Kids t-shirt
This puffin t-shirt for kids features Alek, a puffin who never throws away anything that still works, from my Animal Kinhood series. A northern sea creature with a friendly face, the kind of critter a kid adopts as their own.
Fratercula arctica
The lights of my town send the pufflings off course. A cardboard box fixes it.
Open North Atlantic sea during the non-breeding months, where it lives as a solitary pelagic far from any coast; in summer, coastal cliffs with diggable soil for breeding, mainly in Iceland (60% of the world population) and in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago, where the Heimaey colony holds around 830,000 pairs, the largest in the world.
Alek has a phrase that says it all in two words: "Still works." He says it whenever someone's about to throw out something he knows just needs one small part — an old radio, a spark plug, half a tool — and he rescues it to fix it. It's a good idea to wear: that almost nothing is broken all the way through, that a lot of the time you just need to look closer. The message clicks with kids, and the puffin who says it wins them over right away.
A puffin is small, round, and has a colorful beak that looks like a toy, and that look is exactly what appeals to a kid: an animal that looks like a stuffed toy but really exists and holds up against the freezing sea. When the kid wears it and you tell them about him, they want to know everything. If they want to get to know Alek in full, he's in his biography; for the t-shirt, it's enough for them to decide that puffin is theirs. I sign every portrait myself, Yago Partal.
