Art Crank
______I’ve got a spot in the Art Crank – London – exhibition in September, so I’m left with a decision as to which bike based picture to use as the print? I’m aware that London has a big fixie culture so should I go for that, maybe a guaranteed crowd pleaser. I’ve got plenty of nice mtb based ones that I love but maybe it’s not such a conducive atmosphere for that in the big smoke? What a quandary, I shall mull it over and ask the masses in the world of facebook and see what they think. Regardless I’m dead chuffed to have got a spot and it looks like they put on a fine soiree. Will be interesting to see what everybody else has in the pipeline to, the previous years have certainly proved a rich source of inspiration.
Help me decide on facebook here.
-
______Bikes are the world’s most fun and accessible way to get around. Posters are the world’s most fun and accessible art form. ARTCRANK brings them together.
ARTCRANK is a showcase of bicycle-inspired original poster artwork that people can enjoy looking at and afford to take home. ARTCRANK began in Minneapolis in 2007, and has expanded to Denver, St. Louis, Portland, San Francisco and Des Moines. In September 2010, we’ll hold our first international show in London.
Every ARTCRANK show features posters created by local artists from the host city. Admission is always free, and posters are priced to let everybody take home at least one.
Vive le tour
______This years Tour de France was superb, seat of the pants racing from beginning to end. I honestly can’t remember a Tour since the late nineties which has been so gripping and action packed. With very in the way of filler in the form of flat sprint stages every jersey has turned out to be an epic competition. I can only hope the Vuelta a España will turn out to be such a belter.
In cycling related art business I am hoping that I will get this VIVE graphic on to a proper cycling jersey before to long. I am working with a company who get artists to create edgy, driven designs that fly in the face of the usual go faster designs cyclists are lumped with. So fingers crossed it will come off…..
Uisken
______Mull has no shortage of nice looking rocks so in breaks in the weather while the chumps were away clambering up the cliffs I managed to indulge my fixation with the rock. Here’s some cliffs from the Ross of Mull which I think were a mix of schist and granite, basalt maybe? Don’t really know, I’m no geogololist but I do love the rock. The bit of coast we were at in Uisken was a wild place. With wild goats wandering about on the cliffs and through thick bracken, the rocks were exposed and open to horizontal, rapid erosion the coast still strikes me as a bit of alien environment. The rocks are sharp, pitted and victims of their surrounding creating interesting and complex forms.
Himself - Herself
______Horrific bad weather and my right arm in cast. Not the best recipe for an outdoors holiday in Mull with the Scotstoun Gentlemen’s Club. So I took the opportunity to get some drawing done. Whilst in An Tobar the arts centre in Tobermory after a pretty uncomfortable but enjoyable mountainbike round Loch Frisa, Misha found a great photo of an old Mull couple sitting out side their croft looking stoic, it was clear from looking at their faces that they endured a hard life. The image stuck in my head and this pair are the result of that initial inspiration. I’ve tried to emphasise my impression of these folk and portray a sense of the characters behind the hardship.
Featured on Behance Industrial Design
______ Got a nice email from Oscar Ramos Orozco from Behance telling me my ss-st mountain bike concept was excellent and was being featured on their industrial design portal. This is praise indeed rubbing shoulders with designs from Mercedes Benz, Quicksilver and Native instruments. How cool??
A strange fixation with ROX!
______I have developed a strange fixation with rocks and boulders lately. Well to be fair i’ve always loved rocks. I used to spend hours on end when I were a nipper examining and chucking stones into the Spey, my Mum was always be-fuggled by how much I loved it, she had trouble dragging me home. In fact my sister had a pet rock called Murdo and my kids love the things to, so maybe it’s a family thing? It’s only recently that I’ve been photographing them and drawing them. Here’s one that looks like a pretty substantial mountain that I found on a nice day out at dumbarton castle, which certainly has lots of pretty rocks. Ok, so i admit to being a bit of a weirdo but rocks are important, we live on a massive one called Earth, get into it! rocks are the new / ancient coolness. Official…
MK Whistles.
______Got the new mk whistles site up in the spring there. For one reason or another forgot to post it here. Divot…
______Any how it’s a nice minimal site, modern open and focused on the whistles and the customers. Me and misha got this one together pretty quickly but not after much humming and hawing and scribbling boxes on paper. As with most of the sites I make these days it’s built on the wordpress framework which I still can’t fault, it has completely revolutionised how I produce websites. It has some cool additions like a random image rotator on the home page, although we’re still considering what tag lines will work for the target audience. Other nice additions are the sidebar gallery and enormous, comprehensive footer section.
JP Mowberry
______My good pal Benjamin hooked me up with a law firm he was working for and I got the gig of re-branding their company. It’s a while since I’ve done a plain straight down the line typographical ident and I’ve quite enjoyed it. Trying to find subtle but effective tweaks to such a basic concept is challenging and very different from my usual illustrative driven lunacy. The web site is nearing completion and there are a few more projects underway for some other law based projects which are showing varying degrees of individuality and progress.
______The law / solicitor sector in Scotland has a particularly dismal graphical appearance so it’s nice to be working on some classy simplistic design with a forward thinking progressive company.
Cycling art – a growing coolness?
______I’ve been working on getting some cycling based illustration projects underway. A self-initiated projects to coin an industry buzz-word. So here’s the latest couple going down a more graphical, modernist approach to my previous hand drawn efforts. I have had a bit of interest in these, so there will be prints available come the Autumn, so keep tuned. Might even learn how to screen print some of these, it’s been something I’ve always wanted to learn.
schmO v.5
______So my never ending itch to redesign things has manifested itself into another version of the schmO. This one is quite a departure of designs of old, it uses a nifty javascript called supersized by build internet. Basically it’s a full screen slideshow with navigation, it cleverly resizes the image to fit whatever monitor it’s on. It has drawbacks, most noticeably image degradation on larger monitors but nothing is perfect in the world of internet. Also you have to use title and alt tags to provide captions for each image. I doubt google will like this but I’ll just have to wait and see how it fairs. The aim of this design is to get the my work to the fore and i think it achieves this with it’s minimal user interface. After all my trumpeting for simplicity lately I thought it would be worth practicing what i preach. If you use Internet Explorer 7 or below you will be asked to upgrade your browser on load. This framework quite simply doesn’t work on it so there was no point in trying to make it compatible. Across browsers it has some quirks, Opera seems to treat it quite strangely but it works fine. Safari, chrome, firefox all display it as I would like. The latest version of explorer has it’s bugs, as expected but they don’t affect the user experience to much so I’ve left as is.