THE CLIMBING TEE: 

This piece is part of our latest range, range 11. At Phish we take loads of inspiration from the great outdoors, native marine life and bush life are always prominent elements of our releases. Recently one of us has discovered climbing, and not only is it a great way to stay physically and mentally fit, its also a great way to experience the outdoors locally and afar with a new perspective.

A great way to practice designing is to draw things around you. At the time we hadn’t planned a climbing tee, but after studying and drawing an array of climbing gear, we decided to make a tee out of it.

Once the design was done we burnt it into a silk screen. This process involves coating a screen of stretched high mesh silk with a light sensitive mixture called Photo Emulsion, once coated and dried, we print the design out on transparency film and use it as a stencil to block the light from exposing areas of the screen. This causes the design area to remain unexposed and the rest of the screen becomes exposed, we then wash the screen down with water and the unexposed emulsion washes away and creates a silk stencil that we can then print with.

A fun part of the process is picking and choosing colours. For the climbing tee we decided to go with a mustard yellow tee to resemble a strong energetic sandy stone finish, and paired it with a rich burgundy red to mimic the tones of the rock you’ll find in inland and Northern Western Australia.

Then it was time for the product photography. We decided to collect some stones and got together some climbing gear to create a bit of a theme around the tee.