Now that the Christmas rush is over — I painted dozens of shirts for customers who wanted to give them as unique gifts — I’ve spent the last few weeks painting some new shirts.

Here are a few I painted for customers for Christmas, plus others I painted more recently:

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Angel Vancouver has the largest selection in Vancouver of the Bacelona-based Desigual clothing line for men, women and kids. We recently received a new Desigual shipment that included a number of fall coats and sweaters for women, plus Desigual shoes,  boots and some colourful rain boots. We ship worldwide.

And here’s a sneak preview of a Desigual men’s T-shirt (left) for spring 2014, which should be arriving soon. It’s called Monkey 3D:

If you’re looking for a custom hand-painted shirt, call Angel  (604) 681-0947 or email jackie@angelpaint.com

And Click here to read about a shirt I painted for actress Dakota Fanning.

Angel Vancouver is located at No. 2 Powell Street in the Gastown district of Vancouver, Canada. Our store is on the corner of Powell & Carrall Street in Maple Tree Square, which is where Vancouver began.  The photo above shows what my store looked like in 1886.

Desigual’s slogan is La Vida es Chula (Life is Cool)!

Today’s music is Gotye singing Somebody That I used to Know; the video features some cool body painting:Gotye’s (pronounced gott-tee-ay) real name is Wouter De Backer. His friends call him Wally. He was born in Bruges, Belgium but moved to Australia with his family when he was two years old. He explained to Sound on Sound magazine how he struggled with writing the song, which started with his sampling the guitar of Brazilian jazz guitarist Luiz Bonfá’s 1967 instrumental song “Seville”:

“Writing ‘Somebody’ was a gradual and linear process. I started with the Luiz Bonfa sample, then I found the drums, and after that I started working on the lyric and the melody, and added the wobbly guitar-sample melody. After that, I took a break, and a few weeks later I came back to the session and decided on the chorus chord progression, wrote the chorus melody, and combined that with sounds like the Latin loop and some of the percussion and the flute sounds that further filled the space. At that point I hit a brick wall. I was thinking: ‘This is pretty good, how can I get to the end really quickly?’ and I was trying to take lazy decisions to finish the song. I considered repeating the chorus, an instrumental bridge, a change in tempo or key, I even considered finishing the song after the first chorus. But nothing felt like it was strong enough. So the third session was all about writing the female part and changing the perspective. The arrangement of ‘Somebody’ is reflective of me moving towards using sounds that provide me with inspiration for a texture or a platform for an idea, and then through sonic manipulation and coming up with original melodies and harmonic ideas to make it my own. I guess the balance of sounds taken from records and samples I created myself is perhaps 50-50.”

He eventually used Kimbra, a New Zealand recording artist, to sing the female vocal. At the moment, Gotye’s song has been viewed more than 470 million times on YouTube. The most watched video is Gangnam Style by Korean guy Psy, which now has more than 1.8 billion views, surpassing the 971 million views of Baby by Canadian Justin Bieber.

And here’s Gotye’s video for the song Giving Me a Chance, animated and directed by
Gina Thorstensen & Nacho Rodriguez:Gina & Nacho also did this video for Spanish band Klaus & Kinski: