Every design starts underwater. Not on a mood board — on a dive.
Most of them are created by Bryan, out of twenty-eight years of diving. When we started, photography was one of the main reasons we went — so some of these designs come straight from the photographs we took, and the rest from what those dives left behind.
Others are places we have not been yet: a photograph of a site we still hope to dive, or a story another diver brought back up with them. The adventure designs are further out again — characters, imagined places, pirates.
From the dive to the design
The imagination begins. Whatever we saw down there becomes a story first, and then the story becomes a design: ten to twelve hours of it, and several more hours of fine-tuning after that before it is finished.
That is why there are not forty designs yet. Each one is a dive that inspires us to create designs that let the memories become stories that we can share.
Why it is screen printed, in Oxnard
Two things mattered, and most printers give you one of them. The detail of the design had to survive onto the shirt — the colours, the linework, the gold in the frame. And the shirt itself had to be one you would actually put on, with a print that big across the back.
National Graphics, the next town down the coast in Oxnard, could do both. Screen printing holds the colour and the detail of our stories at the size we draw them, on a garment that stays soft and comfortable underneath it.
So the shirts are printed a few miles from the water most of these designs came out of.
Our Dives. Our Stories. Our Legacy.