Well, after many, many hours, this project is nearly done. Many years ago, I did a design in Photoshop, where I tried to do a Tromp l’oeil illustration of a very famous plaque. This type of plaque is quite common among schools that teach the Filipino Martial Arts. You can see my original version here, as a poster.
Since then, I was contacted by John Malmo who is the administrator for the website www.MyFMA.net. John wanted to organize a community T-shirt project, where different schools would donate funds to having a really nice T-shirt silk-screened. He had seen my previous image on my website. The problem was that I had lost the original artwork in a hard drive crash. That being said, the original version would not have been silk-screenable, having way too many color gradations.
I told him I could redo the artwork, but it would take time. After some struggling, I was able to reduce the image to a 7 color silk-screen print. It’s nearing completion, as I write this I’m working on the color separations. The front of the T-shirt will have a star shape and the names of the contributing schools and communities. If you’re interested in getting one, check out the site for more info. These will definitely be collectors items as it will be a limited edition run.
Update:
It has recently come to my attention that some jackass online has stolen my artwork for use on his site. You can see the version he has here. You can see my original design here. I know for a fact that there is no other design out there that has these elements:
- The central shield shape has the image of Chief Lapu-Lapu, an historical figure in Filipino culture. This image was taken from a photograph lent to me by my friend Greg, who went to the Philippines in 2005, and shot this image on Mactan Island.
- There are many Moroland plaques out there, but none have these swords, in this alignment, with both axes (the patul and the capa-capa), AND the black banner where it says “Philippines”
- Last, the lighting and shading used in the shields in particular, are quite distinct.
It is quite obvious that this person or his web designer simply found a small version of my image on Google or somewhere similar, knocked out the background, and then put it on his site.
Please join me in contacting this person and requesting that he remove this image from his website. This is blatant copyright infringement. His name is Mark Mikita and can be reached at mark@fightology.com or at 11520 West Washington Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, USA 90066 or by phone at (310) 754-5517.
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