August's retro print T-shirts and glasses

As usual, the reveal of this month's retro print designs from Juan Ortiz has been followed by the designs getting applied to T-shirts and glasses as well. Since I posted the poster designs StarTrek.com have done their usual feature, with Juan Ortiz explaining some of his inspirations and thought process, so here's each of the Mighty Fine T-shirts with the Ortiz commentary:

Plato's Stepchildren

This one, of course, was inspired by the Gone with the Wind poster. It's very iconic and captures the moment.

Sometimes I'll layout a concept in illustrator and then move from there. But I remember being excited by the eyelashes, of all things. They came out so rough yet simple. It may sound strange, but I knew the poster would work, based on those lashes. The rest of the piece just had to work to accentuate them.

Originally, the scratches were supposed to imply an old paperback cover, but I feel that the end result is more of an old Roman fresco wall painting. That works for me, too.

The Mark of Gideon

I remember doing several layouts, but not having any luck. The episode itself makes little sense. Why create an entire duplicate of the Enterprise when all they really needed to do was ask to relocate part of the population to another planet. Easier said than done, I guess. That's why my poster has the Enterprise leaving a desperate population behind.

Journey to Babel

The word journey in the title implied a voyage aboard a tall ship to me. Since the Enterprise has no tall sails, I compensated by cropping in close and evoking the tall sail image. The shuttlecraft helps add depth and scale and makes up for not being used in my version of “The Galileo Seven” poster.

Return of the Archons

For some reason I pictured an article or story in the Sunday paper with this image of the two sentinels. When I was a kid, I used to love going through all the papers on Sunday. I'm sure it was a ritual in many homes before the computer. Creating artwork for newspapers is what editorial illustration is all about. I would do it every day.

And here are the designs on the Bif Bang Pow glasses: