Year: 2010

Rickmansworth: my modernist motherland

Posted on by Ricky

I live in Rickmansworth. It isn’t really fair to call it my motherland; I just couldn’t resist the alliteration! I might not have been born or brought up here, but I have been living here for a good few years now and am kinda attached to it. In fact, the townspeople seem to like having me here too, as every May, they get together and celebrate ‘Ricky Week’!

At Ricky Week a couple of years back, the church at the bottom of my street opened its tower to the public, so Lilly and I went up there as it offered a nice view over our village. While we were up there, I overheard an older fella muttering about how the village has been ruined by all the modern architecture.

Continue reading “Rickmansworth: my modernist motherland” →

Learning, Improving things and Play:musik

Posted on by Ricky

DJ Flight’s label play:musik is back! I was only nineteen when Flight very kindly gave me the opportunity to create the original artwork and identity for the label, but I have learnt a lot in the past five years, so the label’s relaunch was a good time to make some improvements to the artwork. This post is about the changes I have made, the things I have learnt, and the artwork, so if you’re interested, Continue reading “Learning, Improving things and Play:musik” →

Something Creative (nearly) Every Day in July

Posted on by Ricky

It’s that time again!

Well it’s not all just July, and it’s not July in its entirety either as I took a little holiday this month, but here is another four weeks worth of daily creative nonsense anyway!

Some of the better stuff this month includes a couple of tiny stopmotion experiments, and I’m also weirdly satisfied with this picture of a building near my home. The rest of the month is a bit random, but I’m sure a couple of the ideas in there have some merit to them!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “Something Creative (nearly) Every Day in July” →

Little Oranges

Posted on by Ricky

Good work comes from good projects, which in my line of work, usually means good record titles to design for. ‘Little Oranges’ has to be the best track title I’ve had the pleasure of working with since Credit Crunch! Was B-Complex thinking of satsumas? Clementines? Tangerines? We may never know!

More pictures after the fold. Continue reading “Little Oranges” →

I like a good Washing Machine

Posted on by Ricky

I should probably write about the things that influence me more often. A couple of weeks ago, I rediscovered The Secret Life of Machines, a Channel 4 TV series from the late eighties / early ninties. I used to watch this with my Dad when I was really small- it was on TV when I was between the ages of 2-7 apparently (!) – and despite being so young, it clearly made an impression on my tiny mind!

Here is a clip from the show, where Tim Hunkin describes what the concrete ballast in a washing machine is for, with the assistance of Rex Garrod:

Genius. They picked such an expressive washing machine for the demonstration too! It’s great watching this stuff again as the longstanding lines of influence are pretty apparent. For example, here’s a series of post-it notes from 2007 that bear a subtle resemblance to the above clip:

Which is a concept I revisited last week:

Now there’s an idea that is going somewhere!

Anyway! If you like washing machines, you can see more of my washing-machine-related daily artwork by clicking here, or if you just like machines in general, you can find links to watch more of the secret life of machines on Tim Hunkin’s website.

June SCED Excitement

Posted on by Ricky

Well, another month has passed since my last Something Creative Every Day roundup, and sadly that also means a month has passed since my last blog post. I guess I haven’t been doing anything exciting enough to warrant a whole blog post outside of these daily nuggets of creativity:

There are plenty of good ideas here- I am particularly pleased with my USB Onion and think the Runaway could have legs. It was nice to paint a couple more T-shirts this month too, particularly as the weather seems to have nicened up a bit!

Also, while I’m writing here, Last month’s Paper iPhone TV Set got some attention on the wider internets: Most of the traffic came from Gizmodo, which pleasantly puzzled me considering I only sent a link to Engadget and Giz posted their story first? [In the unlikely event that someone from Gizmodo is reading this, I’d love to know how you managed that?]. It also made it to a whole host of other european tech/gadget news websites too, so thanks to all for linking!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “June SCED Excitement” →

Something Creative Every Day (almost) in May

Posted on by Ricky

This month in my world of nonsense, I finally reached one hundred followers on Twitter, gradually managed to fix my Vespa, and avoided the election fever/confusion. Craft magazine also Blogged about my Cardboard Copier this month! thanks for that, Craft!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “Something Creative Every Day (almost) in May” →

Paper iPhone TV Set

Posted on by Ricky

This was going to be my creative activity for yesterday, but it ended up taking me a little bit longer to make than I was expecting, so it counts for the whole weekend! It’s a paper TV set for an iPhone!!

I’m not sure where I came up with the idea of making a little TV set to slot an iPhone into, but the thought came into my mind to use a magnifying glass lens to give it a nice curved CRT-like look to the screen. I copped this ramshackle bargain off eBay (complete with vital safety instructions) to make it out of.

The iPhone slots into the side like so:

And to prove it really works, here it is playing the title sequence to M*A*S*H, the only TV show Lilly has on her iPhone. The show happens to have post-it-yellow titles anyway, which matches the TV set rather nicely 🙂

A Day in the Life of DJ Q

Posted on by Ricky

Here is a pitch I did for BBC Radio 1Xtra earlier this year. The producer of the 1Xtra M1X shows had an idea to do some promos to go on the web- animations of ‘A Day in the Life of…’ for each of the five M1X show DJs, and asked me if I wanted to have a go at one.

I hadn’t really done much animation prior to this (other than a few random stopmotion experiments), no less serious animation, but it was only meant to be short so I thought why not give it a go! I was sent a script which I had a little think about and drew a storyboard up to. I’m not very good at drawing caricatures, but DJ Q has a nice big smile so I ran with that. After I showed them the storyboard, the producers and DJ Q made the audio track for me to animate to, then after a bit of feedback and tweaking, it was finished!

I didn’t really know what to make of it when it was done (having never done anything like this before) but the reaction seemed to be positive, which was a relief! Even all my silly visual puns seemed to go down well! I’m rather proud of it now, but I’m not sure on what its future is, so I figured I’d put it up on my site to show people I can do stuff like this!

 « Page 1
contains Newer Entries
You are currently reading
Page 2
Page 3 »
contains Older Entries