Ships, Scrawls And A Really Big Snail

Hey Internets! Here’s a roundup of the past four weeks in Ricky Trickartt’s Sunshine World. Clearly, the big event this month was the big snail. He’s so jazzy, I’ve decided to name him Cosby. Oh yeah. [Update, Nov. 2018: As I modify this post to fix some broken links, it seems now that using ‘Cosby’ in a positive light is no longer a very good idea at all]

The two biggest hits this month were the Pie Chart and Meats by Dr. Dre. The latter was an idea that has been rolling around my noggin since this fabled Apple acquisition arose in the news – my drawing turned out much better than I was expecting, and was immediately well received too. Wonderful.

The biggest disappointment, on the other hand, is Xscape The Lampshade. Every time I walk past a poster for Michael Jackson’s new album, I think it looks like he’s wearing an elizabethan collar (AKA lampshade), like a guilty dog, and that’s what this picture is about. Maybe my drawing was just so bad people thought it was Liza Minnelli, so they didn’t get the reference. It’s an easy mistake to make. I thought this would be a bit better digested than it was, but perhaps it’s just a quiet testament to how oddly my mind moves.

My personal favourite is the Science Boat this month. I loved the story in the news that Britain is ordering a new boat for science – particularly how it simply says SCIENCE on its flanks in big, bland, bold Helvetica in the renderings. It contrasts with the other recent news about Japan’s ‘science’ boats they’re using for whaling. Nasty business. Anyway, my drawing of the science boat seemed to somehow hit that sweet-spot of cuteness, and that makes me happy.

Don’t forget that if you want to follow along with my daily postings but aren’t into the whole Instagram thing, then I am also keeping up with putting them on Flickr (just like old times!) and Tumblr. Alright!

April in Little Yellow Squares

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss the duck wearing a captain’s hat.

It’s April in Ricky Trickartt’s Wonderful World of Colour! The month has zoomed right past me – it really doesn’t feel like four weeks ago when I posted the last roundup, but I have all of these daily drawings to prove to me otherwise. There’s a bit of an animal theme running through this month – my favourite drawing of this lot is Huffman, the dog with the snout as long as the rest of his body. It’s so long it needs its own additional prop when he walks. He featured in a few doodles, and will probably come up again at some point in the future.

Speaking of the future, if you want to keep up with my future postings, make sure you follow me on Instagram to see more of this daily nonsense before I post these roundups!

Oh God It’s Happening Again

In the same way Something Creative Every Day just kinda started itself in 2009 and just kinda stopped happening three and a half years later, the Ricky Trickartt daily nonsense project has just kinda reincarnated itself.

Letting SCED come to a halt last spring felt right – not having to think (the thinking was definitely the hardest part!) of something to make every day brought me a small sense of liberation, but as 2013 rolled on, the liberation gave way to a kind of absence. I was missing the challenge, so I started pondering how to bring it back and make it better than before.

The one thing that was abundantly clear from the original run was the project’s lack of focus. It was part of its charm, sure, but it was also making the project hard to define, so that was the thing to fix if SCED was to return. I began pondering different strategies and sorting through the archive to see how they would work – I considered colour-themed months, daily robots, canvas restrictions and more, but nothing seemed to add the right kind of focus to the project.

Instagram is where all the cool kids are these days, and I’ve been posting random creations there sporadically for the past year, including the odd post-it. One of these post-it doodles suddenly turned into a week of daily postings, and before I could figure out how to focus the project’s return, here we are a month later with 28 daily post-it-postings. Oh god, it’s happening again!

When it comes to using post-it notes for daily creative outbursts, I’d like to acknowledge the incredibly talented Aaron Hartline, The Daily Post-it (seriously, look at how amazing this is!). He is an animator at Pixar who started following me on Twitter a couple of years back, I guess because we were sharing the intersecting worlds of daily creations and a love of post-it notes. He’s got focus!

Anyway, like the original SCED, I’ve no idea how long this is going to last, or if anything good will come of it, but I’m going to enjoy doing it for the time being. I’ll see how it goes, and if you follow me on Instagram, then we can see where it ends up together!

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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