Wallflowers take note

A one off brief came in from my lovely Club Noir clients a while back. It kept getting bumped due to other more pressing projects for them, but we've finally got round to putting something together.

They've been running sell-out Burlesque Workshops for a few months now, and felt the need to start publicising them properly, so briefed me to come up with a poster concept. I came up with the idea of an old 'before and after' ad, with real oldstyle ad-language and with the Workshops presented as the answer to all your problems. And here be the result.

Hello Dave

I have a lovely new freelance client who's been putting some nice work my way (including more SODDING WEDDING INVITES). I rebranded a friend of hers' IT company. The company was named after the street where it was based - Blackrock Road. I thought the Blackrock thing was too good a chance to pass up and decided to reference the famous black rock monolith from Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The monolith, or TMA-1 as us sci-fi geeks know it, was a representative of a technologically superior race, sent to earth to advance the technological capabilities of early mankind. Which, given that the Blackrock are an IT company, was just asking for it. EVEN better, TMA-1 had very particular proportions 9:4:1, so I kept these for the logo and used a monospaced font and underscore to reference oldstyle computer programming.

End result: Client was very pleased with the outcome, despite not being familiar with the monoliths (cretin).

GODAMMIT

I hate it when a plan doesn't come together.

I recently did a rather large illustration job for my former employers that required several very late nights hunched over a desk, sketching and inking almost 40 illustrations for a document intended for the NHS, with a very tight deadline.

Annoyingly, despite meeting the deadline, the client decided to revert to a previous illustration style. I bowed out at this point as I unfortunately couldn't commit to redoing such a large job; my back just couldn't take it! It means that all my hard work will never be seen in print - so Praise Be to Blogger. Here are a few samples.

Wedding Bells

In a bid to prove to the world that I don't care that they're all getting married and I am going to be an old maid, I've also done a wedding invitation recently for my friend/colleague Keli and her man William. They tied the knot last week in a very low-key but stylish ceremony at the Ubiquitous Chip.

We agreed on a lovely palette of reds and beige as red was to be a highlight colour for the tables and the couple's outfits. We didn't wanna go full on Valentine's red though, so the dark burgundies and beige helped tone it down a bit. The typography was created by halftoning a photoshop file with lines instead of squares/dots, then live-tracing to get the stripy effect that allowed me to slot Keli and William together with an ampersand. A wee tying the knot metaphor that hopefully erred on the right side of cheesy.

The bride looked beautiful and the groom looked handsome but their invites and place settings looked EVEN BETTER SO THERE.

Hi Strangers

Ok, yes, I know, its been a long time. Its a shoddy state of affairs and I feel suitably ashamed. Although I do have an excuse. I've been working my ample bottom off. Not literally (unfortunately), I've just been doing a lot of work for friends and relatives and some freelance jobs too that have left little time to share the fruits of my labour with you lot.

The most time consuming of these not-so-little jobs was a present for my Mum, who turned 60 years young on Friday 25th April. I had an idea to write a kids book about her life that she could read to her grandkids (who she completely adores of course). My Dad's pet name for my Mum is 'Maggie Anne', so I got the idea for a title first and the story stemmed from there.

So 'Maggie Anne's Magic Hats' was born. My mum's life story is told through all the hats she's worn in her time; a metaphor for all the roles she's fulfilled - Daughter, Friend, Wife, Mother, Boss etc. The punchline being that its not the hats that are magic at all, but Maggie Anne.

I illustrated the book too (obviously), taking my cues from 60s-era retro animation (like Bewitched titles), and the fact that as a kid, whenever I drew my Mum I drew her curly hair first. So that had to be a big feature. I hope she didn't take offence. She's been battling her curls all her life.

So Happy Birthday to my totally Magic Mum. You were worth every second.

An Enchanted, Brazen Christmas

OK so this post is a little late - apologies. Ms Raffel of the illustrious Brazen studios asked me to do her some lovely stuff for her Christmas window. We bandied some ideas about and settled on the theme of an enchanted forest - where bewitched trinkets hang off every branch.

Having just had the interior and exterior of the shop repainted in a boudoir-esque rubine red and cream combo, we decided to use this colour scheme, and I set about creating some suitably enchanted looking flora and fauna with which to bedeck the shop window and the interior windows into the workshops.

Ms Brazen also required a device to announce the fact that her wee shop has been named 'Most Stylish Boutique 2007' at the Scottish Style Awards; all that even without the new paint job.

Well deserved.

Backstage

Club Noir, not content with selling out their existing club at the Carling Academy, have decided to launch a spin-off club in the much smaller and low-key venue of the Winchester club on Bell Street. The idea is that this club will be the notional 'after party' or Backstage of the main club. The performers will be present; but mingling, rather than performing. The whole affair will be much more laidback and about seeing and being seen, rather than a major club night.

Bearing that in mind, the Noir troupe tasked me with designing the new branding for the spin-off club (called Backstage just in case you hadn't already figured that out) and a new flyer. We talked about a photographic route to contrast our now traditional illustrative style for the main club, and this was the result. The brand is the photo effectively - a comp of several shots, treated to look like a spot-lit, dark alley and 'signed' in white by the people who brought you Club Noir (as though they are the stars you waited hours to see at the stage door). You feel like you have to know someone who knows someone who knows the password to get into this place, and even then you'd better have the right threads on or you've no chance.

A speak-easy, a secret hide-out, a den of iniquity.

Dontcha want in?

Lions and Tigers and Pears

OK so I've been wanting to have a stab at hand lettering for a while - sketching out a typographic layout in pencil, inking it the old fashioned way, then scanning and tracing in illustrator, tweaking, filling, outlining etc etc and generally messing with it. I've been studying all my sheet music you see and all of that has been hand lettered and looks yum, so thought I'd give the old calligraphic skills an outing.

Anyway - I got the opportunity to try out the technique recently and this was the result. Its a bit rough still and I'd like to spend a few hours working on getting the type and the image interacting better. Maybe more foliage/tendrils and tings, and a bit more texture. Actually, looking at it now the top of the B looks a bit heavy. Hmmm. More practise required methinks.

I dunno. What do you reckon?

Gigantic, angry baby

Two and a half hours before 2007 ceased to be, Brodan McDonald made his weighty entrance into the world. Boy number two for my older brother and his partner Carol and eleven days overdue, Brodan tipped the scales at 11 pounds, ten ounces, drawing nurses from other wards to witness the hugeness.

So here he is in all his glory (filling a babygro designed for a three-month-old) and boy does he look f***ed off. Well if somebody had bent your head all out of shape with a set of forceps, you'd be mighty unimpressed too.

I wouldn't mess, personally.

One night in Paris (not THAT Paris)

Well here you go: a sneak preview of Club Noir's Valentine's flyer/poster. My lovely Noir clients have agreed to make this 60x40 full colour too and I can't wait to see it in all its gigantic technicolour glory. Now, before you start I KNOW that this poster looks like Alexandre Theophile Steinlen's 'Le Chat Noir' poster. Its DELIBERATE. Chat Noir=Club Noir. You see? I just made the lovely Noir girl into a feline temptress et voila! Referential city!

Incidentally I was rather pleased with myself at drawing the girl off the top of my head. Bit of a first for me, as I usually need to work from photos/life - but might have something to do with all the life drawing classes I'm doing at the mo, pretty good practice. I'm a frustrated comic book artist at heart, you see.

Anyway. Flyers will be in all good goth shops in the New Year, and the 60x40 will be plastered all over Glasgow in late January. Camera phones a-gogo!

Smoke and Mirrors

This design for Smoke and Mirrors, Noir's Christmas club, looked like it was going to be a bit of a problem child. My lovely clients and I had a bit of a communications breakdown and a couple of redesigns were required. Lessons were learned though, and the end result was pretty cool. Although to be honest I can't bear to look at it any more. I'm glad that in this instance though, my clients at Noir were convinced to go for a full colour 60x40, instead of their usual 2 colour. The number of positive comments they have received, and the number of requests I've had for copies will hopefully convince them to continue spending a wee bit money on their posters from now on (fingers crossed!).

Smoke and Mirrors is on the 1st December - I think its going to be a popular one, so buy your tickets in advance or risk disappointment!

Incidentally, this was also the first job designed on my BRAND NEW MACBOOK PRO. And very happy we are together too, thankyouverymuch.

Scandinavian Ceramics

Now, as those of you familiar with the inside of my kitchen cabinets will know, I am a proud (read: sad) collector of patterned ceramics from the post-war period (up to the 70s). Sourced from flea markets, car boot sales, the Barras and good ol' ebay, my collection mostly consists of American, Eastern European and British pieces and ranges from complete coffee sets to one-off tea pots and pin dishes.

However, in recent months I've become a bit more picky about the bits that I buy, and even ebay no longer seems to be able to provide the interesting or unusual stuff. So I suppose I have this rather excellent blog to thank for giving me a few new names/potteries to look out for. Check out the link 'vintage ceramics' and have a look at all the absolutely gorgeous patterned ceramics from Sweden, Denmark and Finland. For some reason these ceramics are hugely popular in Japan, and this website seems to have snapped up all the good stuff already - which may make it harder to find cheaper bits on the likes of ebay. But I do like a challenge.

Hello Mr Easyjet? One flight to Helsinki please.