March of the Angry Ferret

A mate of mine is working on a techno track called "March of the Angry Ferret", and asked me to do some artwork for him to stick up on his website once the track's complete. I think it's fairly self-explanitory: I utilised the copy and paste function to save myself contracting RSI...

Creative Project Week 2

I'm loving this! This week's starting point was a lyric:

"Dust gathers on my stereo... cause I can't bear to hear the radio" (one Google search later, I can tell you that this is from I'm Scared by Duffy)

This struck me as quite a melancholic rhyme, and I imagined a once loved radio now discarded. Perhaps usurped by the latest MP3 player. Funnily enough, it kind of tied in with my Radiohead character from the CD artwork I'd recently produced (see my earlier blog, below), and I jotted down a quick sketch on my notepad at work while it was still fresh in my mind...

When I got home, I worked on the final piece based on my sketch. I decided to draw using a charcoal pencil to give a rougher, harsher appearance to the line work. I worked on the various elements separately and then scanned them in and developed the final composition in Photoshop. I then coloured the image using various layers...



However, while I was happy with the drawing and the composition, I felt the colour didn't really help the mood of the image. I converted the picture to greyscale, removing the colour information, and changed the text colour to white with a slight drop shadow. I feel happier with this as a finished piece...

It's, oh, so quiet

I'm off to see Bjork tonight, which seems to garner one of two reactions from people:

"Ooooo! Really? That's so unfair! I want to go and see her!!"

or

"...Why?"

Anyway, I am really looking forward to it, so much so that it gave me an idea for some drawings based on her album covers, which are always interesting. This first one is from her debut solo album Debut, which is quite straightforward compared to some of her later album covers, so I recreated it using a 5B pencil and added a monotone colour scheme using layers in Photoshop...

All we hear is Radio(head) ga ga...

...Radio(head) goo goo. Radio(head) ga ga.

I downloaded Radiohead's new album off the Internet for a "nominal fee" and it's all sorts of excellent! One of those rare Cd's that you can stick on and listen to all the way through without wanting to skip any tracks.

Anyway, as I didn't have any CD artwork (one of my main gripes with the "digital music revolution"), I decided to create my own. I hand drew the elements on paper, then scanned the drawing and added the colour and the rainbow effect in Photoshop...

I also created a back of the CD including the track list. I wanted to get a hand-crafted look to this, so wrote the song titles onto a sheet of tissue using a black felt tip so the lettering bled a little and wasn't perfect, then I laid the paper on top of a page out of a newspaper to give a background texture and colour and scanned the lot. Here are a few photos of the final product...

Creative Project week 1

I've joined a group on Facebook called Creative Project. Each week a quote, phrase, word or lyric is posted up for everyone to have a go at visualising. 

The first week's phrase is "I'm addicted... I'm growing strong".

For some reason, the first thing that came into my mind after reading this was a steroid-addicted body builder flexing his substance-enhanced biceps (...It had been a loooooong day)...