Zombey Road

Since the first day I opened the M.A.M.S shop on CafePress, I’ve been trying to figure out how to capitalize on my region’s affinity for zombies and zombie culture. The most famous films shot in the area are of course, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. While, Land of the Dead was set in Pittsburgh, the film was shot in Canada. Kevin Smith even filmed, Zack & Miri Make a Porno in Pittsburgh, complete with fictional hockey team, The Monroeville Zombies, in the movie. Me, I am a cinemaniac and have an affinity for human brains….kidding. So, of course, I have a section dedicated to Zombie Ware on my CaféPress store. As of right now, there are only four designs. The Zombie Food Pyramid, Moods of the Living Dead, Brains!, and my newest design, Zombey Road. This last design was a labor of love as it took five minutes to conceive and two months to actually design.

The basis for Zombey Road is simple. I mixed Abbey Road with walking zombies. Simple, right? Not on your life. I did everything I could to make it work. Suddenly, it all became clear. Silhouette it! Then the features would be easy to hide among the shadows. Not to mention, there’s a great contrast of the bright crosswalk strips from the famous Abbey Road intersection to the black shuffling shapes moving across the street in search of their prey, which in this case, would be John Lennon. Ironic, as he was the first Beatle to die and here the position in which he held on the album cover, first, is the only human left….or is it?

In any case, since I like to double up my efforts, I need a dark shirt design as well which also presented another problem. How do I break up the lines between the legs of the zombies and those famous crosswalk strips? Again, it was easy. I needed to retain the white lines, so I made them an outline. For the inverted design that would appear on the dark shirts, I decided that I had to, again, keep the white stripes and erased an outline around the legs and feet, giving the zombies, the familiar gait of the Beatles.



After fiddling around with different design styles for two months, I finally nailed it this weekend. I think it came out rather well. In all, it took me two hours of zoomed in erasing to finish up the images. They went up on Easter Sunday and no the irony is not lost on me. After all, Jesus is patient zero in zombie popular culture, right? Of course, my customers, as few as they are, will be the judge, jury, and executioner on this. I’ll either be praised or crucified.