Hello Internetters and welcome to another four-weekly roundup of my Something Creative Every Day project! This month has felt like hard work, but it has proven to be worth it as there are some nice ideas to have leaked out of my mind over the past few weeks. I’m particularly pleased with a couple of stopmotion experiments – the Melting Chocolate was a little pointless but somehow turned out exactly as I had envisioned it, and The Raw and The Cooked pleased me immensely, but then I don’t think there are many people out there who share my two fascinations with how microwaves and televisions once looked the same and how roast chickens are always used as generic foodstuffs to cook in a microwave.
Aside from the animations, I also really like two pictures I drew this month: Rhonda the diplodocus is the best drawing I have done on an iPad to date, and I can’t really explain why, but Domestimatic 2032 really pleases me too. It can’t just be because it has a washing machine in it – so much of my work does anyway – but I do like it!
And don’t forget, if you’re big into Tumblr, then you can now follow Something Creative Every Day on Tumblr too!
Matt Logistics’ fourth studio album ‘Fear Not’ is out this week, and once again, I have had the pleasure of doing the artwork for the project!
I love working on Logistics albums as I so often get the opportunity to go the extra mile with my artwork – starting from his debut in 2006 where I soldered together 750 lights into the album cover to 2009′s Crash, Bang, Wallop, which I hand-painted a canvas for, Fear Not has become a multimedia art project involving sleeves, stickers, animations, videos, hand-painted T-shirts and even Rubik’s Cubes. Read the rest of this entry »
Finally! It’s time for another month of SCED to be rounded up, covering the month of March and a tiny bit of April! This month is full of all kinds of silly drawings, washing machines and robots. My highlight of the month was finishing off Speakerbot, giving him a retrocomputing style flashing light panel and a new coat of paint. I’ve also started to finally get my head around drawing on the iPad – hopefully these drawings will start to become interesting soon!
In other SCED news, as you might have noticed from the addition to the menu on the right, I have began porting my daily creativities over to Tumblr. I think I’ve found a nice audience here – I seem to be getting more likes and favourites here than I am on Flickr, which is awesome, so hello to all of my new Tumblr followers! I hope you enjoy the little window into my brain this project provides 
It’s roundup time, folks, and although I have been a little late on posting a couple of days of creativity, this is the first time in a long while I have done something to count for every day in a consecutive 28-day period! Right On!
The month started with a lot of robots – I found myself thinking about the complete lack of consistency in my SCED project, so I drew robots all week. These robots spawned one of the highlights of the month for me – tiny little Speakerbot, who not only was fun to make but has made a small improvement to my home too!
Although Speakerbot is probably my highlight, there is some other good (and not-so-good) stuff here elsewhere in the month too! For example, I’m oddly pleased with the Landsnake, though I remain somewhat baffled by the politically angry comment somebody left on it last week. Not at all what I was thinking, but well done to them for exercising their imagination!
This winter I worked concurrently on two album projects: John B’s Light Speed and High Contrast’s The Agony & The Ecstasy. Both projects are for different artists and evolved in different ways, but since the art was completed and wheels were set in motion, I’ve been noticing increasing unintended parallels between the two projects and their artwork.
Both album covers were driven by the artists themselves and both had different motivations- High Contrast rather controversially wanted the baroque Caravaggio classic The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew to represent The Agony & The Ecstasy, while John B had some press photos done last year complete with full make-up and styling, one of which he wanted to use for his album cover.
Both albums use transitional serif typefaces – I tend not to use serifs very often in my line of work, so two at once was a rarity! HC pushed for Perpetua on his – I have to admit this wouldn’t have been my first choice (the upper-case U having a tail bugs me) – I was angling for either Garamond (historically appropriate) or Bodoni (classical Italian), but Perpetua works in the entirety of the project. John left it up to me so I took the extravagant haute-fashion stylings of his photos and decided Baskerville fit that aesthetic and the more grown-up sound of this album quite well.
As well as both being driven by the artists’ own motivations for the cover image and both using transitional serif typefaces for different reasons, the most curious parallel that struck me was in this interview John B did with This Is Drum & Bass:
TiD&B: If you could compare your sound, and your new album to perhaps a work of art, what would it be?
John B: No idea… Maybe one of those crazy Renaissance scenes where there’s loads of stuff going on; someone dying from a dagger wound, a bunch of sexy Renaissance ladies with their boobies showing, some angels, and a lion or two.
I’m reasonably sure John hadn’t seen HC’s album cover at the time he did this interview, but it struck me as curious that he pretty much described it (minus the boobies and lions, of course) to analogise his own sound!
Lastly, both albums were a long time coming! It has been six years since Electrostep and five since Tough Guys Don’t Dance, both of which facts are a slightly alarming reminder of how long I have been doing my job now!
Light Speed is out now on Beta Recordings, and The Agony & The Ecstasy is out tomorrow on Hospital Records.
Well here we are, more than a month late, with a roundup of the latest and greatest in daily creativities! To explain the uselessness, I had to take a bit of a pause to finish NHS200 after the last roundup. By the time that was under control, I was jetting across the ocean for my winter break, where I spent three weeks contemplating how easy it is to get comfortable doing absolutely nothing, shamefully managing only four posts the entire break. Damn.
I continued to be useless upon my return, but as of about a week ago, I’m back into it, and have finally chalked up twenty-eight since the last roundup. There’s some good stuff in here too: The Cash Cow from back in November was pretty awesome, and more recently, Pirates of Yesteryear turned out about as well as I had hoped!
I have now also siphoned off my second year of SCED into a set of its own too – you can now find the daily creativities from September 2010 to September 2011 in its new set here, but the very latest will be in the same place you know and love here.
So now we’re well into 2012, lets hope this year brings more creativities I’m proud of! Yeah!