The Christmas Story

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With Christmas well and truly over, hopefully everybody has received all the Santa Cruiser cards destined for them by now! Here’s the story (and a few pictures behind the design.

I really wanted to do this illustration I came up with last christmas I called ‘The Nutkraken’ for our cards this year, but even after drawing it all up properly, the idea was nixed by Lilly.

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Back at the drawing board post-it pad, I set about coming up with some other ideas, including this one I called ‘Santa and his Elvis’. This was nixed too:

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Eventually we came back to trying to reflect what happened in the past year, and decided that getting bicycles was probably the biggest thing. I put Santa on various bicycles, including some more conventional bikes like our own, and fancy racing bikes like my cat stickers, but his rotund nature meant he was best suited to a very upright cruiser bike. Here’s the final sketch, before tidying up:

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Everything was manufactured and ready to print:

A photo posted by Ricky Trickartt (@trickartt) on

The pressing wasn’t without problems, but it came out pretty good in the end:

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…And for our digital-native friends I did a special gif version to email them!

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Go Fish!

Here’s the last project to close out the work-year: Hospital playing cards!

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Hospital and I had been talking about doing a deck of playing cards for a long time and I finally found a few free days to crack on with it in November, just in time to get them out for the holidays. The idea to do the King, Queen and Jack as Surgeon, Nurse and Physician came to me when we first talked about doing playing cards, so I started by drawing them up, and followed them with some more conventional number designs.

When we got the specs from the printer, I discovered there was space not just for two jokers but two extra cards too. I drew a Joker based loosely on Tony the CEO, then after a bit of scratching around I decided a bonus pair of turntables would be better than the rules of Bridge.

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The last detail was the box, and I decided if there was ever a playing card package to pay homage to, it would be the magician’s favourite Bicycle.

They’ve turned out really cute – it’s nice to get ideas out of my head looking like I imagined them!

The Yellow Zoo

Well hey Internet, check out what I’ve been thinking about for the past month! I think I think about animals a lot by the looks of all these drawings.

The two biggest hits came late this month – the PowerPoint Slide and the In-stag-ram were exciting! My personal favourite though was the Launderette, it told a nice little story in one little square.

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “The Yellow Zoo”

Christmas Cards 2015: The Santa Cruiser

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I’m selling christmas cards again this year. Click here to buy some!

Last year was my first year selling my letterpressed christmas cards, and in hindsight, it was a bit ambitious to try and sell every single design I’ve done all at once when I was printing them on demand. To keep things simpler, particularly under the time constraints, I’m just going to be printing and selling the one design this year, which you should be seeing a mockup of above.

This year was the year of the bicycle for me – Lilly and I got bicycles for the first time since we were teenagers, and spent the summer cycling around Hertfordshire, so we decided to reflect that in this year’s design. In developing the illustration, I tried to put Santa on a variety of bicycles (he looked particularly ridiculous on a racer bike!) and found he fit best on a slightly beach-ish cruiser.

As ever, these cards are being hand-letterpressed onto high-quality 300gsm Somerset card stock, and they will come with appropriately-sized envelopes. This year the envelopes are made of recycled paper, which is a big look!

Cards will be pressed and sent out to you during the first week of December, so they arrive with you in good time to send out to your people. It’s a small selling window, so get yours now!

Would you like some to send to your nearest and dearest? Go and get some here!

S.C.R.A.W.L.S.

This month my beloved American became American-British, so to celebrate, I took her to see the latest James Bond movie with a seven-lettered-word-beginning-with-S-written-in-all-caps-for-a-title. Just like all the other bond movies, this one didn’t make a huge impression on me, but it did yield my favourite post-it note of the month, which was a musing on how Daniel Craig seemed to be wearing a different pair of designer sunglasses in pretty much every scene of the movie. Very stylish, but it made the movie feel a little like a Sunglasses Hut commercial.

Elsewhere this month, I’ve been watching the World Gymnastics Championships and chuckling every time someone did a move called a pike, pondering how technology makes impossible things possible, and hiding robots into everyday scenes.

A pretty good, pretty scattered month!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “S.C.R.A.W.L.S.”

Where We Going?

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The other big album project I’ve been working on lately is London Elektricity’s ‘Are We There Yet?’. Tony already had the image he wanted for his album cover from a photo shoot while touring in Japan, but he wanted to go all-out for the special edition of the album, and it was left to me to figure out how.

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Because of the album’s travel-related title, we agreed to do a series of twelve postcards (one for each track on the LP) and a fold-out map too. First I was given a list of track titles, then I got to listen to the album not long after. Tony’s music always sounds like a slightly-retro adventure to me, and I know he’s really into science fiction, so I decided to treat each track as an intergalactic destination, and made each postcard to be a 1960s-inspired travel poster.

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Once I finished all the postcards I turned my attention to the fold-out map. I couldn’t really make a conventional map as the elements from the postcards transcended planets, oceans and objects, so I came up with this abstract illustration for the job.

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The style of this work is a little bit outside of my usual repertoire, but I’m really pleased with how everything turned out! The map artwork is included in all formats, but to get the postcards, you had to get one of the super-limited box sets.

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Here Comes Autumn!

Oh look, Autumn is back in town! Here’s what I’ve been thinking about over the past month: Factories, reimagined cats and the lizardy aristocracy.

My favourite post-it from the month was the heavy industry. It came out nicely! The biggest flop of the month was probably the ghost of Michael Jackson floating over east London. He’s such a freak I think it’s impossible to draw a picture of him that isn’t completely awful.

Yeah!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “Here Comes Autumn!”

Scandinavian September

Hej Internet!

I spent a week in Stockholm this month, and because Scandinavia is full of good internet, I made sure to do the daily post-it thing while I was away. It proved to be a pretty good travelogue, very nautical as there’s so much sea around there! The Swedish Scenes from the middle of the month sums it up pretty elegantly.

Beyond that, it’s been a bit of a random month. I’m not sure I even understood my intentions with Intern-E.T. but it seemed to get more love than anything else I sent out there. the Nice Cream Truck is probably my personal highlight!

It’s not yellow, but to round out this post, here’s a nice photo of some fog:

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After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “Scandinavian September”

Kinda Literal

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The first of two big albums I’ve been working on this year is out today – Etherwood’s second album, Blue Leaves. There was a lot of artwork involved in it, so here’s a drop of some imagery, notes, and a few exclusive bits that didn’t make the cut.

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work on the project started way back in January with the single ‘You’ll Always Be A Part Of Me’. Continue reading “Kinda Literal”

What Happened to Summer?

Here is what happened to summer. Behold, 28 sunshine-yellow little post-it notes!

The more I use social networks, the less I understand them, but they’re pretty much the only way I have to gauge this project’s ongoing popularity. This month’s biggest hit, both on Instagram and Facebook, was the ear plug. This surprised me as I thought it was a pretty basic idea not drawn very well, but what can you do. The pitta bed was a similar experience.

The other side of the coin was the anatomic bomb, which was a pretty good idea, pretty well drawn, and it was pretty well-received too, so what do I know?

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “What Happened to Summer?”

 
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