Every month Brave Island runs a Young Creative of the Month fund, where we spotlight a local young creative with an interview on our blog, and support them with funding of £100. For February, it’s Tirzah Brown, clothing designer and founder of Totally_Tirzah. This fund launches at the beginning of every month, you can apply to be Young Creative of the Month for March here.

Please can you tell us about your creative practice?

I started my handmade bleach t-shirt business through social media in where I make handmade custom t-shirts and hoodies in which I started in late October 2023. Since then I have fallen in love with it. And I have a big passion for helping other young people express themselves through the clothes they wear with the characters and designs they want without feeling any pressure to dress otherwise. To have trendy clothes but still with the things they love. I believe that in today’s society the young people are pressured to fit in with each other, with my business I’d like to help encourage young people it’s okay to wear clothes with designs that you like. My t-shirts specialize in cars, dragons, marvel characters, anime and much more. And it’s a big goal for me to reach out to more young people especially across the island so they are encouraged that it’s okay to still have their favorite designs on clothes and to be happy with it. 

What drew you to the medium of bleach on fabric?

A few years ago I really was eager to be a T-shirt designer so I tried everything to be one, fabric paint, special material for it, and was even looking into screen printing, however nothing stayed on the t-shirts whenever I tried these other mediums. So one day i was talking to a friend at college and she mentioned bleach tie dye, and it got me thinking whether you could draw with bleach. And I thought to myself that was one thing I never tried, so after a bit of research I thought I’d give it a go, and with that I made my first Spider-Man design and absolutely fell in love with the hobby.

After a while quite a few people had asked me where I got it from and where they could get one from, and found they made great gifts for people and that’s where the idea of a business came from.

Can you walk us through your creative process when you start a new project?

Whenever i start a new t-shirt there are quite a few steps to doing so including safety, to always make sure the windows are open for fresh air and a breeze and to make sure to wear protective gear.

I use bleach in the same way you would with paint. It took quite a while to develop the exact correct way for it and would be much too long to explain the whole exact process but I experimented with different dilutions to create the correct method.

Where can people find your work if they’d like to support you?

You can find me on Instagram and TikTok with @Totally_Tirzah if you’d like to check out some of my work!