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!
I got a couple of finished copies of some of my new housebag designs through the post this morning, so I decided to use it as an excuse to see what I can do with my new strobes (aside from pratting around with lighting gels and colourful cakes) and try and take some nice pictures of them!
Mmm- luxury double-sided print action for Critical!
And here is the 31 Records sleeve I did late last year.
I am experimenting! Wooo!
Somebody on one of the forums rediscovered this today, which also led me to rediscover it- I had completely forgotten I made it! Apparently it dates back to last June. It’s the Trickartt DJ Bio Generator- a piece of PHP junk designed to generate your very own low-budget self-gratifying D&B DJ biography.
If you’re not familiar with the world of Drum and Bass, or any other DJ-centric music, it might be easy to miss the point. Similarly, it might not be so funny if you had already put the effort into writing yourself one of these manually (I bet you’re kicking yourself now- you could’ve just done it by filling out a few simple boxes!), but here it is anyway.
Hooray for basic PHP!
This is pretty much the highlight of my Holiday holiday this year – today Lilly and I got to meet an internet celebrity – Caplin Rous, the giant coconut capybara!
He is pretty much the coolest creature in the world. He is so gentle, so smart, and so charming! He makes the coolest little noise too, which you should be able to hear in the below video.
He also really likes blueberries! We were feeding him frozen ones. We didn’t get to feed him a popsicle, but it was probably a bit cold out today.
So if you didn’t know what a Capybara was, you do now! They are the world’s biggest rodents – just like giant guinea pigs! I like guinea pigs. Capybaras come from South America natively, but Caplin was born in Texas. Apparently there are a handful of people who keep them as pets, but none as well trained as Caplin – he could stand up, shake hands and twirl around when pried with the right treats. If you want to know more information about Caplin, or capybaras in general, you can find a lot more interesting and fun related stuff on Caplin’s website, GiantHamster.com.
Thanks to Melanie, Caplin’s owner, for being kind enough to let us come to meet him.
Going away put posting this a little off-schedule, but it was a good thing really as it has straightened up my months. Here we are anyway, with a roundup of the last of the year’s Something Creative Every Day project. Some of the action includes letterpressing, diplodocuses, iPhone apps, and American excursions. Cool!
Considering this project was started on a whim, I think I’m doing pretty well 3.5 months in. For the statistics fans out there (like me), I have managed to post something creative for 91 of 112 days, giving me a success rate of 81%. Maybe my new year’s resolution should be to bring that up to 90%. Or maybe it should just be to get some more interesting paid work!
I still haven’t decided if this Blog is purely professional or still borderline personal, so here is a non-work-related post. I might decide it’s rubbish and delete it in a few days, but for now, it shall live. Anyway.
Happy new year! Yesterday Lilly and I had a tiny fireworks excursion for the occasion, partially in the name of her brother, who is out in The Gambia, West Africa, in the Peace Corps. He is a fan of fireworks.
We managed to find this tiny fireworks stand (pictured above), run by vaguely redneck-ish (but friendly!) people. We figured we’d start small for our first fireworks excursion and only got a few little bits and bobs, and I took a few nice pictures – more than I would post on Flickr in one chunk, so I thought why not write a blog about it! Read the rest of this entry »