Drawing Trees and Other Things Green

Havn’t made any T-shirts since screen printing class in Boston 13 or so years ago (Oh what I would do for the space to setup a screen printing studio today!). That said a year and half ago my boss for a trail construction company up in Maine asked if I’d be down to design an image for our work shirts and/or extra swag he wanted to brand. He already had his logo so I came up with this Birch tree forest with a lonely trail winding between the trees. Long story short he decided he wasn’t a big fan. Wanted a little more trail work themes evident in the image. Fair enough!

Birch Woods T-shirt original drawing


After awhile I decided I still wanted to see it on a shirt. As I said I don’t have the space or at this point the funds to invest in a screen printing setup so I used a direct to garment print on demand service to try it out.

Trying the dang thing on! Don’t mind the dirty mirror..


Pretty spiffy if I do say so myself, and oh my, would you just look at those calves! I’m constantly falling in and out of art making while balancing life and work with the rest of us but I was looking for something fun to do to get me back into some drawing and painting so I decided to make another tree drawing potentially to be a T as well.

The first drawing was inspired by the Birch tree forests of Maine I was spending time in. Those forests reminded me of the Aspen trees of Colorado (fun fact: one giant living organism connected by the root system). Aspens are a strange and beautiful tree. Like the Birch their knots have eye like shapes that are always watching, though that was not depicted in my drawing. They aren’t quite my favorite tree out there. That crown goes to the Bristlecone. Only found around tree line in the mountains with a hardy wood that is constantly barraged by extreme weather and in turn ends up bending and twisting with the winds and having the bark swept right off of the predominant wind facing side. The oldest living tree in the world is a bristlecone in the Sierra Nevada Mountains at over 4000 years old, and many I would encounter in Colorado were in their 2000s.

bristlecone t-shirt (color: oxblood black)

Bristlecone T-shirt (Color: Oxblood Black)


I got going on this little series, as a side project to my computer coding classes and reintegrating to society in Richmond, Va; and came up with the name Trees on T’s. It’s so catchy I wanted to puke. I didn’t keep it. No name as of yet. As I got around to a third one though I didn’t really want to draw a tree. I wanted to draw Kudzu. It’s an invasive vine that covers forests sometimes for miles in the South. There isn’t much around here in RVA but I see it all over when I head a little further south to visit the parents. Everything it covers it kills. It, in turn is impossible to kill. So it only made sense to show it eating something, but instead of eating a forest I decided to have it eat a car.

Realized after these first three (more to come in the future at some point), an unintentional theme that ended up playing out more than the ideas of it all being trees was that in each drawing of nature there is some evidence or trace of humans. Each design is one small example of our relationship with nature. We build trails and roads through it. We tear it all down and build cities that we then decorate with bits of evidence of what had been in sidewalk trees, green grass lawns and public parks. We hike to the tallest sometimes coldest, windiest places so we can see more of it and we dump our cars and tires in it when we think no ones looking. All things turn to dirt and dust. Somethings just take longer than others. I’m not a no impact/no waste purist. If I was these shirts would be printed on thrift store finds. But I think it’s important to be aware and thoughtful of what footprint we are leaving.


If you dig the shirts you can pick them up in the shop in various colors and as many sizes as I could offer(unisex)!

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