Hello, internet world! As usual, it has been aeons since I wrote anything here. I'm quite sure I have a reasonable amount of stuff to write about to show for my time between writing here. so let's see what we have!

Stopmotion

I've been having rather a lot of fun with my Nikon, as you may have been noticing if you follow my Flickr, as heaven knows it gets updated a lot more than this. Although I don't think I'm taking anything particularly exciting, I'm enjoying hiding behind a nice big peice of glass wherever I go. Anyway, that's mild digression. Following a bit of inspiration from the Lilliship, I have found myself dabbling in stopmotion animation, which I've put some of the fruits of up on YouTube- They're only a few seconds long but I'm rather fond of them, so check them out!

Black and Red

Like the first felt tip markers in the pack to run out on you as a child, the past three album covers I have made have all ended up mostly black with red detailing, by some freak coincidence. This includes the long-coming Icarus album cover. When Syncopix told me he was calling his album Icarus, I decided to take the title semi-literally for the art and ended up sculpting a pair of wings, casting them out of wax and melting them back down again for the cover imagery, photographing it all along the way.

There are smatterings of new works throughout the portfolio for those who are looking for a new reason to shower me with money and to entertain you Trickartt-stalkers out there, in various sections. A couple worth talking about are the sleeve for John B's new single, 'Mr. Freud', and the Sausage Bracelet. Mr. Freud appears to be a runaway popular sleeve, and despite my apprehensions when I made it, it turned out rather nicely. I was worried it was going to be a bit too much like a cheap blue monday, but it ended up holding itself up. When I received the finished copies, it made me feel like I was holding a giant floppy disc, which in my eyes qualifies it a success. The sausage bracelet was a valentine's gift for Lilly (aren't I sweet?), modelled on her sausage dog, hand-sculpted by me. It's not perfect, but i don't think anything I make by hand is.

As usual, there are other random bits forthcoming that I'm not really in a position to talk up, as well as a whole world of incertainty. I guess if you're interested, you'll find out whenever the time is appropriate. So that'll do for now!

Wow, two months since I last wrote here. I'll make an effort to write something proper soon, I'm sure.

anyway, just a quick apology to anyone that tried to get to my site to find a 403 error instead- I was hacked! we had to shut down my site until I repaired the code, which I have done now. Blessing in disguise really- now my URLs are a lot tidier!

Hello again! Just a brief explanation! I have made over my blog too, it seems to mostly function how it should. :) It continues rather nicely on from the new theme set by the rest of my site quite nicely. The main idea is for it to be more about the pictures than my writing here, as they're often a lot more interesting!

Apologies for not wrtiting an update article in the past few months... Amongst other stuff (mentioned below), it really has taken me this long to finish redesigning this page, and make it work!

Bonjour, weblog readers! It's been a while since I wrote here last, but it's been a busy few months! Since I last wrote, I have moved house to a much more humble dwelling (complete with great sunsets!), done a couple of albums, a load of singles, and tinkered with this site a lot. you may notice the format of this page has changed, but that's gonna be explained in another article (it will help test the redesign!). Basically, it's all about the pictures, so here the are!

To my right, you should be noticing these pictures, starting with the Critical album All Sounds Electric in all it's finished luxurian glory, the Speeka album (which is my first non-D&B album!), which was actually a hand-screenprinted effort, some new singles for Hospital that I'm rather proud of, some new glow-in-the-dark garments and anything else I can remember to put in, like the apron I hand-screenprinted and -stitched for Lilly!

Who knows, I might even go and update my flickr soon! I've taken a handful of reasonable photos in the past couple of months... I've discovered the wonders of a tripod!

I've also leaned up my Portfolio a little, removing a lot of the cruft in favour of a more logical layout. My favourite new addition though is the trinkets section. There are more to be added when i think of them and get the opportunity to photo them too, so keep checking back if you're interested!

Bon Appetite!

Avast, Trickartt v3.0! Ahoy v3.1!

New Look Site

Today, I uploaded version 3.1 of the good ship trickartt! The site works in pretty much the same way as it did before, but has had a makeover. To be honest, I was never entirely happy with v3.0 from an aesthetic point of view, as I probably moaned about on here. However, a couple of weeks ago I came up with a new idea for the design while working on something completely unrelated. It all came together relatively easily, but took a lot of work to bring it all together.

As you can tell, the blog section is yet to be updated to match, but it is on the cards. i just need to work out how best to make it work for the more conventional vertically-scrolling format. There's even an outside chance I'll take it as an opportunity to upgrade to some proper blogging software, but that all depends on how ambitious i'm feeling when I come to doing it.

Prints!

As I previously mentioned, I've actually put up a page advertising the Prints I made this summer. Foolishly, I put them into storage a few days before I found the motivation to make the page, so some photos of the actual prints will be added to the page at some nearby future point.

If you are interested in buying one, please don't hesitate to email me and talk turkey! If these sell reasonably, I have told myself to invest some of the profits back into getting some tshirts (and potentially other nice printed things such as postcards and wrapping paper) and start the fabled boutique.

Lastly for the evening, here is something I worked on but doesn't have a rightful place on my portfolio. I recently helped work on High Contrast's new album 'Tough Guys Don't Dance'. I didn't do the artwork, but I did get a rather nice new credit on the sleeve:

Production and Layout! If anyone wonders what that actually means, the simplest explanation is High Contrast said what he wanted, Chris said how to do it, Dave did it and I made it fully functional. haha. It was quite a project!

Well I hope you all like the new look of (the rest of) the site! I feel it's a lot more me, and rather more unconventional!

Ahoy! I can't believe it's been three months since I last wrote anything here. Wow. I guess, as they say, time flies when you're having fun. A lot has happened in the past quarter, I have had my hand in a few more albums and singles, I turned 21 and I took a trip to the other side of the world! Whoosh!

I have managed to keep the main site relatively updated in the mean time, even if I haven't wrote on here, so there is new stuff to see. well here is a handful of stuff, some commissioned, some not.

New wallpapers! The first being a diagram of how rain is made.

This is probably one of my favourite pieces of work from the past few months. It's a pastiche of Hokusai's Great Wave, which I know is hardly an original idea, but it was too appropriate for the titles of the single the art was for. Besides I had fun doing it! Here's a closeup of some of the detail in my version too :)

Here is a dabbling in mixing illustration with photography, named Suburban Takeover:

I managed to acquire a wide-format printer for a few weeks in July, so I used it to run off some posters and a few canvases. I have a selection of stuff waiting to be sold too, but to be honest I don't see myself getting organised enough to do that in the near future. I'm intending on putting a page up at some point in the future listing what I have waiting to be homed by you, but in the mean time, anyone seriously interested can email me for a bit more info. Anyway, one of the posters I came up with is the Pasta Wallchart:

The last thing I have to mention for the time being is that I got a new camera - my first dSLR! I'm enjoying the freedom that's offering me, and I joined flickr, as that seems to be the done thing by anyone who likes taking photos, though I have to say I don't understand it completely yet. I thought it was going to be a bit more public and would offer me lots of people looking at my photos to potentially offer me constructive criticism, as I don't think my photos are very good yet. Anyway, If you use flickr too, I would be delighted if you did whatever you do on flickr and start talking about my photos or something.

OK, the last thing I'll leave you with for now is this character. Avast!

Keeping this page updated is such a weird scenario. I get stuck in the quagmire of feeling like I'm not showing enough stuff then realising I've got wayy too much for one entry! haha.

On with the crap tho. I won't post pictures here but there are lots of new things in the work section, including the mammoth project that was the Hospital Records website- a project that took about seven months start to finish. We all love it though- unlike most of the bigger labels in D&B, Hospital's website is now fully modernised and present! There have also been a selection of new things added to the Critical and Hospital sections of the work pages if you feel like taking a gander.

From the realm of non-worky things appear two more wallpapers! One is inspired by Andreas Gursky, though is photoshopped as opposed to his incredible photography, and the other is just some standard retro funk. they are available to download in the usual place tho.

I've also been dabbling in the concept of using web browsers as a canvas for a bit of art that's largely a repeat pattern. I've had some relatively interesting results too!

Panoramas

I've been messing around with shooting panoramas over the past few months. They're quite fun to do and Photoshop CS3 has some mindbending photostitch algorhythms, which have yielded the following results, tho I tend to have just as much fun laying them out myself. Maybe one day I'll do some that are as good as David Hockney's. I've no idea how interesting you'll find any of these, or even how good they are, but i quite like them. The images are clickable for larger versions if you are actually at all interested.

In the park with Adfam, made up of cameraphone photos:

An early one of my room:

A couple of panoramas taken on a daytrip to Brighton with Lilly:

And a couple more from Germany, in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, respectively:

Here is Danny Byrd looking jolly while sporting his new Trickartt T-shirt:

Lastly, I have decided to do away with the weird bit at the bottom of each entry about what i'm listening to, as it's pretty much pointless. instead, I am favouring the idea of actually writing a note about whatever I've been listening to lately, if I feel it's worth reccomending. Such as Talc's album 'Sit Down Think'. I've been listening to it soo much over the past few weeks and it's such a great fun album. It's on Wah Wah 45s and you can find more info about it here. To quote Fly, "I bet Denis Waterman couldn't get Natasha Kaplinsky into any of [his] lyrics." Too right.

As promised, this post is here for the sole purpose of letting you know Hospital Shop has Trickartt Panda T-Shirts in stock now!

They are available in Cardinal Red and Golden Yellow in sizes Medium, Large and XL.

Remember, that's SHOP.HOSPITALRECORDS.COM! :)

I've realised my weblog was becoming exactly what I didn't want it to lately- the lazy man's way of showing new work. So I have decided to remedy that and have updated a load of junk on the portfolio, so if you want to see some new pictures, go dig around there, particularly in the Hospital Records section.

Anyway. On with the interesting stuff.

Finally some new Wallpapers!

Yes! I hear your cries of bewilderment! You can download them from the Wallpapers section, as ever.

On a creative randomnity tip, here are a couple of strange things.

The Lilly and I baked this loaf of bread the other day and much to her dismay, I had some googly eyes to hand, ready to turn the loaf into a breadmonster!

Now on his fourth protoype, the cuddly Purple Dude is starting to make sense. I'm experimenting with different fabrics and different kinds of stitching and the like, but he's coming on famously!

And with that, I bid you Adeau!

Have some pictures.

New Beta Things

Weapons 3

Here is a preview of the Weapons of Mass Creation Three album artwork:

I had to master the Super Badge-It and get the needle and thread out for this cover... It was quite a picture, believe me! Anyway, we brought the always fantastic Andrew Attah in again to take the photos for this.

The cover of the cd folds out to reveal the full image:

On the Weapons/War front, I've been helping envisage the Stop the War on Vinyl campaign, coming up with the commie-style identity for it.

Threaddage

Apparently the Panda Style 7" became massively popular in it's limited glory, and following numerous enquiries about them, I am happy to announce that Panda Style Trickartt T-Shirts will be available from Hospital Soon! You can rest assured I will make some noise on my site when they're actually available to buy.

That's about all i can show right now. In case you don't venture into my portfolio much, I suggest you have a look round, cos I've retaken all of the Threads photos and added a few new items to boot!

Keep it Cakey!