You Sealed Your Doom, Your Time Has Come

Spent a little longer than I thought I'd have to (always the case) on this t-shirt design due to "Hurricane" complications. Some shitty (very old) wiring fried when water got in our basement and we thought we were about to have an electrical fire so our power was out for a while. It's worth noting that the two things I opted to save in the event of a potential emergency were my cat and a portfolio of paintings, including this one:
I get pretty stuck for tshirt design ideas, because they're more design oriented and less narrative and a lot of the ideas I have stored away work better for full paintings. This shirt started with some gates I saw and photographed at Edgecomb Cemetery in Maine:
I added some touches to the original urn:
Draped urns are pretty common in Victorian Cemetery iconography, with the urn representing the body and the veil representing the "veil" separating the world of the living from the world of the dead. Oddly enough, Cremation was very rare in Victorian times, but the cremation urn was a popular symbol of the corporeal world anyway.

The Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet and is often used to represent simply "the end" or the end of time or of life. You'll also see it along with the alpha (the beginning) in christian churches fairly often. A Theta would also have been appropriate and I thought about working both of them in but thought it was overkill.

It should be pretty clear by this point that I really like doing mist and smoke and ghost hands, because I've worked them into most things I've done for the past year. It's just really fun to paint and I think it adds some dimension.
If you're interested in exploring cemeteries and making sense of the symbolism there (and there's tons of it) this book is really great:
It's organized by symbol type (animals, plants, religious, figural, secret societies) , full of images from all over the world, and conveniently small so you could feasibly bring it out to a cemetery with you. AND you can order it from the Laurel Hill gift shop and in doing so support one of my favorite Philadelphia historical landmarks.

About to buckle down and work on a movie poster design and in the early stages of planning a curated show with some friends. More on that later....