Do you remember analog photo negatives?

I still have some, tucked away deep in the archives.

I always found them eerie and uncanny. Humans turned into zombies with black teeth. Burnt orange, weird cyan and violet everywhere.

But what did I expect? We don’t have an intuition for addition or subtraction of colors. Would you “expect” red and green adding up to yellow? The exact opposites of our usual, friendly red-yellow-green-blue are uncommon in the real world.

I once tried to create negative colored art by choosing the proper weird opposites – and invert the drawing afterwards. I failed immediately at choosing the right type of cyan for the (very characteristic) pure spectral red that I was after.

But then I tried to use my geometrical drawings as apparel designs – and it made me see the negative colors in a new light, literally!

I learned – from my own surprising reaction – that art I want to see on my walls is not necessarily the art I want to wear.

I played with most of my colorful construction that feature vibrant rainbow-like colors – tesselations created by the projection ways, usually separated by black lines. On a shirt, it gave me clown custom vibes. No amount of tweaking the actual design – selecting details, rotating, moving – could save it.

Out of despair, I considered simple, straight-forward transformations of the colors. I feel, this is an easy-to-explain “permitted” digital design step that still preserves the essence of the analog art.

The easiest of all transformations is just: hitting the Invert button.

And I loved the result! The burnt oranges add a touch of warm earth tones which makes the designs look less colorful but more wearable. The black lines become white which reminds me of white code art on black, rather than checkered patterns.

Judge for yourself – here are four new T-shirt designs:

Collage of mockups of models wearing colorful geometric art t-shirts - created from hand-drawn and digitally inverted descriptive geometry construction by elkement. Text points to store.elkement.art. Four different all-over printed crew neck t-shirts are available in a men's and women's cut.
Mockups of elkement’s T-shirt designs, based on original mathematical art paintings, digitally inverted. The store link given in the image is not active anymore (Sept. 2026)

I ordered “Spinning Projection” – as the difference in scale between the original and the T-shirt is largest. The original drawing is only 20cmx20cm, so on fabric it has been blown up to triple the size.

And modern printing technology did not disappoint: This is my new favorite quantum physics T-Shirt!

Photo of the back of a T-shirt in black, dark purple, and blue, showing a geometrical construction and formulae related to quantum physics. Created from a drawing on paper that has been digitaly inverted. By elkement.
Photo of a detail of a T-shirt in black, dark purple, and blue, showing a geometrical construction and formulae related to quantum physics. Created from a drawing on paper that has been digitaly inverted. By elkement.
Photo of the front of a T-shirt in black, dark purple, and blue, showing a geometrical construction and formulae related to quantum physics. Created from a drawing on paper that has been digitaly inverted. By elkement.
Spinning projection women’s t-shirt.