Sweet, Noggy Christmas

We’re always searching for unconventional ideas for our annual hand-letterpressed Christmas cards in my world. Always plenty of bad unconventional ideas come up (I actually think the Angel Grinder was pretty good!), but this year’s was a doozy: eggnog.

I’ve been spending Christmas outside of the UK for so long now I’m not sure if eggnog has finally been imported to these shores, but even in its cultural home of America, it still baffles me. It’s kind of like the milkshake you never wanted.

It doesn’t really taste eggy. It sits in the same American Holiday category as pumpkin pie in my mind – a kind of not-entirely-sweet thing that is equally misunderstood outside of the US. I’ve acquired a taste for pumpkin pie now, but every year I’m on that side of the Atlantic ocean at Christmastime, I drink eggnog and wonder why I’m doing it.

I even went to the effort this year of making my own eggnog from fresh ingredients – the real stuff is basically the same ingredient set as a good gelato, so nothing to be afraid of (though your pipes might feel differently). The homemade stuff was definitely better, but still utterly perplexing.

Perplexing – perfect for our Christmas cards! To print we went, with a nice little halftone pattern giving the illustration that extra bit of depth. Super satisfying!

The Little Yellow Journal of Another Trip To America

Another winter has been spent being bewildered in the States! This year I encountered (beside all the usual bigotry, gun worship and emotionally manipulative advertising) the fattest chihuahua I had ever seen, mailboxes that looked like they were alive, and a different take on the self-service vending machine. I ate an obscene amount of tacos too, for all meals of the day. You can’t do that in Britain!

And then I flew home, and wondered what just happened. Here’s how it looked through my eyes:

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “The Little Yellow Journal of Another Trip To America”

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.”

February’s Fancies

This month in Ricky Trickartt’s wonderful world of colour, I’ve been pondering the backstory to Cecil’s Ride though a series of cat drawings. These are probably some of my favourite doodles over the past few weeks! Not all of the cats are to do with him though – the sack of cats came from Don Quixote, which I finished reading this month.

A couple of weeks ago two stories hit the internet at the same time- the resurrection of Skymall and release of footage from the new James Bond movie. The combination left me remembering Adele’s theme song to the last movie, and I imagined what James Bond would look like (and be thinking) if he ever got the opportunity to peruse a copy of Skymall on a long-distance flight.

I also found myself musing on the possibilities of throwing a hot dog so it would fly the length of a swimming pool. Maybe a 25-metre pool as that’s what was have here in the valley. I think my best bet would be some kind of balsa-and-tissuepaper wing construction. It’d make a great competition, but I don’t know if I’ll ever put this daydream into action, particularly if the hot dog is topped with mustard. That would just make a mess.

Drawing is fun!

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

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!

 
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