Making Money

This week, the UK’s new Pound Coin entered circulation – Its biggest change in 34 years. While I do have an interest in coins, going to one of a handful of locations to clamour for one of the first in the country? Not that interested. A fancy quid will crop up in my change soon enough.

Left: Old and Busted (1983-2017). Right: New hotness (2017-).

Anyway, money. At work, we have competitions and offers. Some of them have cash prizes, so I had to draw us some coins. The best way, I decided, was to do them in Illustrator with the 3D effect – this let me draw it once, then copy and paste, repeating, resizing and rotating the graphic to add variety.

Partial artwork of Win £500 flyer
My 2015 custard coloured coins – Make it rain!

I’m going to briefly go over how to make a 3D coin in Adobe Illustrator, then talk about the new Pound Coin graphics I created last month.

A Whale of a Tale, Act 1

The Bradford University Society of Operettas and Musicals – BUSOM for short – performed their 2015 main show last week. Moby Dick! The Musical sees a St. Trinian’s-like girls school (complete with headmistress played by a man in drag) putting on a musical version of Herman Melville’s novel to save their bankrupt institution; hockey sticks for harpoons and all.

BUSOM’s staple poster creator has graduated, moved away, and become very busy. I was picked to work on the main show this year. That meant it was up to me to get that ‘play within a play’ message across.

First up, posters for the cast auditions. Over the post-Xmas holidays I came up with the below pic, for the production team to surround with the relevant text. This was the birth of Audition Whale, drawn with Illustrator’s standard but useful Charcoal brush.

Audition Whale quickly gained fans.

Chalk drawing of cartoon whale on blackboard
Look at its stripy school tie!

Inking All Month Long

There’s a chap who calls himself Grickle, who I discovered via his work on the Puzzle Agent games. Have you heard of recent film The Boxtrolls? He helped create the titular creatures.
One day, he tweeted the below swamp creature, with the hashtag #sketch_dailies.

Grickle on Twitter

Sketch Dailies (website / Twitter) tweet out one drawing suggestion every weekday, around 5:30pm UK time. They help lead an event called Inktober, where you do one drawing every day for a month (or you can do one every two days, etc.). You can take on Sketch Dailies’ proposal, or do your own thing. Despite the name, it’s not strictly limited to ink – People use their tablets, watercolours, whatever they please.

Motorhome Maladies

The perilously perched Motorhome is introducing another thing wot I did at work… I put together an infographic / illustrated stats which cover the last few years of Caravan Guard’s motorhome insurance claims.

You can see the whole thing on the company blog herevia the below image, or on visual.ly. You can click it again in the C.G. post to go super-big. I’ve chopped the full-length preview of what awaits you into three, so you can see it at a reasonable size: To soak in all the graphical fineries, though, you should just click through already!

Caravan Guard Motorhomes Insurance Claims - Click to visit

Caravans and Bicycles

In February I started working for Caravan Guard (and it’s sister company Leisuredays), a medium-sized, family run insurance company. It’s no secret: My CV’s available on this website, after all. I’m in the Marketing department… as a Graphic Designer. Last month I moved to ‘Permanent contract’ status.

Success Kid and company logo
Success Kid approves.

I’ve been doing a huge amount of wonderful stuff, both straight-laced and silly, for both the Leisuredays re-branding and more general tasks. Making the sky blue on overcast photos. Adding and removing signs. Removing people. We’ve got new and updated booklets, flyers, folders, tiny stickers and big banners into production. I’ve made a truckload of icons, graphs and graphics, while correcting and refining the existing sets. I even got talking cows into a milk-bottle shaped mailer.

The Ravages of Age

Twitter rolled out new look profiles last month, allowing higher resolution avatars than before. I opened my Photoshop file to export a larger copy, made sure the glasses resemble my current pair… then lopped off the quiff (as I no longer sport one).

Hair today, gone tomorrow.
The official Twitter logo had its hair cut in 2012.

The human self-portrait, displayed on my portfolio cover and in the top-right of this blog, has also been shorn and contemporised…

Fish Head and Friends

Happy Star Wars Day! The Fourth of May be on your side, or words to that effect.

As one of my best-known works, it’s funny it’s not had a write up – Ackbarpography was made pre-blog. The origin is now unclear, but one day in 2009 I was struck with the urge to try Type Art, and merging Star Wars characters Admiral Ackbar with his famous phrase “It’s A Trap!” was the one for me.

I traced an image of an Ackbar Lego Minifig to get simplified, head-on features. I then spent considerable time making the letters into facial features while, keeping them legible and in order. I was hesitant to add “non-letters” in to complete the face, getting away with the eyes because they’re at either side. Along with a collar, I added a hatched head shape behind everything to cohere the lettering together.

The Opera Post, Act 2

In my last post I mentioned that I had many tasks for the New Bradford Playhouse’s in-house production of Maskerade. Last time we talked posters. Today, we focus on the programme.

A 12-page booklet, the whole thing was designed to be printed in black and white on ordinary office paper. The audience got such a version, while I gifted some cast and crew members this borderless, colour cover variant. It contains the usual suspects: a synopsis, cast list, crew list, rights, a word from the director, a bit about the theatre and what’s being performed there next. A nicety is that being an internal production on a shoestring budget, there’s no advertisements. The cast pages ended up being the centre spread, which was ideal.

mask-prog-cast1

The Opera Post, Act 1

This month The New Bradford Playhouse put on an in-house production of Maskerade, adapted from the Terry Pratchett book of the same name (think Phantom Of The Opera with humour and witches). I haven’t been on that stage in a long time, and love the works of Pratchett, so I signed up.

My main role was one of the stagehands who are actually part of the play, so as well as spouting lines i’d shift furniture, in sight and out of sight of the audience. I had two other bit-parts in one scene each, with quick costume changes. Along with learning script, stage directions and set mechanics, I also made the show’s programme, some posters, two Papier-mâché masks for the cast, and one mask for myself. In 4 weeks. Oh, and I started a new full-time job at the same time.