Anchorless

In the morning I shall be Hamburg bound for Flatstock 23 and the great times that lie at the end of my 14 hour solo journey. So I've loaded up my iPod with all The Weakerthans albums and got a couple of new Bill Bryson books for company.

I will be taking a fair amount of posters ready for the hard sell plus some kooky little business card wallets as illustrated above and below. I'll surely come back with crazy pics a-plenty from the weeks proceedings and be talking in some code that us 'poster weiners' have concocted to further distance ourselves from the real world.

I'll also post the new Bowerbirds poster up on my return but until then, have a great week!

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

Guten Tag. So you may or may not know that next week I am off to Hamburg, DE where I will be exhibiting at the mighty FLATSTOCK on the Reeperbahn. If its half as good as last year it'll be the greatest thing ever as I get to hang out with some good old friends and hopefully make some new ones.

Whilst i'm over there i'm also contributing an art print to The Beatles (you may have heard of them) museum in Hamburg, Beatlemania.

Here is a quick process of the art print being made, starting with a sky blue colour for the first layer. The second colour down. The third colour, which although Elle described as a bit poo-y, is actually more Jamaican Ginger I think... Here I needed to make sure that the paint had an exact level of transparency so that the colour behind would be visible, creating extra detail and depth to the print. The fourth colour is a dark salmon and again having to make sure that the paint was transparent enough to show the colours which I was printing over. So, a bit more of a tricky one this and it took ages but they'll be up for sale shortly from my Big Cartel store but I can't wait to see these up in the museum!

Loads of updates to come next week and hopefully i'll have time to show you them before I sod off to Germany. Until then, auf wiedersehen!!

Idiot Heart

Along with the Magnolia Electric Co. posters that I printed for the Brudenell show (which apparently featured a man dancing in his underwear), I was also asked to screen-print my effort for Sunset Rubdown. I wanted to make a series of the two posters, giving people something to collect and basically something that looked pretty cool.

With this in mind I made a sketch based on the cowboy / horse illustration from the Magnolia poster. I wanted the image to relate to SR's recent album 'Dragonslayer' and so I drew some dude riding a dragon... genius! I then inked in the illustration using my tried and tested Pentel Pocket Brush. And then I went about doing all the fancy Photoshop things like adding colour and then making the separations ready for screen-printing. This time I added a moon as opposed to a sunset, as they've got a track called 'Silver Moons'. This also gave me the idea to actually print silver when it came to the screen-printing process. The acetate for the white layer of the print. Printing the white layer. The white layer down on the navy card, looking all nice. The acetate for the 'split (yes, another) fountain' layer. Printing the 'split'. The finshed poster on navy card. Detail on tan card. The finished poster on black card. So there you go, a little insight to the design and print process, phew!

Also worth a mention is that Tubelord's Rainboliatric project got blogged about on the Rock Sound website, where you can see a few of my efforts littered amongst the hilariously great artwork from other great UK illustrators! Way to go dudes!!

Lonesome Valley

I believe I promised to show you some 'funky-ass screen-prints' for some posters that I did for the Brudenell Social Club. Since I am a man of my word, here is the poster process for the Magnolia Electric Co. gig going down tomorrow night at the Brudenell.

The acetate for the white layer. Printing the white layer. White layer down. The white layer down on the two brown card variants. The acetate for the 'split-fountain' layer. Doing the splits (not literally). Testing out the split layer, to achieve an authentic looking sunset. It worked! Detail (plus look close enough and you can see the metallic gold sparkle in the top of the sunset). Not all the prints registered perfectly but I kinda like this, as it makes each print completely unique. The finished poster, on Ruby Red card. So another month, another process thread. Hope you enjoyed it again.

There will be a super-limited amount of these posters available at the gig tomorrow night from the merch stall and from Monday 7th September they will be available from my Big Cartel store. Hopefully you might want to buy one.

Tatty bye y'all!

A Simple Hypothetical

If you hadn't heard, one of the UK's finest bands Dartz have decided to call it a day. Obviously this is very sad news but to celebrate their marvelousity, they are playing a couple of fare-thee-well shows and this is my effort for the Middlesbrough date. I was happy to be involved in some shape as to their sending off due to the fact that I can't make the gigs (mega bummer). So, to Henry, Will, Phil and Nico, thanks for teaching me to dance.

Yeah!

G'day. Here is a quick-ish illustration that I done for Radio 1 approved Belfast dance-punks Not Squares. The illustration is based on Robert Crumb's Mr Natural character, except I got him drunk and convinced him that his almighty beard was a musical instrument and here he is trying to play it... Good luck buddy!

This was done on tracing paper and will be inside one copy of their debut single, 'Aye Yo Pa'.

Yeah!

Propeller

A couple of months back I received an email from Jo Tubelord, pitching to me a rather interesting project in which he wished for me to be a part of. At first I was going to sack it off but he did put 4 x's at the end of said message and i'm a sucker for the digital love.

The challenge that lay ahead of the band was to assign a set amount of 7" sleeves to a bunch of 'art weiners' for their upcoming single 'Propeller' and so I took 30 of 500 to help out.

After receiving my 30 sleeves in the post along with a heart breaking tale of a moose who whilst out on a casual jog falls in love with a bear yet never gets the beautiful ursidae, who is oblivious to the poor moose's affections resulting in loss, confusion and resignition of chasing an impossible zeal.

With the above story as inspiration I created my image which I chose to screenprint across the 30 sleeves and the below pictures document the process in which the sleeves were printed...

The sleeves, awaiting their fate (plus killer mug). The acetate for the first layer of my print. The first colour (metallic gold) being printed. The gold layer complete. The acetate for the second layer of the print. Second colour (intense pink) being printed Both colours down, drying and looking like a delicious army! The final sleeve. Hopefully that has shed some light on the screenprinting process and how my sleeves for 'Propeller' were put together.

If you want to see more fricking ace sleeves for this project then head over to the Rainboliatric blog. There's some seriously great work there, so go, go, feast your eyes!

The Stars Are Projectors

Good day. Quick update with some fresh new t-shirt designs of the one-colour variety.

First up is a design for pop-punkeroos The Auteur. This design gives light to the mystery that surrounds as to why cats have such bad breath... Secondly is a slightly 1960's Batman inspired picture for Kid Cosmic, of some innocent little dude on a gameboy... uhh, thats it. KAPOW!

When Day Chokes the Night

Hello. A while back I was asked to do some design work for a new pub that is opening in Brixton later in the year. I came up with some rough drafts and turned out they love wolves and were happy with what I'd sent them, which was cool. So today I was in Nation of Shopkeepers (a rad little bar in Leeds city centre) when on picking up a little zine / listings I discovered that very logo on a half page spread, sick! So that was a nice little surprise before I went and spent a small fortune on groceries in Sainsburys...

That's it for now, hopefully soon I'll be able to show you something I've done for everyone's fave Kingston-based rapscallions, Tubelord.

Over and out.

Dreamer

Good evening folks. So things have been traditionally busy over here at twoducksdisco studios including getting hacked and robbed (again, sigh) but retrieved (hurrah, woo)!!

Things have been poster heavy these past 2 weeks, as i've completed things for Magnolia Electric Co., Sunset Rubdown and Tiny Vipers. The latter of those can be seen below.

I'm holding off on the MEC and SR ones as they'll be appearing as funky-ass screen-prints in the next month or so. But if you do want to see them, just pop down the Brudenell...

Just a small post today but I figured it had been a while since the last. I've just signed off another poster that I'll put up next time, plus a logo for Rest is Noise, which will be appearing across various bits of promotion for Field Day... killer!

Catch you later my brother.