Not So Camouflaged

Pola

White: The colour of the arctic, and of the polar bear. It’s the perfect camouflage! Perfection aside, it could be a little more festive.

Like all of my best ideas, this one started out life as a post-it sketch.

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Surprisingly, Lilly liked him, so in an unusual strike of decisiveness, I traced him up and off he went to Centurion for another nice plate.

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We dusted off the Adana, and got printing.

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We figured it wasn’t really efficient to print each colour on the letterpress, so to make things even more unique, Lilly and I painted 2,700 tiny fairy lights in watercolour.

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Because we hand-painted them, every single card we produced this year is unique. Cool as a polar bear!

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Year of the Boris

Considering that it’s probably the biggest project I’ve had the pleasure of working on to date, I’ve come to realise I haven’t said much about the work I’ve been doing for Netsky over the past twelve months!

2012 has really shaped up to be our Belgian friend’s year- I remember being astonished at how quickly he ascended over the course of his debut album in 2010, but that was nothing in comparison to his follow-up! The sheer expanse of this project has really brought it together – it’s not just record covers; the artwork goes much further! Continue reading “Year of the Boris”

Inside the Machine

Aside from having to say goodbye to my old Vespa, one of the projects I worked on this Autumn was that of Enei’s debut album, Machines, on Critical Music. When I was given the heads-up, the first thing that struck me about the project was just what a great title Machines is!

I immediately thought ‘I like machines!’ and began dreaming up all the ridiculous things I could draw for the artwork: Washing machines, sewing machines, vending machines, washing machines, fax machines, robots, washing machines, salami-slicing machines and so on. Did I mention I wanted to put a load of washing machines on his album cover?

The daydreams didn’t last long, and from the giddy highs of domestic machines, I fell to the low of realising that all of my typical inclinations would be way too kitsch for the album, and my usual tact of just-getting-on-with-it wasn’t getting me very far either. Continue reading “Inside the Machine”

A Farewell for my first Vespa

“I always told myself that I would ride this bike until death do us part”

It’s been an intense few months in Rickmansland. You may have noticed my daily creativities have not exactly been daily lately, as in the last day one was posted was way back at the end of June, which is when it all started.

My beloved, loyal little Vespa had another breakdown, and this time it was on the South Circular, about 25 miles from home. I had to abandon the bike in Clapham and get the tube home, so I could return the next day with a rental van and take it to a garage to get fixed. This experience was made that much more intense because I only had one day before Lilly and I were set to go and spend a week off in Sicily, where I tried to spend as little time as possible sulking about my dead Vespa.

Continue reading “A Farewell for my first Vespa”

You Call This Summer? Daily Creativities, May-June 2012

It’s been a long, slow 28 days of creativities in Ricky Trickartt’s Wonderful World of Colour. I’ve been grappling with a combination of busyness (working on Netsky’s album amongst other things) and general uninspiration, so pumping out the dailies has been a long slog. I think I need a holiday. Which is convenient as I have one coming up!

There have been a couple of inspired moments this month though. The highlight of the month has to be the Trojan Poultry, which was meant to look rubbish but ended up way cooler than I had originally envisioned. Nice problem to have! The Ram is worth mentioning too, as it went a little bit viral (by my standards at least!) on Tumblr, with almost a hundred reblogs and likes since I originally posted it. A final bonus word for And it Continued to Rain too – it might not be much, but it’s my oddly-pleases-me pick of the month!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “You Call This Summer? Daily Creativities, May-June 2012”

The Daily Creativities of April

Hello Internetters and welcome to another four-weekly roundup of my Something Creative Every Day project! This month has felt like hard work, but it has proven to be worth it as there are some nice ideas to have leaked out of my mind over the past few weeks. I’m particularly pleased with a couple of stopmotion experiments – the Melting Chocolate was a little pointless but somehow turned out exactly as I had envisioned it, and The Raw and The Cooked pleased me immensely, but then I don’t think there are many people out there who share my two fascinations with how microwaves and televisions once looked the same and how roast chickens are always used as generic foodstuffs to cook in a microwave.

Aside from the animations, I also really like two pictures I drew this month: Rhonda the diplodocus is the best drawing I have done on an iPad to date, and I can’t really explain why, but Domestimatic 2032 really pleases me too. It can’t just be because it has a washing machine in it – so much of my work does anyway – but I do like it!

And don’t forget, if you’re big into Tumblr, then you can now follow Something Creative Every Day on Tumblr too!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “The Daily Creativities of April”

Fearing Not

Matt Logistics’ fourth studio album ‘Fear Not’ is out this week, and once again, I have had the pleasure of doing the artwork for the project!

I love working on Logistics albums as I so often get the opportunity to go the extra mile with my artwork – starting from his debut in 2006 where I soldered together 750 lights into the album cover to 2009’s Crash, Bang, Wallop, which I hand-painted a canvas for, Fear Not has become a multimedia art project involving sleeves, stickers, animations, videos, hand-painted T-shirts and even Rubik’s Cubes. Continue reading “Fearing Not”

March SCED Roundup

Finally! It’s time for another month of SCED to be rounded up, covering the month of March and a tiny bit of April! This month is full of all kinds of silly drawings, washing machines and robots. My highlight of the month was finishing off Speakerbot, giving him a retrocomputing style flashing light panel and a new coat of paint. I’ve also started to finally get my head around drawing on the iPad – hopefully these drawings will start to become interesting soon!

In other SCED news, as you might have noticed from the addition to the menu on the right, I have began porting my daily creativities over to Tumblr. I think I’ve found a nice audience here – I seem to be getting more likes and favourites here than I am on Flickr, which is awesome, so hello to all of my new Tumblr followers! I hope you enjoy the little window into my brain this project provides 🙂

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

SCED Roundup, February 2012

It’s roundup time, folks, and although I have been a little late on posting a couple of days of creativity, this is the first time in a long while I have done something to count for every day in a consecutive 28-day period! Right On!

The month started with a lot of robots – I found myself thinking about the complete lack of consistency in my SCED project, so I drew robots all week. These robots spawned one of the highlights of the month for me – tiny little Speakerbot, who not only was fun to make but has made a small improvement to my home too!

Although Speakerbot is probably my highlight, there is some other good (and not-so-good) stuff here elsewhere in the month too! For example, I’m oddly pleased with the Landsnake, though I remain somewhat baffled by the politically angry comment somebody left on it last week. Not at all what I was thinking, but well done to them for exercising their imagination!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “SCED Roundup, February 2012”

Speed & Ecstasy

This winter I worked concurrently on two album projects: John B’s Light Speed and High Contrast’s The Agony & The Ecstasy. Both projects are for different artists and evolved in different ways, but since the art was completed and wheels were set in motion, I’ve been noticing increasing unintended parallels between the two projects and their artwork.

Both album covers were driven by the artists themselves and both had different motivations- High Contrast rather controversially wanted the baroque Caravaggio classic The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew to represent The Agony & The Ecstasy, while John B had some press photos done last year complete with full make-up and styling, one of which he wanted to use for his album cover.

Both albums use transitional serif typefaces – I tend not to use serifs very often in my line of work, so two at once was a rarity! HC pushed for Perpetua on his – I have to admit this wouldn’t have been my first choice (the upper-case U having a tail bugs me) – I was angling for either Garamond (historically appropriate) or Bodoni (classical Italian), but Perpetua works in the entirety of the project. John left it up to me so I took the extravagant haute-fashion stylings of his photos and decided Baskerville fit that aesthetic and the more grown-up sound of this album quite well.

As well as both being driven by the artists’ own motivations for the cover image and both using transitional serif typefaces for different reasons, the most curious parallel that struck me was in this interview John B did with This Is Drum & Bass:

TiD&B: If you could compare your sound, and your new album to perhaps a work of art, what would it be?

John B: No idea… Maybe one of those crazy Renaissance scenes where there’s loads of stuff going on; someone dying from a dagger wound, a bunch of sexy Renaissance ladies with their boobies showing, some angels, and a lion or two.

I’m reasonably sure John hadn’t seen HC’s album cover at the time he did this interview, but it struck me as curious that he pretty much described it (minus the boobies and lions, of course) to analogise his own sound!

Lastly, both albums were a long time coming! It has been six years since Electrostep and five since Tough Guys Don’t Dance, both of which facts are a slightly alarming reminder of how long I have been doing my job now!

Light Speed is out now on Beta Recordings, and The Agony & The Ecstasy is out tomorrow on Hospital Records.

 
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