Kurosawa / Mifune clothing

Anyone know of any websites or shops that sell shirts with an Akira Kurosawa or Toshiro Mifune design? I’ve checked eBay and the like but they’re pretty bad; its no wonder the same shirts appear to be unsold for months running.

I’ve always wanted one to be honest, and although there are custom design shirt websites out there, I fear making my own would end up with diastrous results. D:

Everything from beer coasters to t-shirts are available from the Kurosawa Production / HoriPro Kurosawa merchandise shop.

If you end up ordering anything, let us know what the quality is like! 😆

Edit: The range of items is not huge though, and the website doesn’t seem to work quite as intended anymore.

Yep, the Ebay stuff is rather lame.

There is http://www.kurosawa-drawings.com which offers Kurosawa paintings, some that can put on shirts, the site however isn’t the easiest to order from, and expect several days for a poorly worded half Japanese/half English email to arrive so to complete your order.

I’ve seen a handful of designs planned for Tokyo’s AK100 event already. None are fantastic, and all have the AK100WT logo on them, however the cover art for a calendar(can’t find the image), was pretty good, and I would suspect that to pasted on everything and anything.

Although I don’t know if the mass amount of merchandise they have plan will be push out of Tokyo.

I haven’t seen anything Mifune, minus the Ebay stuff.

I’ve used the custom shirt sites before for other stuff, and they work really well. You just have to be careful of image boarders, and the transition between image and shirt, otherwise it can look stupid.

Vili, with the intercept !

I’ve seen that site before but what I’m looking for is not Kurosawa’s drawings but rather, a screencap or photo of Kurosawa or Mifune on a shirt or similar clothing. Shame there’s no websites or shops about with such items of clothing; it would be a nice niche market to tap into.

Thanks for the links though Vili (I don’t know why, but the beer coasters I found to be particularly amusing – Kurosawa’s drawings and beer coasters offers a strange sight to the eyes ).

Are there any links on the internet to the AK100 shirts you are referring to Jeremy?

I would custom make one myself but a) I don’t know which is the best site out there in terms of being good priced and offering quality shirts to make a custom print on and b) as I say, I would probably make a botched job of it.

I think a great shirt would consist of a screencap / photo / picture of Mifune from Scandal on his motorbike or any from Stray Dog (I do go on about this film a lot, don’t I?). It’s my birthday tomorrow so I was hoping I could treat myself to a Kurosawa / Mifune shirt. Sadly to no avail.

http://www.to-promotion.com/ was the site that for a while had a few example, they were removed on an update in January. The images however were very small, and not capable of transferring to a shirt.

I would suggest, taking a screen shot of whatever movie you like(ideally one that is progressive framed, like Criterion), clean it up a bit with a photo editor, and use that as a shirt image. The size of a full size capture is perfect for a shirt transfer.

The above is technically illegal, but those shirt website are completely automated and nobody checks for copyright images. Worst case is they reject the print.

I can’t suggest one website over another, they all are more or less the same.

Wow, I am such a fool. I got really excited reading the thread topic, and thought that I could get an article of clothing that belonged to Mifune…! I am really pathetic.

The one Mifune-design T I always see on various sites is here: http://www.honcho-sfx.com/Mens/Mens-Toshiro-Mifune-T-shirt

But, allright, promise you guys won’t bandy this about (please don’t make fun of me)? I sculpted a small three-dimensional head of Mifune..and separate arms and legs and I made places where I can stitch those to a body so that I can have my own Mifune articulated-limb figure. His head is about 4 inches, so altoghether it would be about 30 inches…but I haven’t gotten that far as to make the body.

Honestly, it was the most difficult thing I have ever done. I wanted it to be characteristic of Mifune-not in one specific role-but relevant to several-a sort of “iconic” icon! Ha! So, I watched the films, and froze his profile…even holding the head up to the screen and comparing. One scene in the Musashi Miyamoto saga was especially good-where he is sculpting his own Kwan-Yin and thinking about his girlfriend. He sillhouettes into dark-perfect for checking the profile accuracy. I also tried to find multiple views so that I could understand the structure of his face-what it looks like from under the chin, from above, from behind.

Anyway, it was awesome, and very hard work, but it was fairly gorgeous, if I do say so myself. My little fetish object.

But. then I found out about this porcelain material in color-I tried to overlay the original head. And, not so great.

I cannot decide to start over or scrape or what? I had about 80 hours into the original, and it took every ounce of skill I had-even the nostrils had to be right, you know?

So, as for making t-shirts? Relative piece of cake! Jeremy lays it out cleanly.

Okay cheers Jeremy and co., I may just try a screencap of a Criterion, whether it’ll end up quality or not, who knows!

And Jeremy, have you actually done the screencap to shirt process yourself? Out of interest, what was the film(s)?

Happy birthday, Ryan!

Do let us know if you end up making that shirt. 🙂

Coco, you absolutely must send us a picture of that Mifune sculpture!! 🙂

I never done a shirt, but I’ve seen the end result and it was good.

You just first have to adjust the image for what can be realistic printed out.

Take a full 640×480 screen shot, crop out any boarders, you can upscale as large as around 1438 x 1081 with 100DPI, which is a bit over 14″x 10″ of printing without negative results. Then drop the color resolution from 256 to 16, adjust the levels if need(avoiding a lot of sky will help), this will set up the image to something near exact to what the printer can do.

From there you can in the website scale down the image, to which will only go to make it look better. This applies to B&W, in color you cant drop down to 16, so go 256, and just reduce the image size so the 100DPI is enough to produce clean image and color. Also depends on aspect ratio, so dont follow everything exact.

Much easier then I made it sound, and all this can be done in 1-2 minutes, using the free http://www.irfanview.net/ program. Something everyone should have anyways.

If have trouble, just tell what DVD and what time within it, and I’ll post the perfect image for a shirt.

My gift to you-Happy Birthday 😆

For my birthday, everyone here needs to chip in and get me a Panasonic AJ-HPX3700. It’s $60,000, and I would like 2, plus the $20,000+ in required accessories for each, so start saving.

Yes, this Mifune statue, is of great interest.

Vili wrote 3 hours ago:

Coco, you absolutely must send us a picture of that Mifune sculpture!! 🙂

I say.

Happy birthday, Ryan.

And if you manage to get something interesting with a Kurosawa T-shirt, please let us know.

Aw, Happy Birthday Ryan!

The coolest T-shirt I ever made I hand-painted from an album cover Siren by Roxy Music. ( http://www.amazon.com/Siren-Roxy-Music/dp/B0000256KK )You can paint acrylic directly on to the T-shirt fabric. It looked even cooler the older and more wrecked it got.

But, if you aren’t old-school, you can follow Jeremy’s more high-tech instructions. Oh, and Jeremy, I’ll start saving for your technology right away.

Everyone, my poor Mifune head is still waiting for a solution…the porcelain clay overlay isn’t right. I suppose I need to scrape-or start again.

Coco, you have too much cool hand-made stuff! A Roxy Music t-shirt!? And from one of my favourite albums of theirs, too? Bryan Ferry has actually had some interesting album covers, huh?

And there we go, I started humming “Love is the Drug”.

Jeremy, two Panasonic AJ-HPX3700s and the required accessories coming right up! Would you like fries with that?