A massive pile of pink, black, heather gray, and a rainbow of artificial color is splashed with Logan Spreng’s designs. Across the small, medium, large, and extra-large cotton t-shirts like an artist’s canvas pulled from their frames, hearts, blood, Lincoln, and Champagne logos peer through the sea of color and call for double takes.

Each visible design pops: the outline of a boy and girl holding hands (the boy as connect-the-dots with a solid heart, the girl as a solid with a connect-the-dots heart) and the Wyoming cowboy bucking over a saloon-style font for Colorado, with a white seven over bronco-orange and a halo hanging from the seven’s arm.

Spreng sifts through a couple shirts on top of the pile. He looks closely at the connect-the-dots shirt.

“I didn’t use the computer for this one. I made and cut out 110 dots an put them on the screen,” he said, folding the shirt and placing it aside. “I thought it was a good idea at the time.”

Spreng is an independent t-shirt designer and printer in Colorado. His company, Champagne, makes t-shirts, all from his basement and all dabbled with a bit of love, blood, and tears.

“When you think champagne, you think high-quality, which is what I want people to think,” said Spreng.

Spreng’s passion for t-shirt design started in his early twenties. He began designing because he liked the idea that someone, somewhere could wear his work.  He challenged himself with five-minute designs, an exercise he used to create a significant portrayal of his ideas within timely parameters. His dream was to design t-shirts full time.

He consigned some of his work to local skateboard shops and friend’s bands. When he found out that people bought them, he started to “force himself into something different,” and strove for patience in his work.

In his basement-studio, there are no mass production press’, no fancy MacBooks; it’s just Spreng, an old PC with Adobe Illustrator and his unyielding work-ethic.

And he’s constantly in the grind.

In his room, lit by a few architect lamps that look like lucky grabs from the Salvation Army, a lone TV tray acts as a drafting table. Spreng bends at the knees and the waist to unfold the small tray.

He pulls a medium, white crew-neck from the heap of the cotton rainbow. He drapes it carefully over the tray to reveal a famous sketched portrait of Abraham Lincoln in its lower corner. He lets a Lincoln-like smile go as he smoothes out the wrinkles and adjusts his various wristbands.

“I really like Lincoln. I think he was a great president,” he said, through his curtain of blond hair. “But he was assassinated, which was awful. I’ve got something pretty for that.”

Half of Lincoln’s head looks like a broken beer bottle, and it’s crucial to the rest of Spreng’s design.

Spreng grabs a screen from the wall of carefully organized shelves of screened designs that start at the floor and pile up to the lofty basement ceiling. The screens look like pieces of raw-hide with stenciled-designs in the center thin enough for paint to seep through. Each leather-like piece is stapled snugly to a wooden frame and resembles a homemade artist canvas.

Spreng’s snaps of Americana morph from paper to print in a long, almost archaic process. He builds each frame for the screens in his garage wood-shop and gets fabric paint and other supplies from a Denver art dealer.

He puts the screen face down on the tray. He grabs some red paint, dabbing it close to the edge with a plastic spoon as if he’s getting ready to slather tomato sauce on a square pizza.  After three swipes with an edge tool, he lifts the screen to expose a blood-and-flower-spattered Champagne logo bursting from Lincoln’s cracked head.

“That was fun,” he said, still standing with his eyes glued to the T-shirt. “That’s the first one of its kind.”

Spreng isn’t looking to be a part of an art circle. He doesn’t want to be critiqued or put in a position where he needs to explain himself. A “dee-raffe” design, the combination of a deer and giraffe, looks simple enough to stay out of any smug conversation. Spreng’s only explanation for the design is “animals are awesome, and I love them.” He isn’t looking for layers of exposition.

“It’s just something I haven’t seen before,” he said, easily filing the dee-raffe screen on a cookie jar-high shelf. “And I had to draw it on a piece of paper, and see it on a shirt.”

Spreng sits on an oversized love-seat next to the drafting tray. He sorts through different print-outs, pencil sketches, and a few stray t-shirts that crowd a recliner.

Some designs need second looks; Spreng smiles at a portrait of Charles Manson centered on a black t-shirt, and he points out the kiddie-drawn heart in place of Manson’s infamous self-tattooed swastika.

“The ideas are ever-flowing, I’ll see a font that’ll bother me, or a design I could do better or differently,” said Spreng, still holding the Manson shirt. “I want to see what my ideas look like on a t-shirt.”

Spreng never designs a shirt with money in mind. He does have a website coming soon, and he does sell his t-shirts to anyone interested. Some companies, like Threadless.com, use profit incentives to encourage designers to get their ideas onto shirts.

Threadless.com is an outlet for cavalier designers to submit their ideas to be printed on T-shirts. The Threadless community judges designers, and, after a week of voting, the winning designers get their shirts printed, are given a $2,000 dollar cash prize, among other prizes, and have their shirts sell on the website. Threadless.com also reserves the rights of designs. That, according to Spreng, isn’t what he’s about.

“Maybe those people just don’t care about it,” said Spreng, slowly giving another Lincoln smile. “But I do.”

In his basement, it’s hard not to believe that a mad-scientist doesn’t live in one of the dark corners. The screens and piles of cloth only look like clutter to casual observers. But to Spreng, they are all scratch ingredients used to create his original moving canvas’.

“There will always be my niche,” said Spreng. “If someone likes it, they’ll wear it.”

Visit Logan at myspace.com/champagneshirts and stay updated about his new site, set to launch on Valentine’s Day, 2009.