Waschmann spins again

My new attempt at an old painting of a spaceman-washing-machine

It feels a little silly to paint a picture I already painted a few years ago, but the Waschmann caught my attention again recently. I was thinking about how my attempt at contrasting a matte space sky with a glossy robot body didn’t really work on the canvas surface. I decided I’d give it another go on a harder surface, and it would be a good excuse to have another go with Stuart Semple’s Black 2.0 paint (and by funny coincidence I then heard it featured on 99 Percent Invisible recently too). I’ve got to say – the Black 2.0 paint is super disappointing. The best thing about it is how it photographs, as it’s very easy to blow it out to 100% black when post-processing, but in person it’s laughably not-black. Even regular old System 3 process black is dramatically darker to the human eye, even with a gloss glaze over it. I hope Semple’s Black 3.0 paint is an improvement, but I’m less inclined to try it considering how disappointed I am by the 2.0.

My old attempt at painting the Waschmann

My painting is a little better anyway – it’s a lot more subtle without the thick black outlines.

Odyssey Oddity

Exciting times arrived in Rickmansland this spring, bringing a small commission from a big company. Red Bull asked me to design a T-shirt for a music event they were hosting in June. Named The Odyssey, the event took place on a small armada of boats on the Thames.

I was asked to come up with a design that I felt represented Drum & Bass music, and being me, I wanted to steer away from the hoodies-and-graffiti visual cliches of the genre. Instead I tried to illustrate what the music does – offers a place to escape into something totally different to other stuff we have on our planet and sink into a different dimension.


Red Bull were also kind enough to post a brief interview with me onto their website, which you can read here. I am thankful that even with the tint of hindsight, I don’t sound too ridiculous in the article. If you like the T-shirt design, you can order yourself one here!

Clean-up in Sector Six

I created the above illustration for Barbican’s Sci-fi poster competition. Clean-up in Sector Six imagines a team of domesticated robots commissioned to travel into junk orbit and collect the space junk that is floating out there. Inside their rocket ship, they dismantle the trash they capture, and after sorting it for valuables, use the rest as fuel for their engine that powers the ship. They’re kind of like space wombles! Of course, because their job is cleaning, they can’t help cleaning up their ship perpetually as well.

Here we see a robot vacuuming the vacuum chamber

I do like to think about junk orbit from time to time. Some of the stuff floating around up there would have been the most expensive objects ever created in their time. Now they just hover around out there, trying not to cause any accidents. Kind of like how I feel on the internet.

Where We Going?

swi-tl

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.

art-its

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.

five

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.

mapp

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.

tdp

 
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