Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 21, 1993 TAG: 9309210055
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KAREN L. DAVIS SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Randy Johnson, owner of Roanoke's SCENE 1 T-Shirts, would.
He's a wildlife artist, and T-shirts are his canvas.
He's also a stickler for detail. He prefers to use live models to develop true-to-life designs for his screen-printed shirts.
Recently, Johnson purchased an African Emperor scorpion from an exotic animal dealer for a new design. Like a bee's sting, the dark teal Emperor's venom can be deadly to people with allergic tendencies.
For a while he kept brilliantly colored, poison-arrow frogs, shipped in from the tropical rain forests of South America. The frogs carry the most virulent biological toxins known, so Johnson and his staff of two had to handle them with latex gloves.
Next, he hopes to acquire an armadillo, and he's already talked with veterinarians about how to properly tranquilize, if needed, and care for the armored critter.
"We don't mistreat the animals," he said. When he's finished with them, he donates them to a private collector or institution that displays them for educational purposes.
If Johnson can't ship in live models to study and photograph at his Merriman Road graphic-design and screen-printing shop, he travels to see them in their element.
Like the time he visited Birds and Animals Unlimited in Orlando, Fla., to see a Rainbow-billed toucan. There, professionals who train animals for use in theme parks and commercials posed the toucan in various positions and settings while he shot rolls and rolls of film.
After studying the model and photographs, Johnson spends about 100 to 200 hours on an ink-and-pencil drawing. To refine the detail tones, he sends the black-and-white image off to be "half-toned," or reproduced in tiny dots on film. Then, with an airbrush and acrylics, he paints a color overlay on matte acetate to register atop the drawing. Finally, color separations, necessary for printing, render one piece of film for each color. With so many steps involved, Johnson can spend several weeks to several months on a single design.
The toucan design is still on the drawing board. But while Johnson was in Florida studying the bird, he also visited Gator Jungle and shot some close-ups of an adult alligator's head for a future design.
Handlers roped the good-sized gator and held it down for him.
"I wanted to wet the alligator's nose for a different texture," he said.
The handler told him it was okay to fetch a cup of water from the alligator pool. The gators were well-fed and fairly used to people, so they weren't likely to mistake him for lunch.
"There were about 50 to 100 five-to-seven-foot-long alligators in this pool, but they all scattered in fear when I approached," Johnson said.
He noticed a board near the pool, briefly wondering why it was there, as he stooped at the edge to fill his cup with water. But one cup wasn't enough.
He had to go back to the pool a second time.
And the second time, one of the more aggressive gators eyed Johnson's fit, lean build more closely.
"When I got close, he charged me."
Per the handler's shouted instructions, "I backed up, grabbed that board and tapped him on the head to scare him away," Johnson said.
The alligator immediately backed off, unharmed.
Why risk life and limb for a T-shirt design?
"I want these images to be beautiful, informative, accurate and unexpected on the medium of the T-shirt. Because we can no longer afford to think of ourselves as separate from the environment, the best thing I can do with my art is to stimulate someone's interest in the natural world," Johnson stated on his Pocket Creatures brochure.
Pocket Creatures, a trademark of SCENE 1, is a design concept he came up with years ago for a wildlife art show.
"I needed something unusual for a poster tie-in with T-shirts, so I did the Pocket Falcon. And when I got a lot of requests after the show, I knew I was onto a great idea," Johnson said.
At first glance, the Pocket Falcon appears to be perched on a front shirt pocket. But the colorful Kestrel is really an artistic illusion hand-printed on a plain shirt with no pocket.
The falcon was the first design in a line of Pocket Creatures that now includes a green iguana, a corn snake, a blue and gold Macaw parrot, a cuddly domestic kitten, a baby alligator and the Poison-arrow frogs.
Johnson studied fine art at Florida State University and got interested in wildlife art while working as an illustrator for Florida's Department of Natural Resources. Later, he became editor and art director of the state's GEOJOURNEY Magazine. He conceived the original artwork for Florida's Save The Manatee Program and produced his first T-shirt design to publicize the plight of the endangered sea mammal.
He started his own business in 1983 in California, after moving there to work for and learn from a friend already in the T-shirt business. He relocated his family to Roanoke just a year ago.
Johnson said he and his wife, Karen, picked Roanoke from a city ranking list for its "good public school system, low crime rate, good air, good water and natural beauty. For people in a family mode, this is the best place in the world."
In the past 10 years, Johnson has carved a niche for his Pocket Creatures and wildlife T-shirts as a wholesale supplier to stores and catalog companies such as The Nature Company, Rainforest Action Network, Real Goods, Campmor and Mango Republic. His shirts also have been featured by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and several environmental groups, including The Peregrine Fund, Predatory Bird Research Group, Florida Audubon and the Vermont Institute of Natural Sciences. Three designs are now in the final selection process by World Wildlife Fund in England for the spring catalog.
He's also planning a Harpy Eagle project that Conservation International in Washington, D.C., will use to raise funds and develop an eagle preserve in Guyana, South America. Johnson said Neil Rettig, a world-renowned photographer who has made films for the National Geographic Society, has agreed to furnish his still photographs and eagle cinematography as reference materials for new artwork.
\ Every shirt is hand-printed at the Merriman Road shop. The shop has four screen-printing presses, three of which Johnson built by hand. One of the presses can handle up to six colors.
A separate screen, called a stencil, is required for each color, and most designs use four colors and four screens. After printer Tom Dorathy puts a blank shirt on the press, he alternately aligns each screen, according to the design specs, as he separately applies each color of ink. The shirt dries in a large oven, then drops off a conveyor into a box.
"We can do 60 to 80 shirts an hour by hand-printing, if it's a fast-printing design," Johnson said.
"I like the idea of hand-printing, as opposed to getting automated equipment," Johnson said.
The shop keeps about 2,000 shirts in inventory. Although not set up to handle retail business, "We are getting more and more people who see our sign and walk in to buy shirts," Johnson said.
\ Karen L. Davis is a Roanoke free-lance writer.
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by CNB