Season’s Tweetings!

A nice girl who bought a set of the letterpressing inks I was selling earlier this year tipped me off about Centurion Graphics as a good place to get printing plates made, so for this year’s Christmas card designs, we did exactly that!

We got some nice heavy-guage magnesium plates made up of a robin design I came up with under Lilly’s direction. They plates are really good – so much easier than my previous linocut efforts, and capable of a really nice deep impression in the card too.

Unfortunately I was a bit hasty when I started to print up these cards and by rushing I messed up the text on the front a little bit, ending up with a bit of ghosting from improper inking. Oh well.

Other than that we’re pleased with the cards! We’re reclaiming ‘tweeting’ from its modern social-network-meaning! If you’re not British, you might be wondering what robins have to do with Christmas. Wikipedia has an, er, nice section suggesting some reasons robins are associated with Christmas in Britain. I don’t know if it’s common, but when I was small, my Mum used to tell me that robins are Santa’s little watchmen – they had red chests to match Santa’s outfit and they reported back to him on whether you had been good or bad throughout the year so he knew what to give you for Christmas. Haha 🙂

My baby: NHS200

I’m pleased to announce (or rather acknowledge as it has been public for a couple of weeks now) that NHS200 is not actually a salmon slicer but a book!

This project has been my baby for the past several months. Making a book of all of the art and other visual stuff from the label is something that Chris and I have wanted to do for a long time, with the idea being suggested several times at Hospital over the past few years. More notes and photos after the fold! Continue reading “My baby: NHS200”

Something Creative for the better part of October and November

Hey, look at that! It’s taken me a lot longer than it should, but I have finally clocked up another four weeks of daily creativities! I ended up having to take about a week off from the project to work on something bigger and more exciting, details of which should emerge very soon!

There are a couple of great things this month; my favourite by far is the chickens I drew, closely followed by the slightly brutal Yuh Wan’ Pork?, but there some other nice things in there too!

I’ve got less than a month until my annual transatlantic trip now, but hopefully that won’t cause too much of a delay before my next roundup. What I’m more worried about is all the work I have to finish before I leave!!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “Something Creative for the better part of October and November”

Skulls, Spaceships and Playmobil

Tom Chambers is a man with a camera. He’s been taking some great photos and videos for Hospital for a little bit now, and became a resident documenter for Hospitality while at uni in Brighton. His videos for us have been smashing it, like this video from Hospitality at Lovebox Festival this summer, doing a great job of capturing the atmosphere of our parties.

For his final project at University, he made a documentary about Hospital! I was very honoured when he asked me to be a part of it; he even missioned it on public transport all the way out to Rickmansworth to come and see me. I guess it was worth his time though, as he used a lot of footage from our chat in the end result – somehow I ended up getting considerably more air time than Chris and Tony even did, and they’re the bosses of the label!

We were all really blown away by the end result at Hospital; so much that we hassled Tom to let us release it as part of our Fifteen Years Of Hospital extravaganza. I am a bit freaked out by the sound of my own voice, I feel like I say some stupid stuff in it (sorry Edgar, I don’t mean anything bad about you or your job, I promise!!) and I seem to not bother finishing my sentences a few times too, but if you turn a blind eye to my flaws you’ll find a really tidy little documentary.

So if you’re interested in our world, check it out! It’s a great little look into the Hospital ethos of fun, and shows a little glimpse into how we work and why we do it too. It features contributions from a selection of staff, artists and general friends of the label – thankfully it’s not all about me, or even I would’ve embargoed it!

And big up to Tom for making it!!

Reverberations (and Riots)

This week has seen the release of Unquote’s debut album Reverberation Box, an album project I have had the pleasure of working on over the past couple of months. The artwork I created for this album has been greeted so warmly I thought I’d show it a bit of love on Notes!

Unquote is a St-Petersburger signed to Med School after he had a couple of fantastic tracks on big sister Hospital’s Future Sound Of Russia project in 2009. His debut single, the substantially titled ‘Hide Your Tears Because We Are In Heaven‘ came out last year, and my artwork for this is where Reverberation Box started.

Continue reading “Reverberations (and Riots)”

Longest SCED Month Ever

Hey Internet people! Here is my latest month’s worth of daily creativities. Due to the great Flickr washout, it has taken me more than two months to do 28 days of creativity, but I’m reasonably back on track now!

There are some fun things here too; my personal favourites in this batch are What Makes Maurice and Trashbot Junior; maintaining my standards of occasionally-genius visual nonsense!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “Longest SCED Month Ever”

And We’re Back

Finally: I have restored everything from my Something Creative Every Day project which got washed away last month.

It will never be the same but it’s as good as it’s going to get! You can see the fully restored set here, or you can just keep an eye on me on your favourite social networks, as I should be getting back into doing daily creativities again now everything is back.

Thanks to all for their patience and support!

The Great SCED Washout

Last month I encountered a bug that wiped the past year of my Something Creative Every Day project off the face of the internet.

It didn’t take very long to work out what had happened. I had upgraded to a newer version of Apple’s Aperture than I had previously been working with, and the newer one brought built-in Flickr integration, which long story short, ate the entire set I had on Flickr.

What happened was a classic synchronisation nightmare – it synchronised, but the wrong way around. Aperture chose its empty version as ‘the Truth’ and deleted everything that was already in the Flickr set; it didn’t just remove existing items from set but totally erased them from existence.

Aargh! As soon as I discovered the data loss, I got in touch with both Apple and Flickr. Much to my surprise, I got a reply from Apple within hours, apologising and asking for more information to nail down the bug. It took Flickr almost three days to reply to my message, in which they completely misunderstood the situation. In all, it took two and a half weeks of ridiculously slow responses, having my support case closed on me, and writing to Flickr’s product manager, to get Flickr to tell me they can’t do anything to restore my stuff and that it’s Apple’s fault.

Which brings me to where I am today.

I managed to glean most of my descriptions from Google’s caches before they disappeared off the face of the earth, but some were already gone from the cache. I am left having to manually find more than 300 images and restore them back to my Flickr account, and in doing so, I will have lost everybody’s comments and favourites, my tags on all of my images, all the pools and sets the images had been shared with, and crucially, all of the links will be different. So if anything has gone beyond Flickr, it’ll be dead now too.

It’s gonna take me a while to work through everything and reinstate it all. I have made a start though – today I restored this month of missing images, which includes my inventory of everything on my desk; one of the most popular images from my SCED project so far.

When the restoration project is complete, normal SCED service will resume. Wish me luck!

Hospital Bike Club

For some silly reason I have agreed to partake in Hospital Bike Club – along with some of our officers, I shall be embarking on a two-wheeled journey from Hospital’s HQ in South London to Brighton on Saturday 8th October, before Hospitality Brighton that night.

I have been given the relatively easy end of the bargain here, because unlike my colleagues, my two wheels will be propelled by a tiny engine. This doesn’t make it much less daunting for me though – the trip from SE26 to the Brighton seafront in itself would be pretty much the longest journey I will have ever taken my tiny 50cc Vespa on in nine years of owning it, and my journey doesn’t even begin there, as I have a thirty-mile ride to the start line too.

Still, I can’t complain too much – Edgar, Riley, Zac and Tom will be doing this using the power of their own bodies while I buzz along with them, handing them sugary drinks and kendal mint cake to keep their energy up! Lilly may also be joining me to ride on the back, as it would be fun to film the event Tour de France style, with her facing backwards with a camera. We’re not sure on the legalities of that, but I will document the event one way or another!

So why are we doing this?

Well, aside from fun, we are doing this for charity! We are raising money for MIND, the mental health charity, which is a pretty awesome cause. You can donate money on our Just Giving page here. And if you don’t think my mammoth Vespa trip is worth it, then do it for the chaps who are actually pedalling the whole way!

Something Catastrophic Every Day

What a time for this to happen – just as this nice interview with me was posted, somewhere between upgrading my version of Aperture and my Flickr account, the past year of something creative every day has been completely wiped out. I don’t think I have much of a chance of reinstating it, but I have written to Flickr to ask for their help. In the mean time, please excuse all the broken images and links you will find with anything relating to the past year of something creative every day.

 
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