Hemlock Recordings

Not sure who actually designed this ( I seem to say this a lot) but yeah, another label pushing new UK sounds. Very different (but still relative in some ways) to Skull Disco, though you might hear the two sounds clash in the right place at the right time. though this is more London style of UK electronic music. One of many styles, sorry....like all this stuff is a bit more Garagey than the Bristol stuff. It's by no means as dark...

Anyway the reason I rate the design work is that, well, I love patterns, and the fact that it's black on grey, always a winner in my book....like it gives you the impression that what the sleeve contains is something of value. Hmmm. Maybe it's just because I like the label that I'm automatically biased towards the design. Sometimes I can't find a real reason why I like it so much, I mean, really, it doesn't need a reason. I like it and that's my opinion.

Zeke Clough, Skull Disco

http://www.zekeclough.com/page2.htm

Zeke Clough. There's a link to his blog just above. Like a lot of design work, I discovered this guy through the label that he contributed artwork to (Skull Disco in case you hadn't noticed). erm, yeah, I'm not actually sure how he goes about creating these artworks, like maybe he just goes about using a 0.1 fineliner and maybe he's just a bit tapped in the head to the point of making these images. Anyway yeah he made these for Skull Disco, I've a got a Shackleton (artist co-running the label) single back at home which really stands out amazingly compared to a lot of other designs. It suits the label quite well, surprisingly, I mean the label is made up of proper dark Bristol-style dubby techno kinda stuff, I mean the majority would listen and be like, what the hell are you making me listen to. Anyway this artwork is sort of like, the face of this tiny part of the UK scene. It's dark and ambient and can really mess with your head, and the artwork reflects this amazingly.

I can't do it myself. But I'd love to.

Give Up Art publishing layouts

A few layouts by Give Up Art that caught my eye. Quite often I always find myself referring back to this company, it kind of annoys me how they haven't really put up much work recently. Maybe they're taking a massive holiday or maybe they've just kinda shut down for a bit, who knows. But these layouts are nice anyway.

 

What I like most is the subtle elements of these layouts, they are simple and effective, plus the bright and positive illustrations are quite refreshing. 

Emil Kozak

spotted this guy in Computer Arts so I thought I best check him out, he seemed to have a couple of cool skateboard designs, so yeah.

 

He's done these quirky skateboards that have scissor lines around shapes and stuff...essentially once your board is worn out and no longer rideable you can saw out these shapes and build one of the vehicles. Cool, eh....crazy idea, quite adventurous and sorta funny. 

 

He also customised these phones to sell at an exhibition. I love stuff like this, just messing around with ordinary things to make it better. I don't really have much else to say. 

Scott McCloud - web comic

McCloud is a proper guy when it comes to sequential artwork.....he's done a book which I need to look at at some point called Reinventing Comics ( http://scottmccloud.com/2-print/2-rc/index.html ) where he spends some time focusing on the potential of online comics/ webcomics, whatever you want to call them. Talking about how the screen becomes a 'window' to the comic strip, removing the restrictions of printed media. Here's a comic from his series of morning improv comic strips, a series where every morning he'd improvise a short story based on ideas given by readers. If you look at them on the actual website :

http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/mi/mi-16/mi-16.html

you'll notice that it's continuous from left to right, but quite ironically to put it on my blog I have to lay it top to bottom.























The immediacy of webcomics has its obvious ups and downs.
On the one hand you do indeed get immediacy.
On the other you lose out on almost everything else; aesthetic merits and what have you. attention to detail and depth of storyline, out the window. You would never pay any money for it.

What is a Line - PES stop motion.

stop-motion by PES. This is only the first video I've seen by him/her/them. A fairly cool example of sequential art, something that can be achieved using your average household items....However it is essentially just a basic stop motion and I'd quite like to do something a little out of the ordinary. Here's another:



yeah mate.

What is a line - sequential art

A short video by this guy Danny Page. For my 'What is a line' brief I would like to capture moments of moments, as such. Like here, he has taken a particular situation of one guy booting another guy in the head, and divided it into three snapshots to summarise the action (similarly to a comic book, obviously). Anyway the 'line' in the this piece of work is the sequence of images that depict the man performing an action. I could perhaps attempt to work in a similar style to portray various moments in my own day-to-day goings on, or perhaps just thoughts or ideas I might have - instead of drawing them into one image, trying to convey a sense of time and movement by dividing across several frames.