chapter this week if it kills me

Shortish entry today, guys. Sorry. News items, in no particular order:

1. I’m experimenting with a new T-shirt supplier. Since moving to my new place and getting a job that’s mostly online, I’ve pretty much lived in geeky T-shirts. (I’ve never been a fan of sitting around in my pajamas all day—wear anything more than one day in a row, with my nose, and you’ll be sorry.) Of my various suppliers, Offworld Designs is still my favorite, but Redbubble has more of a selection and will let me post my own stuff. The printing is also of higher quality than Cafepress, and there are more ways to customize any given shirt. I’ve taken a whack at my first-ever Redbubble T-shirt design, which you can see above. I really wanted a Bucky Cap shirt, and it was a good way to get more familiar with my drawing tablet. If it comes out okay, you’ll probably see some Masks designs on Redbubble, and maybe some from my other work, too.

2. Comic-Con! Yes, I’m going again. More than one day this time, too. And I’m going about 90% as a civilian—I’ll have bookmarks and buttons and stuff, but this year is going to be more low-key for a lot of reasons. Trying to learn some new things about fan culture and navigating it, and maybe have a bit of fun. I’ll take Pocket Coyote, though, and there will be pictures.

3. There will be a new chapter this week if I have to write it in blood. I’m not going to Comic-Con without a shiny new chapter up to show people. You heard it here first. In the meantime, if you could see the progress I’m making on Teh Novel, you’d be really impressed, but that doesn’t mean a darned thing on a blog.

Oh, well. Nice-looking T-shirt, eh? I am open to suggestions for Masks designs …  

Help! I'm a prisoner in a T-shirt shop!

Okay, for the record, I did not set out to be a T-shirt salesman. Saleswoman. Whatever. I didn’t start writing stories just so I could sell T-shirts. But since I’ve had people ask me for months now when I’m going to start selling this or that T-shirt I made for myself on Cafepress, I have opened a T-shirt shop just so I can write instead of selling T-shirts. And that makes sense to me.

So here are the three shirts I’m selling so far, in their many variations, and where they came from.

1. The “Remember Who You Are” Shirt: I designed this one for Comic-Con this last summer, and I and my companion walked comfortably around the con in the ladies’ version. After I posted the art on Facebook (a version of it is the MASKS profile image, as you might have noticed), two or three people either posted on the page or contacted me privately, asking where they might buy such a thing. It had never occurred to me that other people would want to turn themselves into walking billboards for my book, but my mother always taught me that if people want to buy something and you’re willing to sell it, you don’t actually have a problem. So here are those shirts, in three variations: unisex (or men’s, if that helps, though I wear this cut a lot too), women’s, and women’s plus size. I apologize for the plus-size version being more expensive; Cafepress charges me more for those shirts, and it didn’t seem fair to charge more for the cheaper shirts just to compensate.

2. The (NINJA) Shirt: I actually have a hand-painted version if this that I made last year as part of a Halloween costume. I blogged about wearing it to the emergency room. Well, my brother saw me painting the original shirt and demanded one for himself, and he started wearing it to his dojo all the time, and now everybody in the dojo wants to buy one. Since Rae also wears such a shirt in one of the chapters—written in on a whim at two in the morning—it made sense to sell the shirt here. You may buy the (NINJA) shirt in any color Cafepress sells; my original is black. This shirt, too, is available in unisex, women’s, and women’s plus sizes.

3. The Sometime Superhero Jersey: I admit, I made this one just to see whether I could. Nicole’s haunting illustration for the first chapter of Masks has stuck with me as a good representation of the promise of the story, and it also features Rae in her Peregrine costume (unlike, oh, the first half of the book!). I wanted to experiment with putting Nicole’s moody ink-wash art on a shirt, and a black-and-white baseball jersey seemed like a better fit than a plain white or black shirt. Plus I wanted to design something with three-quarter sleeves, because that’s my favorite sleeve length. So here it is. Be warned—because it’s a unisex shirt, the sizes run a bit big, so if you’re debating between two sizes, ladies, get the smaller one.

So there you have it. Ordering through Pocket Coyote will take you directly to the Cafepress page. And I know the shipping seems absurd--but WordPress had no good way for me to note that if you're already buying a shirt from Cafepress, all other shirts ship for just $0.50 each. I’ll probably add more T-shirts as I get the ideas, or the art, for them … a friend is designing a Soleil shirt, and as soon as Nicole coughs up the art I want to make a “Team Trevor” shirt entirely for my own amusement. But in the meantime, whatever shall I do with myself?

Oh, right. I could write some more …

How to make your own MASKS T-shirts (and other stuff too)

Okay, here’s how I put together the T-shirts the stylin’ Masks Posse wore to Comic-Con. These directions tell you how to create the image on a black T-shirt, which is considerably harder than on a white one. All images referenced in this post are available in this Photobucket album.

1. Snag the image of Rae and Trevor holding hands—either full-color or black, white, and red. Save it to your computer.

2. Open it using the GIMP image manipulation freeware (available at http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/The_GIMP/gimp.html)

3. Copy the image (right-click + “Copy”).

4. Open a new image in GIMP of the same dimensions (my version was 4844 x 5358 pixels).

5. From the “Layers” menu, select “Add Alpha Channel.”

6. Also from the “Layers” menu, select “Color to Alpha” and set the color to whatever the background color of your image is. (In my case, it was white.)

7. Paste the Rae-Trevor image onto your new image.

8. Now here’s the tricky and time-consuming and crazy-making part. Using the Eraser tool from the main GIMP toolbox, erase all the parts of the image that aren’t Rae and Trevor. All that uniform white around them? Erase as much of it as you can, keeping as close to their bodies as you can without erasing the figures. You will see a checkerboard pattern emerge as you erase the black. Everywhere you see checkerboard, you will have a transparent image. So erase everything you don’t want to see on a shirt.

9. Save the file as a PNG file, and jump through any hoops GIMP makes you jump through to do that.

10. Go to http://www.cafepress.com/make/custom-t-shirts.

11. Click on whatever T-shirt you want to design. I created this design for a black T-shirt, so I recommend something that comes in black. There are sizing charts and whatall—just pick what you like, click on the shirt, and go to the shirt designer.

12. Upload your image to Cafepress. If it’s too big, go back to GIMP and re-save your image in a smaller size.

13. Add the text to your shirt. I used the Chandler font in a dark red for “MASKS” and in white for “Truth / Justice / Secrets.”

14. Drop your image onto the shirt and pull it around and resize it until it’s where you want it. The pattern will let you center your image, but please note that Rae’s and Trevor’s hands are slightly off-center because Trevor’s throwing arm sticks out a little more on his side. I chose to center their hands over the S in MASKS, and centered the text. Don’t go outside the boundaries of the design area on the shirt. Nothing outside that box will print.

15. When you’re satisfied, click “Done” and order your shirt!

TO DO THIS ON A WHITE SHIRT:

Just upload the image and add the text. No muss, no fuss.

TO MAKE BUTTONS:

The button images are available too. Upload them to either Cafepress or Zazzle.com (the site I used this time around), center and jigger them around until you’ve got what you want, and then order as many buttons as you can stand.

There. You are now the most stylish walking billboard in town!