Sunflower Stealie T-Shirt | Grateful Dead Inspired Graphic Tee | Botanical Psychedelic Shirt | Multiple Colors & Sizes | Deadhead Gift

Sunflowers represent joy, happiness, attention and orientation! This seems worth establishing up front. Yes, Helianthus annuus is enormous and cheerful and follows the summer around looking like somebody gave the sun a stem. Goldfinches adore the seeds—American Goldfinches are particularly attracted to sunflower and nyjer—and an entire sunflower patch can become a tiny yellow bird cafeteria. But sunflowers may also practice allelopathy. That is the wonderfully sinister botanical possibility that a plant can release compounds into its surroundings that affect the germination or growth of other plants. Researchers have identified several potentially allelopathic compounds in sunflower tissues, including one from germinating sunflower seeds called sundiversifolide. Its effects vary considerably by species and concentration, so don't go accusing the sunflower in your yard of attempted murder without evidence. Still: the big happy flower may be conducting chemical warfare underground. Which seems like an entirely appropriate flower to put inside a Stealie. THE SUNFLOWER STEALIE The Steal Your Face is one of those extraordinarily rare pieces of graphic design that survives almost anything you do to it. Reduce it to monochrome: still a Stealie. Fill it with flowers: still a Stealie. Put it on black, white, yellow, purple, orange, brick, taupe, blue, navy or whatever shirt wanders into the Studio next: still a Stealie. That's because underneath all the decoration is an exceptionally strong mark: circle, skull, lightning bolt, eyes, teeth. It stands up before the illustration even begins. And that's what interested us here. Instead of treating the skull as something that needed decorating, we treated it as a container capable of holding an entire little reality. Sunflowers grow through it. Leaves occupy the jaw. Color moves around the perimeter. The lightning bolt remains. The skull remains. Nothing gets lost. It just becomes something else. WHY SO MANY COLORS? Because we made the shirts rather than ordering a predetermined product line, and interesting choices are better than pretending everyone wants the same shirt. The same graphic behaves differently on every substrate. On black and dark navy, the flowers emerge from darkness. On purple, the whole thing gets wonderfully psychedelic. On yellow, the sunflower almost consumes the shirt. On brick and orange, everything gets warmer. On white, the botanical detail becomes extraordinarily clear. And then there's taupe. Taupe may be our favorite surprise because taupe has almost nothing to say for itself. It is magnificently neutral. The shirt disappears and leaves behind this screaming botanical Stealie floating in space. The non-shirt with the screaming Stealie. That's useful. Choose the one that looks like yours. IMPORTANT BOTANICAL INFORMATION / ROBERT MITCHUM / OTHER MATTERS Sunflowers are native to North America. Goldfinches like eating their seeds. Sunflowers may interfere chemically with neighboring plants. Robert Mitchum had one of the greatest faces ever issued to an American. The Grateful Dead proved repeatedly that a skeleton does not necessarily indicate a lack of dancing. Groucho Marx understood that eyebrows are architecture. And Eric “Butterbean” Esch demonstrated that the human form need not conform to conventional expectations in order to knock somebody absolutely senseless. My understanding is he could also dunk a basketball. That's not true I made that up. These facts are not presented as being causally related. We simply distrust product descriptions that conceal useful information. WHAT YOU'RE ACTUALLY BUYING A NikkiArcane Sunflower Stealie shirt, made here in the Studio and already existing in physical reality. These are not imaginary mockups awaiting fulfillment somewhere else like those big print on demand guys. This is just one dude making weird shit in his living room. The photographs show actual shirts from the current made inventory ready to ship. Colors and sizes are therefore limited to what presently exists, although new combinations may wander into this listing over time. That's intentional. When one shirt sells another is made to take its place. Just like real life. It could be like Earl Shieb... I'll print any shirt, any size, any color. That's right, I'll print any shirt, any size, any color. But, it isn't like Earl Shieb at all. We want this listing to accumulate a history. A drunken, soon to be forgotten history. A new color may appear. A size may return. Eventually a tie-dye may wander through. I may just slap this DTF on just about anything. Something we haven't even thought of yet is likely to appear. The design remains the constant. FIT / COLOR / CHOOSING YOURS Select your shirt color and size from the available variations. Because these shirts come from different blank inventories rather than one enormous standardized factory run, subtle differences in fabric, shade, manufacturer or fit may occur at any moment. Please use the photographs and variation information for the particular shirt you're choosing. That variation isn't a manufacturing problem. It's the point. ONE LAST THING ABOUT SUNFLOWERS The allelopathy story is more complicated than “sunflowers poison everything around them.” Experiments have found inhibition, stimulation and species-dependent effects depending on sunflower tissue, concentration and neighboring plant. Biology has once again declined our invitation to be simple. We approve. Plant some sunflowers. Watch for goldfinches. Be suspicious of the rhizosphere. Wear the shirt. The flowers know what they're doing. At least they appear to.