If you follow me on the Twitter/Flickr/SCED thing, you will likely have seen this already, but it’s worth posting here. It’s a little taster of the sort of thing I do every day, condensed down to about 30 seconds through the magic of timelapse! Unfortunately my little Flip only records two hours in one hour segments, so that’s all we have in this video. I probably could’ve done with setting my nikon to timelapse more frequently than one frame per minute too, but it works!
It seemed to get a good reception on the flickrtwitter, so I guess it’s relatively interesting, although I think a lot of the interest came from Hospital stalkers – I know you meticulously went through this frame by frame to get the Sick 2 tracklisting out of it!! Yikes!
February came and went, and took another four weeks of daily creative spurts with it. If you have been following me on Flickr or Twitter, you will have seen this already, but it’s always nice to have a record of what I’ve been up to on my blog too!
This month, I learnt a bit about the Flickr API, which made making this post considerably easier. Perhaps not as easy as it could be though- I still have a lot more to learn!
This month, I got the letterpress going again, which you should have already seen if you are a regular reader here, and came up with the usual nonsense of whimsical illustrations, scrawls on post-it notes, and even came up with some random animation experiments, including the Speedbeard a couple of posts previous on this very blog. All this formed the bread in a very tall sandwich filled with winter Olympics, record covers and DIY. Cool!
Shock Horror, I’ve joined another social network recently! This one is called Central Station- it appears to be a network for creative people. I guess it’s similar to Behance, but I never really understood that, and this appears to be a bit more British (well, Scottish, to be precise) and a bit more personal.
Anyway, I don’t really understand this either, but it’s probably because I’m not very good at being social, and to me a network is something you make with CAT5 cables and Wi-Fi. Regardless, it seems pleasant and I approve of the post-it-note yellow, so I’ve put up a bit of work for other members to look at!
Putting stuff up seemed to be the right thing to do too, as people are looking at it! CenSta first added my Post-it book to their blog of things they like in February, which was very kind of them. It’s nice to be nice to the nice!
Not only that, but they then went on to feature my stopmotion experiment from 2008 ‘Full Mouse’ (embedded above or here on Central Station) in a prominent position on their site, which went on to get more views in the space of a week than it ever did anywhere else on the internet combined. Amazing!
So if you’re creative too, or if you just want to be a member of another social network, you should check Central Station out! It doesn’t matter if you’re not Scottish – I’m pretty sure I’m not a Scot, and they’ve been very welcoming to me, as I think they are trying to grow beyond Scotchland.
Update: They’ve put the video on their front page now too! cool!
This is my creative activity for today, but I’m far too amused by it to only post it on my Flickr-based SCED project, so it’s going up here too! Besides, it looks a lot better via Vimeo than Flickr’s video service.
I took the Vespa out for the first time in the best part of three months this week, and came back feeling rather hairy. I’ve been convinced for almost as long as I’ve been driving this machine that my facial hair grows quicker when I ride the Vespa. It kinda makes sense in a fuzzy (pun not intended) logic kind of way- my face feels the cold, so my body probably tries to do something about it short of growing a scarf!
Another trip to Forest Hill today meant another excuse to pick up some finished copies of my work for Hospital! As well as picking up finished copies of Sweet Harmony, some recent flyers and the New Blood 010 album on Med School I tidied up, I also picked this up:
I love designing for print! Finished copies are always, well, finished, whereas designing for Web can always be tinkered with indefinitely (as long as the client lets you!). One of my favourite things about collecting finished copies of records I designed has to be centre labels:
Centre label designs are difficult to keep fresh. They can so easily just be an afterthought to the sleeve’s design and I am always conscious of not just reusing layouts already used for a different artist/label/whatever. Pulling the record out of the sleeve to give it a spin when I get it home usually results in a nice surprise along the lines of ‘Hey! That’s a cool centre label design. I wonder who did that? Oh wait, I did!’, as during the weeks between finishing the artwork and getting finished copies, I only tend to see the front cover, forgetting what I did for the centre labels.
Piano Anthem is out on Monday 1st March on Hospital Records.
Bonus points to anyone who can spot the typographical innuendo in this artwork!
Lilly and I got the press back in action today! We printed up a few bits and bobs (Including the Howdy card above, but we only got one ink out, so everything we did is blue!
I finally did some linocut stuff to print! I wrote to Jax a couple of months ago after she made a nice linocut print, asking what the lowdown on linocut was (I was surprised it really was as straightforward as sticking some lino to a block of wood), so I ordered some lino from Hawthorn Printmaker Supplies, along with some other bits and bobs, and the package turned up last week. I spent the day yesterday with power tools, working on some small furniture items for the home, and while I was there, chopped a slab of appropriately thick MDF into chase-sized chunks, as seen in the left picture.
I followed these instructions Jax pointed me in the direction of, and mounted up a few blocks ready to carve. I came up with a simple little fishscale-y pattern to see how it worked, which seemed to go pretty well! It was a lot easier to carve and yielded a lot more even a result than the wood carvings I tried last year. After Lilly printed it up a couple of times, I realised it looked like a big crowd of people sitting in a cinema or something when the other way up:
Hello!
As that went well, I made a nice big Howdy card for us to print, which you should have seen above. Here is my linocut in the press, with some nice off-camera flash action to help bring it out a bit:
We didn’t stop there either! We also printed a tiny greeting using some of the Mixed type I bought off ebay last week, and the bonus elephant block I bought Lilly as a surprise, which came out much cuter than we were anticipating. Cool!
This week I helped Photographer Extraordinaire Andrew Attah spruce up his website. Now it’s finished, I don’t feel like I did much at all to contribute, but I guess my, er, expertise made a difference. I am pleased with it regardless!
Andrew had the right idea from the start, by moving away from Flash for his online portfolio. He found the nice little open-source CMS Indexhibit to base his new site on, which I then offered to help tidy up. I tinkered a little with the plugins and layout and flexed some CSS to make what we have here – a lot more balanced and user-friendly, but still minimal enough to let the photography do the talking, which is the idea of a photographer’s portfolio!
Check out AndrewAttah.com for a better view of the site and his photos, and keep your eyes peeled for the snaps from his recent Danny Byrd and Netsky photoshoots. Yeah!
And there goes another month of daily creativity! It’s a bit more work-related than usual as a big catchup was in order when I got back to my desk. I guess the other highlight was my new flashes, which have been helping with some random creativity and nice pictures of things I’ve made too. Disappointingly, not much letterpress action in the past month, but it should be picking up again this month!
Don’t forget, you can follow me on Twitter @trickartt, which tweets whenever I post something here, or now whenever I post my daily creative activity to Flickr! Cool!
Hey look! Here is my cover artwork for Danny Byrd’s new release ‘Sweet Harmony’! It’s only a single, but it appears to be getting a bit of attention- yesterday I discovered it has been playlisted on Radio 1, which means it’s getting daytime airplay by the likes of Fearne Cotton (Fun fact: she went to the same high school as me, and was a pretty good artist. Agh! Digression!) on the country’s biggest young radio station… Pretty cool! And not only that, but Dev, the early morning breakfast DJ, has nominated it as his record of the week- Imagine waking up to that at 6 in the morning if you weren’t expecting it!
Anyway, here’s a little bit about the cover art, as I am pretty pleased with it!
I was thinking about doing something rave-related, as the original is a classic of the early 90s rave era. This got me thinking about candy ravers, which brought me around to sweets. I told Hospital about the idea, who immediately saw the pun in the track’s title, which I had overlooked until it was pointed out to me. Agh! I got to work on the idea as the visual pun was too good to ignore, but after several trips to the local sweet shop and many cover ideas using all things from red rope liquorice to candy bracelets, it just wasn’t working.
It wasn’t until the weekend, when Lilly was baking, that I found myself staring at her collection of cake decorations, thinking how much I liked the colours of them, when suddenly the idea clicked with me, and I realised the decorations were essentially tiny sweets in themselves.
To the right, you should be seeing a tiny video. It is a (very short!) timelapse I took while putting the cover together. I made a reverse stencil using the lovely new typeface Tungsten (I couldn’t resist after it was noted as an answer to Compacta, which I have been using for Danny’s artwork for a while now), which I backed with sticky labels for the sugary treats to stick to. I guess it was a bit like giant glittering really!
Sweet Harmony will be out at all your favourite physical and digital record stores on 1st February 2010.
Posted in Cover Art, Design Process, Work | 2 Comments »
I found myself wondering last night if my social-network-avoiding actually works against me and my work, so I have decided today to dip my toes into the social waters in the form of signing up to Twitter! I’ll spare you the pain of a diatribe as to why I’m not planning on using it for normal tweeting, but rather its function will be to tweet about the posts I make here (like this post, which is doubling up as a test of the new system!).
So, if you like reading about my world, and are cooler than me as you like to use Twitter, you can follow Trickartt, to be tweeted at whenever I write something else stupid here!