Newtasty

The serious lack of posts and warmup sketches is because I’ve been hammering away night and day on a couple of intense projects, one of which is with my favourite design team Fluid and new buddies The Character Shop. It’s a very cool project and something kind of new to me, I can’t share anything right now but Im looking forward to when I can.
Chances are I’ll still be in my workshop until Christmas Eve so in case I can’t pop in with some mindless ramblings I’d like to wish everyone a Happy Holidays, here’s a festively rebadged poster I did recently for a Christmas party!

Last year me and my ColdRice friends were asked to host a monthly party at a nice little cocktail bar in Birmingham. As our usual events lean more towards garage rock n’ roll we decided to make this party strictly soul music.

To promote the events I decided on a series of posters depicting some R&B giants in a pulp comic book style, to create an almost unreal image of characters that we are only used to seeing in TV footage or photographs, introducing these 2 things that (to the best of my knowledge) hadn’t met before.
I love the idea of these characters who I consider being larger than life having their tales exaggerated and immortalised in this format. My other reason for this approach was much more simple: Soul music and comic books, me and David Lee Roth both grew up on them!

On Thursday, god looked down on Johnny Cash and said “oi you, lay off the coke…”

I have a couple of little tiny sketchbooks, I like to have them with me while I am hanging around waiting. A lot of waiting time is spent in bars so I’m usually a little tipsy and using a borrowed biro and half my vision when I scribble in them.
I’m going to put up a sketch a day from the books for this week, first one, Arthur Lee.

My band, Copter, had been planning to do a Warriors Revue for some time and this year it came to fruition.
Our good friend Mr. Radar made a 30 minute condensed version of the movie and we played along with the visuals creating a musical narrative, a kind of rock opera! For the event, I made subway tickets for entry, Warriors vests for the band (can’t take credit for the design there) and designed a poster with an old school Jack Kirby comic book feel, evoking imagery of the time in a way that hasn’t been used for the Warriors before (to my knowledge).
The whole thing was a fantastic success, with over 100 gang members turning up ,in colours, for Sirus’ big speech!

Typoshirt One is a book published by Index Books, the first book to focus exclusively on T-shirt typography. Spanning message and logo T-shirts to more abstract and arty models that transmit more cryptic messages, I contributed with the Black Mekon t-shirt design based on Larry Flynt’s infamous court attire, with a twist conceived by my pal (and stylist to the stars) Ian Witchell.
Thanks to Pris for making the shirt look so good, and thanks to Lee for the photos (my copy of the book got stolen by the postie!)

Poster for a ColdRice party, continuing the theme of comic book-esque soul singers

This is great going thru all my old files, found a bunch of pictures from the Pop which was an exhibition of gig poster art. I had around 10 pieces displayed, lots of ColdRice posters. For all the colours and painstaking hours I spent on some of the ColdRice posters, my favourite was always this Weird War poster I made which took about 10 minutes. Always the way isn’t it?

Been having a spring clean of my hard drives and found lots of stuff that i forgot I had done so I’m going on a posting frenzy over the next couple of days.
Thinking maybe I should do a poster section in my portfolio, because of ColdRice I have built up quite a collection over the years. Here’s one I did for my friends Jon and Matt when they played my fair city, they loved it so much I had to rearrange the design to incorporate all the tour dates so they could use it as a tour poster but I don’t seem to have that version lying around anywhere. Anyway, listen to me grandpa-ing on, here’s the illustration and the finished poster too.