Duality Masks

The Duality Masks started in a sketching session with two plain circles. Aparna has always liked the happy and sad theater masks, which balance each other out, and began to see the circles as masks. She wanted to do an angel and a devil instead. As she drew them, the idea became that the good people in this world usually suffer the most, while those who are bad profit off the good by exploiting them. So the angel is the sad mask, and the devil is scheming. It plays on the traditional theater masks, and it shows the duality of people in society right now.

It starts with the two shapes. They are blocked off first, with the focus on the expression each mask should carry. The face is the easiest part to draw, because the eyes and the mouth carry most of the expression. The teardrop was planned from the start, along with a second character on the side.

The second sketch is drawn on top of the first, cleaning up the shapes and tweaking details. The angel's mouth was redrawn to suit the expression better.

Once the basic shapes are set, base colors go in to see what works. The two side characters are added to balance the masks. The colors carry the duality as well: red and blue, usually tied to bad and good. The angel gets light, cloudy heaven blues, and the devil gets the classic hellfire red, all in a classic cartoon look.

DTF printing can't have any transparency, so the outline is blocked in with black first and the colors go on top. The devil has a red base, with shadows that run from dark red to black and a lighter red for the highlights. The angel keeps the same base color from the last step, with darker blues blocking off the shadows. The tears are a darker blue so they stand out.

The masks were among the first designs ever made, and they worked as standalone masks with their little side characters. It took a while to know which text would suit them. The answer was a cloud for Toxic and fire for Society. Toxic was outlined first, while Society was still being sketched, with a rough sketch behind it and more sketching on top to see what looked better.

Once the lettering shape was right, it was filled in with black and tested against different colors to see which complemented each other most.

This was one of the first color options shown to the team, with pink clouds and purple and orange flames. It didn't balance out, so there was some trial and error with the color combinations before the final version.

Every print is hand-pressed in-house onto the garment you're holding.