Speakerbot III

Speakerbot III

This weekend’s project was an upgrade of sorts for Speakerbot, the little robot that lives beside my turntables.

He originally came to be because my speakers sat on different shelves that weren’t the same height in an old apartment. Of course the way to remedy that was to make a robot to bring one speaker up to the right height. Here was my original illustration of the idea:

120210 - Annoy

A couple of days later, he emerged from the cardboard

120211 - Speakerbot

Then he had a well-received lick of paint

120311 - Productive Day

About five years later, the cardboard was starting to get a little soft and wobbly, so this weekend I rebuilt him out of MDF. Who knew cardboard could be so human-like?

woodbot

An upgrade was done to his electricals, including some new switches on the light-matrix and a new meter that can just-about be hooked up to the music to display its current.

Press the button

He stands a lot firmer now, and will hopefully last longer than the cardboard incarnation did!

It’s Made of Paper!

Here are another two recent record covers I’m pretty proud of, both following a paper theme:

NHS291-Packshot-2400px

The Hospital Mixtape series has been a bit of a puzzle since it started a couple of years back because despite it being called ‘mixtape’, there’s a certain discomfort with cassettes behind The Purple Gates. That means it’s down to me to find a way to think alternatively about tapes.

This year the mixtape was put together by S.P.Y, so I took the raw and minimal production finishes from his last album Back To Basics, and set about mixing them up. I got the knives out and ended up crafting a 1:1 scale cassette tape out of reverse cereal box and ribbon. I even made a cardboard case for it too, for the ongoing messy desk imagery used in the series.

ddesk

A bit of careful photography and a lot of retouching later, it all came together.

Hugh Hardie is a new Hospital signing. For his debut EP, titled ‘City Soul’, I drew a very rudimentary skyline and chopped it up into something a lot more abstract. I had recently bought myself a slightly mad paper circle cutter, and this proved the perfect job to take it for a spin.

NHS292EP-Packshot-2400px

The textures came courtesy of logarithmic graph paper from my grandpa, excess ink from Etherwood’s Blue Leaves album project, and a copy of The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (which I thought was appropriately city), ran through my increasingly temperamental photocopier.

The whole cover then got a bit of explosion treatment on the back cover.

hardie-back

It’s all made of paper!

Paper iPhone TV Set

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 🙂

 
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