Monday, September 17, 2007

Hand Drawn Beanworld T-Shirt Found in Beanworld Archive!

A while ago, in my post about The Beanworld Dress I mentioned that I've a bit of a history drawing with marker on T-shirts. I started ruining, not only my white T-shirts, but those of all the other kids in my neighborhood after the summer of 1961--my first season at Camp Thunderbird in Bemidji MN.
At Camp Thunderbird, having your T-shirts drawn upon by an incredibly talented man named Jim "Pogo" Ploss was considered a big priviledge. Pogo was one hell of a cartoonist and song writer. The influence he had on me is considerable. I plan to write quite a bit about him when I can get my hands on my drawings and photos from those days. They are at my parents' house not with me here out west.
But...having said that, I learned how to draw on cotton watching Pogo and have done it on and off ever since.
I went through an incredible period during the late '70s and early '80s drawing highly stylized, whacked out vibrantly colored versions of Superman, Batman, and Fantastic Four on T-shirts using Pantone markers.
I used to wear them all around town and to comic book conventions in the years before I had gotten up my courage to show Beanworld to anyone.
Most of those T-shirts are packed up SOMEwhere--and for sure the sketches and drawings for the shirts exist somewhere too! (I never intentionally throw away anything to do with Beanworld --but I often file stuff according to methods and protocols I cant quite remember later.)
Anyway...above is a photo of Cory holding a hand rendered T-shirt that I found yesterday (between visits to see Margaret) folded up next to the Blue Bean Composition. It is dated 1993, so it is a rather late entry into my oeuvre of hand drawn T-shirts.
As I find more, either the actual T-shirts or photos of them, I'll post them here.

1 comment:

Dan Goodsell said...

This post is just packed with great tidbits of what we have to enjoy in your future blog postings....Can't wait to see the superhero shirts.