Oblique Fascinations

Hello Internet! I bookended this month with travelling. As we start this roundup, I was in Hamburg, being astounded by the amount of riot police in town, and struggling to practice my German. Toward the end of the month I found myself in Ibiza, trying to stay as far from the party towns as possible. Instead I hired a Vespa and drove up a mountain, which was a lot like being at home in Britain, except with nice weather!

My favourite post-it from the month was, as usual, one of the least understood. Never Lonely Tomorrow was a picture about the ever-increasing amount of gadgets in the world that you can talk to. The Amazon Echo and its success in the States particularly fascinates me, as it leans into Amazon’s core business of selling you… toilet paper? I’m sure there will be only more and more of these devices to talk to as the future presses on.

The other oblique fascination of the month was They Say Love Is Blind, a more easily digested post-it note about how my rockets and my squid drawings look so similar.

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

It’s Made of Paper!

Here are another two recent record covers I’m pretty proud of, both following a paper theme:

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The Hospital Mixtape series has been a bit of a puzzle since it started a couple of years back because despite it being called ‘mixtape’, there’s a certain discomfort with cassettes behind The Purple Gates. That means it’s down to me to find a way to think alternatively about tapes.

This year the mixtape was put together by S.P.Y, so I took the raw and minimal production finishes from his last album Back To Basics, and set about mixing them up. I got the knives out and ended up crafting a 1:1 scale cassette tape out of reverse cereal box and ribbon. I even made a cardboard case for it too, for the ongoing messy desk imagery used in the series.

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A bit of careful photography and a lot of retouching later, it all came together.

Hugh Hardie is a new Hospital signing. For his debut EP, titled ‘City Soul’, I drew a very rudimentary skyline and chopped it up into something a lot more abstract. I had recently bought myself a slightly mad paper circle cutter, and this proved the perfect job to take it for a spin.

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The textures came courtesy of logarithmic graph paper from my grandpa, excess ink from Etherwood’s Blue Leaves album project, and a copy of The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (which I thought was appropriately city), ran through my increasingly temperamental photocopier.

The whole cover then got a bit of explosion treatment on the back cover.

hardie-back

It’s all made of paper!

April Showers

What a scattered month!

This April I have been trying not to glue my own lips together, having strange dreams about sandal-shaped buses and sunbathing goths, spending far too much money on MP3s (Streaming services? What are they?), and a little bit of travelling here and there too.

My favourite square came quite early this April, in the form of the advice slip. I’ve never understood why ATM receipts are labelled as advice slips. It’d make much more sense if they really dispensed advice, as I pondered in my drawing.

I was sad the world lost Prince too – another hero of imagination has gone. As I noted on Twitter, I’m still in denial about Bowie, so having His Purple Majesty go too is an extra sad time. Shame I couldn’t come up with a better post-it note to commemorate him.

Post-it notes, April 2016

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

 
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