Out of all the shirts we designed and produced so far, I was surprised to find that our Clan Albion shirt ended up being one of my favourites. Here's why:
At the start of our design process with the Scythe shirts we had established a specific perspective that we wanted all the shirts to have: that of looking up towards the mech. (Rather than the feeling in the board game of looking down on the mech.) It was important to have a consistent look between all the shirts, and having this perspective set at the start made that a good deal easier. With the Albion design, Andrew ended up getting carried away with his attention to details. This ended up making the design one of our most intricate.
But the artwork, no matter how good, is made or broken by the canvas it is printed on. And this canvas was a bit tricky. The t-shirt wholesalers we had restricted ourselves to working with had only a few green shirt options, and most of those were more of a primary bright green color, which we just didn’t love. In the end we settled on Bella & Canvas’ 3001CVC Heather Green, which has more of a subtle camo green that wasn’t too bright to the eye.
Working closely with our print shop here in Calgary, we tried a couple different print methods: first printing a green colour directly on the shirt ended up clashing too much, so instead we tried printing with a semi-transparent black ink. This allowed the artwork to adopt a natural darker shade from the shirt colour itself. The semi-transparent ink also ended up being thinner than standard ink allowing it to sink into the shirt material nicely.
This approach means the artwork is embedded into the fabric rather than resting on the top. This gives it a lovely soft touch (meaning that the artwork barely feels different from the shirt its printed on) and greatly increases the durability. By being more embedded into the shirt, the artwork won’t crease or crack over time, but rather just fade slowly.
The end result is a delight. It has a real understated look to it. It’s not a ‘punch you in the face’ green, and the artwork catches the eye without being too distracting. And I don't know what it is about the heather green colour, as all the scythe shirts use the same fabric, but it feels the softest and most comfortable out of all of them.
So if you are looking at our Scythe Collection, and trying to decided which one(s) you’d like, I’d heartily recommend if you try the Albion shirt, circa our 2020 vintage.
(*I should note that we only a have a few of these left in stock currently with a restock happening shortly. Once we are out of stock, they will be available for pre-order instead if you are still interested.)