Threadless: Accepted.... and then rejected.

I submitted this entry to Threadless about a week ago. At the time I thought I was onto a genuine winner, covering as I was the requisite bases of indie nerd, saccharine smiles and fresh fruit referencing. The design is a subtle allusion to the mnemonic used by guitar teachers across the apple eating world, instantly recognisable to those familiar with a six-string, beguiling and entrancing to anyone else (drummers, say).

But then once it went up, lenoircouture said:

"i thought they were the sticks for caramel apples waiting for the apple"

Which hurt a bit. But then imbrilliant said:

"i thought it was pasta."

and shakethesheets said:

"i thought they were chopsticks."

and then, after all that, MadMike twisted the knife by saying:

"I had no friggen idea what this was about."

What a tragedy.
My performance was so ridiculously low I got taken out of the running but two days in. Later I think I saw someone pointing and laughing at me in Costcutter.
If you want to see the whole sorry story, you can click on this below. It's what they give you to put on your blogs and myspaces to get you friends to vote for you, but for me, having lost, it's just a sad reminder of defeat. An advertisement for my failures.

But despite all that, this does represent a milestone: it's the first thing I've ever really made in Illustrator. See that pattern round the sound hole? (The bigger circle, behind the pasta) I made that pattern, all by myself. It's all quite neat and satisfying, but most excitingly it's quick: I sketched this idea on the bus and within an hour of my getting home, it was done and submitted. (Trust me, that's quick.)

All my posts are coming up in facebook now. Isn't that weird?

No sex please.

A sketch of Britt Ekland, from an old Vogue cover.


Symmetry means beauty, I hear, so here we go. Strangely transfixing, isn't she? A bit like a piggy Billie Piper, which is nice.

Give a shit

Some sketches I uploaded whilst I was at work last week. Temping in a really lax office killed my bloggery because when you can theoretically get paid for doing something, you never want to do it for free. As I was essentially free to piss around on the internet all day at work I didn't want to come back to piss around on the internet at home. But then when I was at work I was eternally scared of getting fired for constantly revising BBC news stories, and the comments, in case they came up in some wacky bonus round in the Tuesday pub quiz and not sending the important letters I was asked to send. A fear of confounding my case by appearing to be in the midst of some elaborate other internet-based project and being sent to sort out the stationery cupboard for the next two weeks meant I never really did any blogging. It's a similar logic that led me to saving any toilet action for when I was getting paid to sit still, and going to bed farting and uncomfortable. I guess that's the price of getting paid for doing something you love.

I'm ready for my Spanish holiday this Summer.


This is the reception where I was working. Sometimes I hung out here because the receptionist was nice and sometimes brought in treats like snowballs (those old-fashioned chocolate and marshmallow things, not rounded lumps of crystalline water ice) or lemon drizzle cake (which seems to be rather fashionable recently. Or at least, Charlotte and I made one last week, and then there was a feature on Woman's Hour about them. Does that count as fashionable? I haven't read Vogue or The Face recently, but LDC is probably on both covers).


We got Glastonbury tickets in the end. Sophie here is probably reading about LDC.


The office.


Camberwell Church Gardens, where I ate my LDC and packed lunch.

mailmeart.com

First, I'd like to strart this blog-post with the usual blog-post opening apologies for the recent lack of blog-posts. I have no excuse (clearly I haven't spent the interlude drafting and re-drafting this blog-post opening).

Nor have I any nice annecdotes to fill the gaps. Oxymoronically I'm basically permanently temping, which despite being utterly thrilling and absolutely brimming with hilarious blog-worthy story-stuff, hasn't left me with any annecdotes I want to detail here. This is partly due to a vestigial guilt from my merciless, um, let's say "satire" of my last office placement (which remained up on screen after my departure), and also partly to do with the fact that I 've told everyone in my new office the details of that exact folly. Now they're positively looking forward to me leaving just so that they can see what I write about them all on here (but only for that reason, mind). So if you want to hear my tales of hour long shits on company time or how my office neighbour hums as he types, then ask me in a pub sometime.

One productive thing I have done whilst working here (yes, I'm at work now) other than earning £8 and then spending £10 an hour online is to cover a whole envelope in a doodle. Now this is standard desk jockey stuff I know, but being arrogant I've deemed mine worthy of entrance into the mail art project at mailmeart.com. It's fairly self explanatory: all the entrants get put in an exhibition online, and eventually offline, and there are some prizes too.

Here is my envelope:



And here is the letter I put inside it (I couldn't quite bring myself to put it on the headed paper):

Bath time

Edit:
This comment from Greg echoes the sentiments of the other feed back I've had about this one:

I didn't get it to start with. But then I'm special. Reckon you should make the blur more obvious though?

So here I've tried to make it clearer what's going on:

Panic on the streets of London

A bit insensitive, perhaps, but nevermind.

Don't Panic: End of the World

I hate Don't Panic but still feel compelled to enter. I guess it's just nice to have a brief and a deadline, and the vague possibility of success if you know enough people. I set myself a time limit of one hour for this design, and almost made it. (Submitting took about three). Clearly it's not overthunk, and probably benefits from that.



You can still vote for it if you're so inclined. So far I'm on three votes, all of them from me, so it would probably help me out.

Tourettris: rejected

Here's another Threadless submission I came up with a while ago. Yesterday I got the rejection email. It didn't even make it past the first round of judges. Oh, the ignominy!
And I thought I was on for a sure fire winner. Oh well, perhaps they noticed the surreptitious expletive. The prudes!

jacknoel.co.uk

I've bought some webstuff- domain names and hosting and PHPs and STDs and all that. The ingredients you need to cook up a website, apparently. After looking at many providers sites and not understanding any of I bought it all from GiMUR.net because their website was the prettiest. I think it's a good deal- £25 a year for all the stuff, but you have to be a "creative" to use it so I might get kicked off any minute. I've had it for over a week now, and still have almost no idea of what to do with it.

I want to make a cool website though, that's all I know. Simple, clean and cool. The current placeholder I've got there is loosely based on this Morning Breath website which is quite nice. As a rule, it seems that design websites are very sleek and cool but not funny, and comic strip websites tend to be crude and blocky, and also not funny.

One thing I've been wasting time over for far too long is trying to generate some kind of logo for myself. Ever since I realised my name could kind of be written out with horizontal symmetry whilst revising, I've been trying endless variations. First was this, as I used as a splashpage on my first ever website:



But then I thought this might be better, for some reason. I think I wanted a black & white version for my CV header (and I'm still unemployed!?):

Then that lead to this, the same things but with some diagonal lines, which were hot property in 2006.



Then one day I changed it into this, a glossy button type affair. Which would be a great logo, but only if it was for a condom company.



What I really need, I reasoned, was something street. So I duly Googled pictures of streets and stuck the words over one of them.



But it all looks so average. That street one looks like it was designed for a poster in a Scream pub. And here is my latest attempt, trying to inject a bit more of my personality into it (and a bit of Morning Breath's too, though by now I've already forgotten why I liked their site).

Ho hum. What's the point of a logo, anyway? I'm not exactly bringing out my own stationery range just yet.
And what's the point of these long, elaborate posts while I'm at it? Shouldn't I be doing some work or trying to find a real job?

Ol' Red eye is back

Here's a picture of my lovely girlfriend Charlotte. I thought it was a sweet and lovely gesture, to make a picture of her like that, but she just took one look at it and said it looked nothing like her and, furthermore, that it was shit.

So then I gave her a red eye. Wham!



Pretty weak drawing but I like the colours and the texture.

I ♥ pink & yellow... & dogs

This post requires a little secrecy, since it's all for a project so secret that even I know nothing about the whats and the whys.

I was asked by, oh, let's say person X to do something about dogs in London. Deft interrogation on my part failed to establish what kind of something she really wanted, but amidst all the self-destructing tapes and coded telegrams I did garner two contradictory clues. One said make it a cool, street, urban type image, and the other said make it a fun cartoon about a dogs guide to London. Not having the skill to reconcile these two briefs I simply came up with two answers.

This one I did first. It's the "cool" one, by the way.



It's cool because it looks like a shitty 'zine, you see. I was really proud of it when I first did it, but the two people I've shown it to so far have met it with such keen disinterest they practically fell asleep right there and then, so maybe it's rubbish.

And here's the dog's guide to London. I really didn't know how to handle this, knowing almost as little about dogs as I do about London. Instead of just redrawing some of my own cartoon strips with myself sporting a wet nose, I went instead into pun megadrive, straining for the lowest possible common denominator and often hitting way below it. I think it may be because I've also been recently trying to make some comic strips for kids too.



I'm actually embarassed by the shitness of it. "He says paws instead of pause! He's a dog! Geddit!? Eh? Eh?..." but apparently the "clients" at the other end liked it, and have asked for more. Isn't that odd?

Threadless

I'm not going to go on about Don't Panic. I've lost, it's over and I've already made all the "time to panic..." kind of jokes too many times.

Instead I've decided to enter another unwinnable internet competition: this time the ongoing one for international T-shirt printers Threadless (or as I call them, "Fredless"). They pay you in money at least and not roached up old flyers.

I had had this idea whilst at work, where I stumbled across an almost identical design down the back of the internet.* For it I've basically developed this new set of characters by slicing the ears off Alfie and Betty, stars of my dormant Inappropriate Alphabet project, to create general vaguely sweet but not too cliched creatures, just like those guys did with Animaniacs all those years ago.

I struggled with the colourways with this quite a bit. Originally I was thinking light blue because it's kind of icey and so the reflections seem more likely:



But for t-shirts I seem to think red and white is always a good idea:



And ended up going for something more like this:



Perhaps it's because I stared at it for several hours late into the night, but something about it looked a bit off to me. Maybe it's their white eyes like cataracts, but at the time I thought it may be the order of things. Because, I reasoned, when looking at a picture one scans from left to right and since this has a kind of "punch-line", namely that the reflections aren't actually reflections but are in fact being painted onto the ground by one of the rabbit-things, that that should be seen last. So I flipped it all horizontally. Now this looks weird to me, but I'm not sure if that's just because it contradicts the original version which I have burnished onto my retina by staring at it too intently for too long.



If you're wondering how I did the subtle fur texturing on the bodies (which only really worked on the light blue version), I used a light box: a new method I'm experimenting with. My dad actually made me the box for my eighth birthday. Good ol' dad. Because that's how things worked when I was a kid, in the nineties. When your birthday rolled round you didn't get an X-box 360 stuffed with cash, your dad had to spend hours toiling over a drawing tool at the kitchen table, and to deftly make it look exactly like a kitchen drawer to avoid arousing suspicions from the recipient to be. Here it is on our glass sixteen-seater dining table:



So I drew the main lines, and then on a seperate sheet drew some fur, resulting in this kind of thing which actually looks a lot more interesting than the finished picture.



If you want to vote, and I'm sure you do, I'm going to put the link up as soon as I get it.

*Not really of course, I am one hundred percent original.

EDIT: It got approved so you can vote now. You're not too busy are you?

Don't Panic: Morality

The last Don't Panic competition was a complete bust, despite my best efforts. I'd probably do better and end up less hurt in a DP competition in the porn-film sense (wikipedia) .
It was suggested to me that to be in with a chance with the kind of sheepish scenesters that probably do all the voting on a site like DP! I should just embrace some tired urban cliches and let the people that vote for me think that they're cool.
So I started with the "urban landscape". The side of a building on our way to work (me and Charlotte work in the same building now, by the way). Check the bin bags for the extra touch of poverty-chic.


Then sketched out the kind of , um, "piece" I wanted to lay down in Photoshop:

Pay attention to the question mark. It's like, asking a question without asking one. Like, who's really moral, man? Is it the man, man? No, man. It's like the voice of the streets etc. etc.
Then I drew it all out on paper, trying to embrace all the kind of over-used graff memes I could think of at the time: CCTV cameras, sweeping arrows, artificial drips.


Then I stuck that over the wall for instant street-cred graff.


But it just looks really shit. Weak linework will always bring a picture right down, but when it's combined with bad colouring and a poor source photo- a vaguely well turned out office worker on the way to work on a sunny morning- it's almost embarassing. Certainly, that quick sketch works better.
The next morning then we took some more photographs, in more urban places. This time round I tried to capture the kind of playfulness of the sketch. These characters, incidentally, were drawn entirely on a Wacom tablet, a first for me.

First: oooh, shop shutters. "Yeah, don't open up your shop round here, it's too ghetto blud." and so on.
The paint on the steel works well, but Charlotte looks a bit funny and the framing is all off.


And there's this one, boarded up windows perhaps. Charlotte looks good but kind of takes over, and there's not much wood texture coming through.


And then this one, the building site. The characters being much bigger makes them all the more dramatic, and this is the one I decided to enter. It doesn't exactly look like a witty critique of artistic conventions, but I like it.


I was late to join the race though, so please vote for me and help me catch up. Currently Greg's poster is doing pretty well. I voted for it, and if he wins I'll be almost as happy.
Why not look at both of ours and decide which one you like best, then vote for me anyway.
Anything but that Lauren Steinberg idiot who's currently winning!

Old Lady

In a bid to be more Gregarian I bought a white gel pen recently. It's nice for cutting back through black lines you've already put down and making negative shapes- I used it for that Entertainment poster, for example. So far I've only really used it on white paper though, and it's not very dramatic. Like pissing on yourself in the shower, most of the time.
Talking about pissing on yourself most of the time, here's an elaborate sketch of an old lady I did as a kind of practice. The hair in the bottom left is the closest to the kind of effect I'm getting at.

More sketches

I've found a few more sketches dotted round in little books I have. I said in the last post I only really stop and sit in two places: on a bus and on the sofa, but there are a few more.
Here's another bus though:


And here's a hungover Sunday afternoon on the sofa, watching the OC with Char, Hugh (visiting from Newcastle, brought cookies, now sadly missed) and Soph (ex-housemate, brought sunshine into our lives, now sadly missed):



Right, so that's just buses and sofas then. But don't believe for a second my life is anything less than a white-knuckle roller-coaster ride of sex and drugs and rocks and rolls. I'm young, I live in the capital, I have a modest disposable income. I'm averagely intelligent and ever so slightly creative. You never know where I'll sit next! On the edge of a wishing-well, on a Camel, in a second-rate simulator on the pier, on a bench by some pidgeons... Anywhere!

Here's one from when I was sat on the loo:



I have traveled a bit though recently. Desperately trying to claw back the sense of self-worth inherent to being a student, I've gone all the way up to Yorkshire and all the way West back to Bristol. Anything to help me shrug off the crushing weight of realisation as I settle into my hourly-wage life in an office, telling anyone who'll listen that "I'm an artist, really."

This is from the train journey back from Yorkshire. As with the buses, it's worth bearing in mind that these vessels really shake when you try and draw on them. I thought perhaps the foggy hangover I was suffering on this journey might cause my right hand to shake in just the right way to countenance the carriage judder making for clean lines all round, but I guess it wasn't to be.



And here's another trip. This time to Bristol for much longer than we were welcome. Here I've tried to use representative colours, but put them all over the cream at a 70% opacity to try and make for a cohesive palette. Is it more effective? I don't know. In fact, I don't even understand what I just said.