Toy Box Poster/Flyer

I have been working on these Toybox flyers/poster for a while now and I think I can let them be seen now.
Maybe I am too obsessed with balloons and blimps, but they are so perfect for poster design that I thought I'd dust off an old classic and do it again. I think they have turned out pretty good. It was a constant battle to find the right balance between the information and the asthetics of the image, but I think it worked in the end.

Screen Printing Set-up

Just a quick snap of my screen printing set up. Unfortunatly, I have managed to screw up all of my test t-shirts, so am going to have to wait for my next batch to arrive. I was very close to the perfect print on the last one, but then slipped so the print was missing the bottom inch. Balls. But yeah its promising so far, hopefully be selling soon.

Food Chain.

So this is the first design I have chosen to print myself. Seems to be the most popular with everyone I have shown it too.Now its just a case of practise, practise, practise; with alot of screwing up thrown into the bag too, I dare say.

The actual design is something I had in mind for absolutely ages before finally drawing it and it turned out pretty well. I was intending it too have alot more intrecate detail, like some of my other designs, i.e, hair and scales etc. In the end, I think it works alot better without these things.

It is also the first branded 'Sushi in Paris' design. The prospect of printing under another label I co-own is exciting, as its been about 4 years since we dissolved 'Demo'.

Anywho, a couple of friends pointed me towards some other pieces of work with similar themes, which I liked so much I decided to pop them in a blog as it had been a while since I'd written one.

  

This is an incredible installation by Chen Wenling, which my friend Safia pointed me too, which is alittle hard to unsderstand at first glance, but shares a trait or two with my design.

Nothing unusual here, just a hippo, suspended from the ceiling, with a furious looking crocodile pertruding from its mouth, who also has a angonized man in his jaws. Oh and there is a shark biting the hippo on the arse. Brilliant.

How do you even come up with this concept, let alone execute it in such an amazingly polished way? Oh my kingdom for a ticket to Beijing.

This one has a nice feel to it too, which my SIP counterpart, Sophie,  showed me.

This kind of Russian art is strange, dry and bleak, which I have always been attracted too due to my depressing nature. It has an almost folk-law like quality to it too, perhaps due to the wood effect grain marks on the animals bodys. Anyway, its interesting and I like it.

Will hopefully start screen printing soon, so will have to write something on how that goes when it inevitably all goes wrong.

Rescue Rooms T-shirt Concept #2

Pin-up

Pin-up has always been cool. Theres something about its cheeky, provocative nature and its tie ins with the War, that have always made it an interesting and fun subject to work with. Plus women are just always more challenging and rewarding to draw.

This design was never meant to be hugely origonal, as its an idea that has been done many times before. It was meant as more of a homage to some of the great artwork that the RAF used to have on their aircrafts during the Second World War, maybe even as a slight spoof. It also envokes memories from the classic scene in Dr Strangelove.

I've not finished this design, it still looks alittle flat, but I might tweek it and print it myself as I'm pretty fond of it.

Rescue Rooms T-shirt Concept #1

Parrot

Now that the t-shirt design for Rescue Rooms has been picked, I feel I can show some of my initial concepts which are not being used.

Whenever I am designing a t-shirt, and trying to brand something that people are going to wear, I always try and start off in the same way. You have to make it interesting, its not enough to just write 'AWESOME CLOTHING APPAREL!' on a shirt, and put some flowers and cool shit flying out of it. You need to remeber that people have to want to wear the shirt, its got to be beautiful or weird or clever. The design comes first, the text comes second. The text should purely be there to label what the design is representing, not vice versa.

Anyway, this is the first concept I came up with.

Doing a design for a club is hard, you have to try some embody the 'something-ness' of the venue. In the end, I just wanted to try and design something that was more like a illustration than a piece of graphic design. The parots were interesting to design as they are usually something people would associate with colour, but I had already decided that Black and White was the way to go. So I tried to contruct the parrot only giving the suggestion of its colour through varying sizes of feather. In the end I think it looked quite good, but I don't think I was quite clever enough with the text.