T-shirt memories

My younger sister recently celebrated a big birthday, and I made up a special birthday video featuring a few old photos from our childhood. While going through the old photos I found one in which we were wearing t-shirts while on holiday in Benidorm, Spain. It was the 1970’s and these were just regular unbranded t-shirts of the time. My sisters were wearing an image of a guy with a zombrero taking a snooze next to his donkey and I was wearing a comic-strip featuring Captain Whizzo, a budget version of our comicbook superheroes. I decided to recreate my sister’s t-shirt design and have it printed as another birthday present. It was a little difficult as the original photo quality was quite poor. But you can see my progress and final effort here below.

So, after a lot of tweaking and improvisation here is the final result below thanks to the use of my open source image editor Gimp. After that I then simply uploaded a high resolution version to a print-on-demand website so I could order and send it to my sister who lives on the other side of the planet. In this case I outsourced it to a project which I often collaborate my artwork with called Irish Nostalgia, just in case anyone else may have had the same t-shirt back in the day. If you were one of the same with this t-shirt back in the seventies, you can find my revived version here.

While I was staring at the old holiday photo, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic about my own Captain Whizzo t-shirt. It’s difficult to remember everything about those halcyon days of the 1970’s, we simply don’t have enough photos to help us reminisce. ‘Not like today where we take photos almost every day. I seem to remember only two t-shirts I had when I was young, one was an obscure blue ‘Jaws’ t-shirt and the other was good old Captain Whizzo. With this in mind I searched the internet to see if I could find any info on this character or the design. As it turns out, I found nothing but a few old photos of the same t-shirt worn by people in the USA and the UK. I suppose we had the similar chainstores in Ireland as the UK, eg Penneys/Primark & Woolworths. I’ve no idea where my folks bought my own t-shirt.

Anyway, with my recent focus on reviving my 70’s Retro Spanish holiday t-shirt I just had to indulge myself and set about recreating my Captain Whizzo t-shirt. Once again the photo quality was dead poor, so I scoured the net for better images. The results weren’t much better. Here’s a couple of wobbly screengrabs!

‘Looks like I had my work cut out for me!

Update: Recreating this design has proved to be a Triton Mess, but I shall endeavour to finish it. For now, I had uploaded a jazzed up Title design here to correspond with the main comic strip whenever that is complete. Watch this space Whizzovians!

Thanks for reading my blogpost here. I will write a new post when I have finished the final design, please subscribe or follow this blog (I’m still a novice with WordPress!)

Alan