My favourites from this month of creativity are the Cardboard Washing Machine, my new Vespa Engine and Creamy Horse, though I don’t think the people of Threadless liked him very much. Nevermind. I think maybe I’ll paint him onto a T-shirt for myself anyway.
I have a bit of a funny relationship with my Sick Music artwork. Maybe it’s because I float around between artist and designer so ambiguously that when I do work like this, I don’t feel like I’m being as creative as I can be. The job is kindof a find a stock image, make it a bit more interesting/relevant and lay it all out! Anyway, it’s all meant to be clean-cut, largely grid-based and stylistically a modern reference to the old Plastic Surgery albums that Sick Music is a spiritual successor to.
Anyway! Here it all is, and there’s a lot of it! I realised it’s a lot more satisfying when I put it all together- it’s a big graphic design project! I should have it up on my Flickr now (as today’s creative activity) here -the nice thing about Flickr is I’ve managed to annotate everything in the image, in case you wondered what each item was.
It’s also worth noting that the image here is reallllly big! You can click on it to see the big version in all its detailed glory 
Sick Music 2 is out this weekend- its formal release date is Monday 26th April, but shops (including Hospital!) have began shipping it already. Yeah!
I have a T-Shirt design up for voting on Threadless! Yes, this is my first design that has actually made it to the voting stage, and now it needs all the help it can get.
It’s such a happy horse- why wouldn’t you want to see it on a T-Shirt? If it walked into a bar, the bartender wouldn’t ask ‘why the long face?’. It’s that happy!
I really wanted to submit this for a kid’s T-Shirt design, but I couldn’t see a way to do that independently. If you grown-ups like it though, great! Wouldn’t it make you smile if you saw someone walk past you with him on their chest?!
Please vote for it, especially if you like it! Get all your friends and all your enemies to vote too! Yeah!
Lilly likes to bake, and whenever she makes something, I try to take pictures of it! I’m not much of a food photographer, but over time I have been beginning to build up a nice little collection of reasonable photos I have taken of the sweet things Lilly has made, so much so that I figured they were worth posting here!
Strawberry and Rhubarb Mini-Crumble
If you like pictures of cake, you’ll find more after the fold, so Read the rest of this entry »
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OK, so here is the artwork I did for the remixes of Bop’s debut album, Clear Your Mind. As it’s a remix EP, like the musicians featuring, I was given the original in pieces and left to produce my own take on it- a remix! Clever huh?!
Scott AKA Ithinkitsnice was responsible for the original artwork. He is probably the most inspiring person to pass through the Drum+Bass artwork world in a while- his drawings are genius and make me wish I was less afraid of pencils and sheets of paper bigger than post-it notes!
Anyway, despite it meaning less work for me, I was rather pleased when I found out Med School had commissioned him to do the artwork, as it was like nothing I would’ve thought up! I was quite excited when I was asked to give it a rethink, as I had a few ideas of where I could take it. I tried a few things, including an ill-thought-out idea for projecting the graphic with light to form the image, but after some fruitless experimenting with lights and some time spent mucking around with the art on the computer, I ended up with a cleaned-up and rejigged version of the original artwork.
As for the book, if you follow my SCED project, you will have seen it already. When Tom at Hospital saw the artwork, he said he liked it because it looked like some kind of old 70s textbook cover. I thought yeah! so I set about turning it into one with a bit of photoshop fun. The book ended up even more interesting than the record cover in my opinion, but the cover had already gone to print. I guess you need the actual record cover as the middleground for it to make complete sense.
Remix Your Mind by Bop features Remixes from Blu Mar Ten, Lynx+Hellrazor, Subwave, Unquote and remix competition winner Thinnen. It is out now on full-artwork promo, and will be out on general release 2×12″ doublepack and MP3 Download on 10th May 2010 on Med School.
Posted in Cover Art, Design Process, Work | No Comments »
Another four weeks has passed, taking with it another four weeks of daily creativity:
It would appear to have been a bit of a slow month in Trickartt world if you have only been following my blog, but it was actually choc full of all kinds of nonsense. I am particularly happy with some of this month’s creative things: my own take on Street Art, a drawing of the local fire station, and an experimental mechanical goose have been personal favourites!
Also thanks to Adobe Photoshop product manager John Nack, who was kind enough to post my InDesign birthday cake onto his official Adobe weblog, and to Adobe InDesign for retweeting it too. I’m glad you guys liked it!
Also thanks to Ash at Med School for writing about my Bop artwork on the new Med School website I made them last month. I’ll stick up a post about it here soon- I’ve been trying to get into the habit of waiting until things come out before I write them up (hence the quietness on my blog this month!).
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!