animal instinct

I made the artwork for this mix tape over the summer. My friend Hugo from the event told me that he wanted something animalistic for the cover. Or something like that. He always tells me some of his ideas and I usually take them in another direction. I’ve always been a fan of album art, so it was a treat for me to make this for him. Text is from my typewriter, as usual.

banjo man returns

This is another image from the same story featuring the bearded man and the banjo. It was a very small image in the book, I made it as big as I could on the shirt. I love the image.

desired colors

The final project for one of my classes was to make a multi-colored design for a shirt. I had already used this design, but in one color. I decided to make it multi-color. I love the results. Only 8 shirts were made with the design.

banjo

Looking through a vintage children’s book, I encountered this image. I usually take an image and remove it from it’s content. Here I decided to use the text that was right above the image. While I was in class making the shirts, I noticed a visiting student was watching me work attentively while I made these shirts. He came up to me and asked me if I would mind putting that design on the blank shirt he was wearing. It was the best compliment I could receive. Of course he got the design.

plastic passion

I had photocopied the image of this woman and had a number of ideas in my head of how to use her for a design. I went to see The Cure that same week, and after they played Plastic Passion I knew what I had to do. The design was created on the screen and only 7 shirts were made.

il campione

Here’s the second flyer for this season’s Discoloosers. No explanation needed. Il campione means the champion. All work was manual, text regarding date and venue was added by my friends in Italy.

i can do it!

I was playing around with images and came up with this. Both the caption and image are from vintage books, different sources. I brought them together to create this. Only 5 shirts were made.

whore killers

This is the other whore-themed design. Both designs were created using the photocopier, and only a few shirts were made.

whores

I’ve experimenting more with creating designs on the photocopier. I looked through the many clippings I have and found two clippings with the word whore. I decided to create two whore-themed designs. The image is probably from the 60's, the clippings from the 70s.

back in chiapas

I met Romeo last year when I went to Chiapas for the first time. I was in San Cristobal de Las Casas, one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever visited. I remembered I was walking around the city. I pass by this gallery on my way to the Mercado and see a young man putting out a sign that obviously was from a restaurant. Instead of the menu of the day though, he had listed what was on sale. Shirts, postcards, etc. I liked his approach and decided to stop by after the Mercado. “I thought you weren’t stopping by”, he said as I walked into the gallery. Then I saw it – the gay art all over the walls and all over the articles he had for sale. The common themes here were religion and sexuality.

I ended up hanging out with Romeo quite a bit during that trip. We’ve become good friends since then and I proposed that we work together for this trip. We exchanged some ideas through email. I packed images, photocopies and blank shirts for my trip to Chiapas. When I get to San Cristobal, I text him while having some tacos by the mercado. “Let’s meet at the usual place”, he says. So I head off to meet him at the same place where he once read my chocolate cup after I was finished with it.

gays mexicanos

Here are a few more Mexican gay pins. All the images are vintage and were used to scale. I typed the txts and glued them on to the images.

organic

this is part of a series I did a few months ago, my organic series. There are several pieces. I plan to develop this idea further. The pictures I used were from an early 70s photo album that I found. These were created using a photocopier, a typewriter and acrylic paint.

a look back

I created these pieces using images from vintage books. The background is made from pages from a book that I painted over. I clipped the images and coupled them with some captions I selected. As usual, matching the right caption with the image was the hardest part. I love the way these turned out.

these charming men

I took a silkcreening class this past semester and it was a great experience. I learned a lot and also got to make some very cool stuff. This was my first design. We were told to pick something simple. I used an image I saw in a 1967 physical fitness book. I stared at the image for a while until the caption came to my head. ‘This Charming Man’ is one of my favorite Smiths songs. I made a number of shirts and a few tote bags as well. I don't have the screen anymore, so I probably won't be using this design again in the future.

lucha candles

I found some vintage wrestling photographs during my last visit to Mexico City’s Lagunilla Street Market. What struck me the most about the photographs was their amateur look, most of them looked like they could have been taken at people’s homes. I bought the photographs and decided to create some art with them. I decorated these candles using photocopies of those images. Each candle is unique, only a few of each image will be made. All my work is manual - I only used a photocopier, scissors and glue for this project.