This video was taken by Kev a little while ago; there are only a few people that know when and where this was shot. And I’m sorry, I think at the moment it has to stay this way. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy it. After Kev took this I just wanted to make it in to an advert. There are many stereotypical views on the British and our tea. We don’t all sit around with our bad teeth, little fingers in the air, drinking tea, with cucumber sandwiches; I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that that, it’s just not how most of us drink our tea! Now I love my tea, according to my dad he used to put really milky tea in a bottle and feed me it when I was really young, and I couldn’t live without it now, but I have now moved onto a mug. Anyway when I was watching this, I couldn’t stop laughing, it was one of the funniest things that I had seen in a long time. I hope that you enjoy it too. I added a little extra, I thought that PG tips would appreciate it.
A few weeks after Kevin Devine’s tour with Brand New he came back to do one on his own. Kev and Jack had organised a gig to celebrate their birthdays, as they are just a few days apart. So the Line up was My First Tooth, Kevin Devine and This Town Needs Guns, it was a really good night, I think that the birthday lads had fun and everyone who had not seen Kevin Devine play before seemed to love him. I managed to sneak up to the front to get some videos of him playing. The 3rd song was cut short because I forgot to charge my phone, it’s normally very good, but I think that I got most of it. This was also one of my first videos on my Nokia N95 8GB and I was pretty impressed, I have taken loads of photos, just not that many videos, I thought that is turned out pretty good. Take a look.
Kevin Devine – Another Bag of Bones – Oxford
kevin Devine – carnival – Oxford
Kevin Devine – The Longer That I’m Out Here – Oxford
This one is not all there, due to my battery on my phone.
Over the last month or so I’ve been a bit lazy with posting anything up here, but I’ve also been pretty busy at the same time.
I was lucky enough to go and see Kevin Devine and Brand New play in Birmingham and London. That was pretty cool, even though on the way to Birmingham my sat nav at the time – Road Angel Navigator 6000 – took me such a ridiculous route that I was lucky to get there at all. From Oxford, it took me about 2.5 hours, and when I finally neared my destination it kept trying to take me down a one-way road, I had no idea where I was, it was tipping it down with rain and at that moment in time, Kevin Devine was on stage. So I just found a car park and tried to make my way over to the venue, not knowing where I was at all. All I could do was try and ring Kev and let him know I was there, he pointed me in the right direction, but he didn’t know where I was either, so it was pretty hard for him to tell me which way to go, he just said head to the Bull Ring. I am not a very organised person on the best of days, but when I left Oxford the sun was out and it looked like it was going to be a dry night, so there I was walking around in the rain with no umbrella trying to find the venue. By the time I managed to call Kev again he knew where I was and helped me get to the right venue, but when I got there I look like a drowned rat great! So I ended up missing Kevin Devine, but did see Brand New. It was a great gig.
We also headed down to another show a few days after, in was in London at the HMV forum, this was the scariest drive of my life. We left Oxford early as we didn’t want to miss anything, getting out the flat on time is pretty good for us, let alone early. Anyway driving down, everything was fine, it was so hot and sunny that I even put the air conditioning on in the car; I don’t normally do this as I know that it does use more petrol, so I try to avoid it, this was the first time ever I think. So all of a sudden there are few big drops of rain, nothing to worry about, it is just strange as the skies above us are blue so we carry on chatting and the big rain stops. About 10 minutes later the same thing happens again, but this time it lasts a bit longer. As I carry on driving, getting closer to London, the rain gets worse, the drops were getting bigger and heavier. I don’t mind driving in the rain, but very soon after the heavy rain comes these huge hail stones and not just a few, this went on for what seemed like hours, I could barely see out of the windscreen, but there was nowhere to pull over, they were so big and loud, I really didn’t know what to do, I have never been in a hail storm as bad as this before, all I could do was slow down. I was so worried that getting close to London I would annoy the London drivers, but luckily they also slowed down, I really thought that the hail stones where going to smash my windscreen, this is not me being girly and scared at anything, this was absolutely ridiculous.
The good thing was we made it to the gig in time, before the doors opened, no smashed windows, and Kev (BSM) got to chat to Kevin Devine so everything was all ok in the end.
Kev and Jack over at Alcopop asked me to help them out with their latest release, Alcopopular 3. They had the idea of a really cool message in a bottle, with a treasure map. The treasure map was where I came in. I drew all the little island symbols and laid it all out. I think it turned out pretty cool! And for anyone that is into recycling, then this has to be up there for eco friendly, no plastic at all. A glass bottle and paper, not really sure who would ever want to throw this away, but if there are some people out there that would after they have enjoyed looking at it, and being known as really cool for having it, then they can with a clear conscience.
The Treasure Map
The Map and the Bottle
1. Tellison – Wasp’s Nest
2. Apples – Theo
3. David Gibb – The Oxfordshire Brigade
4. Stars and Sons – In The Ocen (piano version)
5. Town Bike – Cock Muff Bum Hole
6. Pulled Apart By Horses – E=MC Hammer
7. Stagecoach – We Got Tazers
8. Paul Steel – Psychedelia Smith
9. Unicorn Kid – Nuts n Milk
10. Arrows Of Love – Prescriptions
11. Ice King of California – I Wouldn’t Want To Do That All
12. The October Game – Cast These Waves
13. The Computers – Track Four
I entered the Hugo creative competition last night. The brief was to use the theme ‘The Elements (Earth, Wind, Water & Fire)’. I entered two different designs, because I couldn’t choose which one to go for and we were allowed to submit up to 5 different designs. Both of mine are using the element Earth.
In the first one (with the black background) I tried to show the earth’s point of view looking up. I thought that it would be a pretty different prospective.
Then for the other one I wanted again to try and do something a little different, I thought about looking at maps, the one traditional way that earth/land is recorded. So I used the contour lines to make the shape of the Hugo man bottle, and showing gradient of the earth.
A few days ago Sylwia, a colleague of mine, approached me and asked if I could help out with a little side project which she’s working on. She needed a logo for Barcamp Transparency.
“This is where we will brainstorm, gather info and make it happen! As a result of discussion during Barcamp Apache Oxford (April, 2009) we want to organize a Barcamp Transparency to talk about social media ethics, Web 2.0 ethics, Open Government, cyber activism, direct democracy and all things related to transparency.”
So I said that I would help, after doing a bit of brainstorming, sketching and thinking I put some of my ideas on the computer. Out of quite a few different ones I like the little squares the most. I think it’s because it represents quite a lot of different things which Barcamp Transparency is talking about. To me they mean, digital, pixels, people, lights, houses lots of things like that, also I thought that it was the most eye-catching.
I was asked to use green in the design, but I also thought that red could be a good contrasting colour. The green was to reflect the ethics, open and honest side of it and the red is to express the potential dangers in the things that they are discussing.
This is the design that I liked the most, so did it in a few different colours.
The Green:
The Red:
The split:
This is the one that they liked the best and now are using.
This is my latest design for Big Scary Monsters, Kev wanted a black and white only CD sleeve for a new compilation that he is putting together of unsigned bands. I thought that I would try and make it as fun and simple as possible. Learning with the T-shirt design that transferring drawn artwork to the Mac was not as hard as I once though I would try and keep it pretty free hand. I done a lot of brainstorming and the main thing that I kept coming back to was raw and raw fish. So I went with a raw fish on a plate. I drew lots of different fish and ended up with a page of about 10 fish all slightly different, and then I started to look at what I like about each one. In the end I pieced together the shape, the eye and the mouth all from different fish. I think he looks pretty cool. If you look into his eyes he should bring a little smile to your face. I also ended up coming up with the name for the CD, Kev did ask advice form Twitter and I entered mine, and even though the rest were good, they all were playing on BSM and Music, where mine “To Let” well I think implied that these artists were up for grabs that they were not owned by any one but themselves. Well I thought it worked.
I was just looking around the internet when I can across Morris Miselowski’s website. I was looking on his site when I found a few amazing web tools. I have taken the little bits of information about the sites from Morris, he has pretty much summed them up perfectly, why change it!
ReQall is a free task and time-management application that integrates mobile devices (via voice messaging) with email, web, text messaging, IM, online calendars and RSS feeds to create a unified memory tool.
The seconded was Photoshop express
A great free version of Adobe Photoshop
It’s similar to the desk-bound Photoshop Elements, but Express is online and free. Like Picnik, it lets you snag pictures from Picasa or Flickr and edit them where they sit. Adobe takes that step further by spotting a free 2GB to store your snaps.
Acrobate.com is a set of online services – file sharing and storage, PDF converter, online word processor, and web conferencing, a great “cloud computing” offering that feels like a desktop bound piece of software, but it’s really operating and saving somewhere out there in cyberspace.
This is my latest t-shirt design for Big Scary Monsters.
I learnt a few things along the way with this one, I never really draw designs onto paper, I normally just get my ideas together, do rough drawing on how I want it to look then just jump onto the Mac, but this time I really wanted to it to have a drawn feel to it. One of my bad habits really helped me this time. When I’m working I can really get lost in it, lose all sense of time and sometimes I can forget to save my work. Well this time it happened Illustrator unexpectedly quit on me, I had spent about 2 hours on it, tracing it all, trying to tidy all the little loose lines up, all the little bits and bobs, sorted out what type I wanted sat back and had a little look, thought it was ok, then I was just about to save – then illustrator just disappeared!
As most people would be, I pretty frustrated at the time. So I just saved what I could and turned everything off and left it for the night as it was late and I had work in the morning. When I went back to it I started again, traced the image and saved, but I want just to try something to see if it would save me anytime. So after I saved it I then opened up the file in Photoshop, I thought that this might help to tidy up some of the lines. It did I just rubbed the bits out that I didn’t want in there. Then, saved again, opened up again in Illustrator traced it again, and it looked some much better than the first one, and took half the time.
The version of Illustrator I have now is a newer on I think, I have not had the option before of tracing images. I had read about it before, but had never found the option. Now I know that I can do this I think I will take advantage, plus I don’t have a scanner so I have to reply on taking photos on my phone, Bluetoothing them over to the Mac and hope they turn out ok.
Go and buy now? Should be on sale today, from Big Scary Monsters.
