Aloha Alternative
Hawaiian Shirts
It all started with the design used to decorate the background of this page, "Full-On Octopus." I had just figured out what Scalable Vector Graphics are and also realized that there were plenty of them available at my favourite resource for public domain images, Pixabay. Pixabay was also proving to be a rich ground for textures and background images. Put those two things together with some Layer Mode twiddling and boom, you have a shirt design. Full-On Octopus looked enough like some Hawaiian shirt patterns I'd seen before for me to want to make more patterns like this and put them on actual Hawaiian shirts.
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Currently, my Aloha Alternative designs come in three flavours: Layered, Scenic, and Foral. Layered designs are made of many layers of discrete, representative objects, usually on a theme. The objects usually overlap, changing scale and orientation. Scenic designs are just that, designs that portray scenery from around SW BC or at least evoke it. Finally, Floral designs reflect more traditional Aloha styling but using flora and fauna from British Columbia's southern coast.