During breeding season nature gets heavy-handed with blue-green makeup and punk hair-dos.
With their distinctive spotted feathers, bright blue-green colouring and tufted crests, these spotted shags/parekareka are thinking of romance (and fish.) What else does a shag do in it’s pre-nuptial plumage?
Shop for the double-sided version here, and the single-sided version here.
These black and navy tees with the double-sided Paua print are perfect for the summer. For a 15% discount through to January 5th use the promo code “KIWIART” here:
Cool, clean Pacific waters produce the bright iridescent colours of the paua shell—a watery treasure of New Zealand to keep you cool.
This art print is a composite of a charcoal drawing and hand-separated paua shell pattern printed in 6 colours which gives the paua design a shimmering quality. Illustration based on a photo by Rod Morris.
What a way to spend lockdown! As Surface Active’s graphic designer I built this new collection of awesome New Zealand Nature Inspired T-shirts from a mix of our legacy drawings, photolitho artwork and some new hand-rendered digital illustrations.
To celebrate the launch of Chrissie and my new store we’d like to share a storewide 15% discount offer that expires on January 5th. You can shop here https://surface-active.myteespring.co/?pr=DISCOUNT to get your Surface Active teeshirts.
The jewelled gecko is available here, and the kiwi is available here.
To celebrate the launch of Chrissie and my new store we’d like to share a storewide 15% discount offer that expires on January 5th. You can shop here https://surface-active.myteespring.co/?pr=DISCOUNT to get your Surface Active teeshirts. Use the promo code “KIWIART”.
So Chrissie and I have run our New Zealand wildlife art screenprinting company and clothing brand since 1985. Our brand is Surface Active—Artwear from New Zealand. As design pARTners we create wildlife T-shirts in the spirit of fun. Our subject matter is native flora & fauna, landscapes and Kiwiana—designs that celebrate some of the unique and beautiful assets of New Zealand, our country that we love.
We have had many requests to make our most popular T-shirt designs available again. So I made it my lockdown project to complete the job of launching our brand new Surface Active Teespring store.
From whales to wetas, paua to penguins—please browse through our store to see if there’s something for you.
All the best,
Design pARTners: Shaun Waugh (boss), Chrissie Terpstra (bossier)
Adelie penguins make everything better. Shop for kids and for adults.
Adelie Penguin kids tees are here:
Paua for the people. Kiwi as summers by the sea! Shop the range of Paua apparel and homewares here.
We believe drawing is an essential part of the creative process and all that you see in our store has begun as drawings. At 61cm x 91cm this original portrait of a tuatara rendered in pen and ink by Shaun has maximum impact as a poster. Shop the range of Tuatara homewares and apparel
here.
Kee-aa! Kid’s Kea New Zealand on a deep royal blue tee. Get your alpine parrot tees for adults and kids here.
Forest floor and Ocean. Two double-sided t-shirt designs just for kids. These lively charcoal pencil drawings are printed front and back—they look almost 3D.
Ocean: The dolphins, seals and whales are
here.
Forest floor: A scattering of native flora & creatures of the forest floor, some creepy, some cute—are
here.
Don’t say “oooh!”, say “aaah!” For this is on of the best looking wetas you’ll see. The recently discovered bluff weta can be found in scree and on rocky bluffs at Kaikoura and Mt. Somers and all over this t-shirt, available for adults and kids here.
Surface Active Artwear • Christchurch New Zealand
You can read more about the Surface Active back story here.
April 2020
Dear Surface Dweller,
We’re excited to announce our fab Surface Active TeeSpring store has popped up! Our Surface Active Artwear celebrates some of the beautiful assets of New Zealand. Please pause & peruse our first two designs over at Teespring—Adelie penguins and Tuatara.
from Surface Active
Noisy, stinky & aggressive in reality but ain’t they cute? This design is a chuckle with penguins coming & going on the front and back. By the magic of art the white cotton of a plain teeshirt is transformed into Antarctic sea ice so this design is available on white only.
This imagery tells a tale of a dramatic before and after scene that unfolded when this formation of hungry Adelie penguins hesitated near the edge of the Antarctic sea ice, then they were suddenly faced with a leopard seal on the prowl in the waters just below.
This Adelie penguin all-over print, is available here for AUD$53.12
Design firm: Surface Active
Art direction: Design pARTners, Chrissie Terpstra and Shaun Waugh
Client: Surface Active
Graphic designer: Shaun Waugh
©magentadot brands
Surface Active T-shirts main neck label.
As an illustrative graphic designer, writer, desktop publisher; I was a design pARTner with Chrissie Terpstra in our in-house garment screenprinting studio. We learned that hand-pulled screenprinting is the medium of the hard labouring graphic artist.
Of course we were big fans of the humble T-shirt and by the mid 1980s they had become hot promotional items, garments on the outskirts of fashion, and a relatively new medium for the Graphic Designer’s art. What had for a long time been considered a poor medium for Graphic Design grew to an almost essential one.
All you have to do is walk down the street anywhere in the world since the early 80s to see what a ubiquitous promotional vehicle they have become. If you mail out 100 potential clients a direct mail brochure perhaps 200 people will see it. But mail out, or better yet, sell 100 T-shirts, and assuming they’re at all decent looking, you launch 100 walking billboards.
Keep on reading!
Christchurch is the gateway to Antarctica, has been for well over a century. The International Antarctic Centre was established in 1990, the visitor ‘Antarctic Attraction’ was opened to the public two years later.
In 1991 the Attraction’s “Antarctic shop” merchandising and trading manager invited New Zealand’s leading souvenir T-shirt screen printers to each enter a set of Antarctica T-shirt designs into a competition, speculatively, to be judged and voted on by staff members of the various national Antarctic programmes based in Christchurch—hundreds of world-class scientists, explorers, transport support staff and the likes involved in preparing for their work in Antarctica. The brief was wide open, wildlife art designs, historical designs pertaining to Christchurch’s involvement with the 1912 epic of Captain Scott’s race to the Pole.
Keep on reading!
ORANA WILDLIFE PARK, MCLEANS ISLAND, CHRISTCHURCH
The retail market of the garment trade is tough, for an open range zoo like Orana Park, with one foot in the quality recreational experience sector and the other in the tourism sector, trading is highly seasonal. The competition for the customer’s discretionary spending dollar and the fact the park is a charitable trust that generates 95% of its income from gate takings and their ‘Trading Post’, demanded that the very best way of developing the Park’s new T-shirt range be used for this custom T-shirt design and print project.
Keep on reading!
Surface Active | Making waves in a sea of sameness.
Hyper-real graphics like the Jewel Gecko make a vivid impression. Why? Because people relate to them! Dramatic lifelike renderings of wildlife produce a prompt and typically positive response in a person’s mind. People relate to real things and enjoy them most. It is the route to why people relate to many of our eye-catching and impactful “SurfaceActive” wildlife-art-to-wear designs.
How did we do it? The technique of colour separating this design by hand involved breaking it down into eight separate designs, from which the screens are made. The separations are printed over each other, in layers to create the original hand screenprinted design. This crafty route is the only way to achieve the unparalleled vivid impression of the design.
Fashions come and go, then come around again, but the fundamentals stay. The inspiration for the designs came from getting to know superlative alpine/wildlife photographer Colin Monteith, and renowned wildlife photographer Rod Morris. We visited their image libraries to cherrypick the most beautiful jewels in their amazing archives that we could see had the potential to be developed into hand-separated wildlife art screen gems.
Keep on reading!
Surface Active Wildlife art – making waves in a sea of sameness.
To make digital art of New Zealand’s Tuatara, that has the look and feel of a natural line drawing, the editing, fussing process can take hours and while it isn’t easy it is a great deal of fun. I take pleasure in design and I enjoy using the computer to draw with the stylus, inking over the scan just as easily as I would with traditional pen and ink. The production of design work is an incredible drill when you are doing your utmost to make it terrific. I do my utmost to make sure that every design project I work on is mega.
Keep on reading!
Popular Urban Art or vandalism of private property? That thorny contention was settled unequivocally in post-quake Christchurch 2011. What now is considered pro-social and broadly popular urban art has morphed out of counter culture to become one of the totems of the fine art world. The gallery showcases my comp entry and a selection from my Stronger Christchurch, and Rise street art photo libraries.
The front cover of my Watch This Space logo presentation document depicts the logo visualised screenprinted onto the back of a woman’s red hoodie garment.
Since the 2011 earthquakes Street Art is emerging all over the central city of Christchurch, like life it finds a way to vitalize empty sections and animate the bare walls that dominate the landscape with vibrant colour and youthful design.
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As a designer every now & then you get involved with a project that takes on a life of its own. The story of the Eldee Velocette is part of both NZ and Australia’s classic motorcycle racing folklore. In Feb 2013 I joined a dedicated bunch of Velo enthusiasts, who had serious plans afoot; with improved materials and greater knowledge of methods and concepts, to design and build a ‘modern classic racer’ in New Zealand that raced at the Isle of Man Classic TT, August 2014.
Keep on reading!
