Christmas Card Speed Sale!

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Ah, November. It’s that time of year when the days get so short you’ll miss the sunlight if you blink, and time to get the old Adana back in motion – it’s Christmas card time!

Lilly and I have been making hand-letterpressed Christmas cards for a while now. We come up with a new design each year, so now we have a little range of designs and feel a bit more organised than past years, I think it’s about damn time I put some up for sale!

As you should see in the lead photo, I have four designs up for sale:

  • Season’s Tweetings – a nice robin, Santa’s little watchmen – Read more about it here or Buy here
  • Not So Camouflaged – Spoiling the polar bear’s perfect winter camouflage in the most festive way possible – Read more about it here or Buy here
  • Lapland Launderers – Santa got a new washer for Christmas last year – Read more about it here or Buy here
  • And a new design for this year:

  • Sleighbell Safari – I haven’t printed this one yet, but it will be a nice black and silver print. Buy Here

…or if you can’t decide which ones you like the best, you can also buy a multipack of all four designs here!

The cards are all printed on a very nice 300gsm Somerset paper stock, so they’re nice and heavy and when combined with the letterpressed artwork, there’s a wonderful tactility to them – something you could never dream of getting from an e-card! All cards will also come with an appropriately sized and coloured envelope – either red or silver.

I’m calling this a speed sale because by the nature of Christmas coming on a fixed date, they’re only going to be up for sale for a couple of weeks. All orders will be printed up and posted out to you by 1st December, which should give you plenty of time to fill out the cards and get them into the mail to your friends and enemies before Royal Mail’s own deadline.

Head over to my tiny webshop now to get your orders in, and send your friends some hand-printed and totally unique christmas cards – receiving mail is awesome!

Triple-feature

Back when she lived in the States, Lilly used to have posters from her favourite movies on the wall. For her birthday this year, I decided to bring some of her world back to our apartment here in Rickmansland, but being the artist I am, I couldn’t help but redesign them for her too.

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catThe To Catch A Thief poster was the biggest gamble. Lilly is very fond of Grace Kelly and not-so-fond of cats, so obviously (?) this is a poster with a great big picture of a cat and no pictures of Princess Grace. I know my audience. The design is based on the first edition cover of the original novel, and it was such a great idea I couldn’t resist repurposing it. Besides, it’s a whole lot easier to draw a silly cat than it is to draw a decent picture of Grace Kelly! Lilly’s reaction was that we should get a pet cat, simply so we can name him John Robie. Coming from a cat-agnostic, I’m taking that as high praise!

windowRear Window‘s poster took the longest to come together. My biggest problem with the original poster was the inappropriate use of Showcard Gothic. Not only was it a massive anachronism, given that the font was designed almost 40 years after the movie came out, but it was pixelated to high hell on the printed poster too. Once that was fixed, it took a few runs at getting the illustration to do justice to the fantastic set the whole movie is based around.

sciaThe poster for Charade came together easiest, but that’s because the source material was so great. I loved all the typography in Italian on her original poster, so that had to stay, and the bright yellow colour scheme was great fun too. All that was needed to tie it together were some of the graphics from Maurice Binder’s wonderful animated title sequence.

Movie posters are a little out of my wheelhouse, but I’m really pleased with the results. They took a bit longer than usual to work on, but that was mostly because I was trying to keep them a surprise. More importantly than what I think about them though, Lilly likes them too – she couldn’t wait to get them up on the walls!

Wobble Wobble Womp Womp

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Continuing with the theme of designing record covers for the YouTube generation, the artwork I created for this year’s New Blood compilation on Med School has been going down famously!

For this album, I created twenty bespoke videos based on my original cover art idea – using a subwoofer to vibrate a pool of blood-coloured oobleck – one for each track. You can see the whole playlist of them all here:

It’s surprising how different the results were based on the different tunes – some of the basslines created very uniformed ripples, whereas some made the mixture go absolutely nuts! Continue reading “Wobble Wobble Womp Womp”

How To Make A Washing Machine

If the title of this post didn’t make it clear enough, I was really pleased with the hyper-detailed looping animated gif of a robot factory I made earlier this year. So much so I have decided to make another one. This time they’re making – you guessed it – washing machines!

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It took a lot of energy, but for a 1.1 second loop, you can spent a whole lot longer than that looking at it to follow what’s going on.

My favourite bit is the robot who stretches the drive belt over the drum. It feels nice when things come out of my brain in the way I imagined them!

Decade

It occurred to me while I was in the shower this morning that the ten-year anniversary of my first album cover happened while I was in Africa. John B’s in:transit album hit stores in June 2004, just as I was cocking up my A-Level exams at school. John was kind enough to take a chance on a student doing his record cover for him, but he didn’t realise just how young a student I was at the time!

Here I am as a very proud eighteen-year-old, showing my dad my work on the shelves of our local HMV:

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A decade later, I continue to love designing record covers, and I still work with John B on his, but my ridiculous hair appears to have outlived the record store as I knew it!

 
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