The Besnard Lakes

Over the summer The Besnard Lakes' music has come to mean a lot to me, so when my friend booked them I had to do the poster. The illustration is my take on some of their lyrics...there's a lot of stuff about spying. I screenprinted the final design in two colours on to some lovely thin news-printy stuff. Quite a few got taken down, hopefully for keeps rather than to make room for other posters...

Bristol

Saw Bristol properly for the first time...friends had told me it was secretly beautiful and they weren't wrong. A few photographs below. The Clifton Suspension bridge is really quite incredible.

Paper Strips

Earlier this year I read a piece about the french typographer Roger Excoffon and it mentioned how he used to use paper strips to create typefaces. It inspired me to have a go and I made the alphabet  and "Mobius" below.... Fast forward a few months and I thought about taking some serifs inspired by some of the type on display at the Home of Metal show, and using them in my current wolf-based work. I'll probably continue experimenting with this process and finding other ways to distort the paper strips.

Ed Rucha

Checked the Ed Rucha show at Wolves Art Gallery the other week. Really loved this piece, it makes me feel sad. I really want to start making typography that is more expressive like this, in the way that it emphasizes and adds further meaning to the words, not just pretty letters.

Them Wolves

Spent the back end of last week making wolf masks from good old paper mache, I think I might do more of that sort of thing, it's good fun. Anyway, the masks were to take photos of my friends' band with on sunday. Here are a few of the results...I'm using gradients far too much for things in photoshop of late.

Home of Metal

Went to the Home of Metal show at BMAG to try and find some inspiration for the Black Country based page spread project. It was the first thing I used my student discount for (why is this exciting to me?). The history side of things was quite interesting, I've always found genre origins and all of that fascinating, but I think I found the rest of the show a bit flat...seemed very heavy on merchandise and the nerdier side of music "fans" than about the music itself and the experience it might give. Lots of objects in glass boxes, I can't really get excited about seeing anyone's guitar in a glass box. That said, I don't know how I'd have gone about curating what is intrinsically a visual exhibition about something that is audible. Should probably just go to an actual real life gig.

I will probably come back to some of the zines that were on show at some point, nice lettering.

 I just remembered the Skins episode with the metal kid and Napalm Death. Something about that episode caught beautifully about what it means to have music to belong to when you're young and a bit of an outsider. This is possibly something I found missing from the exhibition...but perhaps this is just personal. Skins does show flashes of genius sometimes. Sometimes.


When I was at primary school, when the "great" Oasis vs Blur tabloid battle kicked off.. Me and a boy in my class picked our sides, I'm ashamed to say that in hindsight I definitely chose the worse side, but in my defense, I was only about 9. We took the battle very seriously, graffiti-ing each others work, post-its, magazine snip-its etc. None of the other girls in my class had any time for either band, they were "scary drug addicts", I felt special. Obviously most of this was just very primitive flirting, but that "sides" mentality in music is really powerful when you're young...however ridiculous it seems now.

So I'm still not really sure what to do for this project, but I'm still glad I went.

More Liverpool

I felt you and I knew you loved me.