A Quick Cuppa

Here is my latest and greatest record cover artwork! It’s for St. Petersburg’s Bop, and a collaboration between Med School and Microfunk.

Bop wanted the artwork to look “pretty but a little bit dangerous so you wouldn’t drink it”. I tried using petrol to get a thin-film effect, but it made my Rickmansland studio smell like a garage. After a different approach, I ended up on this psychedelic cup of cha. It’s one of my favourite pieces of artwork in a little while, and it’s out today!

Lost Property

I received a package from Russia this week, which isn’t something that happens very often in Ricky Trickartt HQ. Inside were finished copies of some artwork I had created for St. Petersburg’s Microfunk – more cardboard cassettes, but in a totally different vein to last time!

Lost Dubs on Microfunk

The album is a collection of tracks from various members and friends of the Microfunk collective that were lost or unreleased over the years. The concept was about finding new life in something that had been left behind. I was commissioned by Bop to illustrate this concept with the bouquet from the bowl, and got to have plenty of fun filing the inside with pipes too!

Lost Dubs on Microfunk

I love print so much. The art looks great on the heavy brown paper stock and white ink – it almost looks like I drew each copy myself with some super-fine white Posca markers.

Thanks to Bop and everyone at Microfunk for the project. You can get a copy on their Bandcamp page.

Remix Your Mind

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.

 
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