Norman Rockwell’s America

The Connoisseur (1962 - Norman Rockwell)I just went to see Norman Rockwell’s America at the East Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Utterly stunning. It’s only on for another month and they have original paintings, studies and prints as well as over 350 framed covers of the Saturday Evening Post that he did. If you’ve been thinking of giving it a go, make the effort, you won’t see another collection like this in the UK again for a while I think. They even had the original of this April Fools painting below.

april-fool-girl-and-shopkeeper

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Originals #4 • Roger Mainwood – Autobahn animation cels

Autobahn 1Roger Mainwood‘Autobahn’ animation cels, Halas & Batchelor, 1979
(330 x 270 mm, pen and paint on acetate).

In 1979 animation studio Halas & Batchelor were commisioned by EMI to make a video to accompany Kraftwerk’s song ‘Autobahn’ for a possible laser disc compilation of the label’s back catalogue. These are two original cels from the film, the background and goggle reflections are lost, the laser disc was never released.

You can watch the film in two parts on YouTube, this frame appears at approx 4.22 in Part 2.

Part 1 Part 2

 

Posted in Kraftwerk, Originals. | 2 Comments |

‘The Crow’ animation by Tom Webb

DJ Food – The Crow Animated from Tom Webb on Vimeo.

Tom Webb contacted me with this film he made as part of his 3rd year Illustration Minor project. It’s the first half of the DJ Food track ‘The Crow‘, written by PC, from our Kaleidoscope LP. Here are his comments about the making of it;

“I set myself the task of trying to illustrate the DJ Food album Kaleidoscope. Initially, I was trying to produce stand alone images but eventually decided to dive into the world of animation for the first time. I created a sequence for the first half of The Crow. I was hoping to animate to the whole track, I storyboarded a lot of it but the deadline got the better of me.”

TW sketch1TW image4TW image5TW image1

“The images were created as spontaneous responses to the sounds and atmospheres I was hearing inside some of the tracks. I started investigating ‘Full Bleed’, ‘Cookin’, ‘The Riff’, ‘The Crow’ and both the ‘Sleep Dyad‘s’ a lot because of their particular energies.

The idea was to finish making the image before the track finished, so I started painting with my hands to help speed things up and build a small library of personal reactions in texture. I then scanned the images at hi-res and chopped out suitable macro sections which were then imported into the animation. There was a lot of trial and error involved. It’s also the first time I’ve had a go at animating so I had to learn the program from scratch as well.”

I personally love the syncopation he’s got and the movements from dark to light corresponding to the moods of the track. You can see more of Tom’s work on his blog calamridropkick.com

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – 1969

550w_comics_league_of_extraordinary_gentlemen_1969Looking forward to this in April:

CHAPTER TWO takes place almost sixty years later in the psychedelic daze of Swinging London during 1968, a place where Tadukic Acid Diethylamide 26 is the drug of choice, and where different underworlds are starting to overlap dangerously to an accompaniment of sit-ins and sitars. The vicious gangster bosses of London’s East End find themselves brought into contact with a counter-culture underground of mystical and medicated flower-children, or amoral pop-stars on the edge of psychological disintegration and developing a taste for Satanism. Alerted to a threat concerning the same magic order that she and her colleagues were investigating during 1910, a thoroughly modern Mina Murray and her dwindling league of comrades attempt to navigate the perilous rapids of London’s hippy and criminal subculture, as well as the twilight world of its occultists. Starting to buckle from the pressures of the twentieth century and the weight of their own endless lives, Mina and her companions must nevertheless prevent the making of a Moonchild that might well turn out to be the antichrist.

Posted in Comics. | 3 Comments |

Originals #3 • Kid Acne – TTC LP Illustration (Full)

TTC LP Inner full

Kid Acne‘TTC – C’eci N’Est Pas Un Disque’ LP inside cover illustration (full piece), 2001-2

(640 x 380 mm, pen and pencil on paper).

The full piece was created using photocopies of two A3 illustrations depicting the crowd characters. These were then joined and the club background added in thinner pen. The DJs were also added at this stage to complete the scene.

Posted in Art, Originals. | 2 Comments |

The Death of Output

DoO1-3 coverL3output logo webBack at the end of 2006, when Trevor Jackson‘s Output Recordings folded, I put together a 3 hour tribute mix of my favourite tracks. This went out as 3 separate mixes on Solid Steel and I even made a very limited number of facsimile Output CDRs of the mixes. I’ve recently had requests to upload it again so, by the miracle that is Soundcloud, it’s available. I’ve also edited it into one piece finally and the track list is embedded in the Lyrics section of the mp3. Being an avid collector of the label I thought I’d show off the screen printed promo releases and a few other choice pieces.

Further reading from early 2007 can be had on Mark E’s ‘ireallylovemusic’ site.

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The Death of Output by DJ Food

[singlepic id=2609 w=640 h=890 float=left] [singlepic id=2620 w=640 h=480 float=left]

Originals #2 • Kid Acne – TTC LP Illustration piece

TTC LP illo (Right) 650

Kid Acne‘TTC – C’eci N’Est Pas Un Disque’ LP inside cover illustration (right hand side), 2001-2 (420 x 297mm, pen and pencil on paper).


Originally one half of a crowd scene to go on the inside of a gatefold cover for TTC’s first LP. The label couldn’t afford a gatefold sleeve so it was printed on the inside of a single sleeve, the left half is thought to be lost.

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The Shamen, Synergy live on KISS 100 FM, 1991

I’ve just uploaded this from my archives to my Soundcloud account

Synergy 650

The Shamen doing a Synergy mix live on Colin Faver‘s show on Kiss FM from 1991. It’s essentially DJ Sticker and (I think) Mixmaster Morris /The Irresistible Force with Mr C. MC-ing. Only about 50 minutes long, the only tape I had was a free one from a magazine so the last 10 minutes is cut off. An excellent selection of tracks if you can put up with C’s terrible freestyling and patter/patois :).

A pretty influential set for me in my student days when I first moved to London (as were Colin Dale and Colin Favor’s shows). It indirectly hooked me up with Coldcut and Ninja Tune as I went to a Shamen gig because of this, met Mixmaster Morris there and he put me in touch with Matt Black.

Posted in Music, Radio. | 2 Comments |

3D comics

Biz 3D ZoneFurther to the post about 3D I did last week, I’ve dug out some of the comics I was talking about. Best find was ‘Bizarre 3D Zone’ which is almost Zap Comix in 3D form, including a strip by Robert Williams which works extremely well visually. There were a few underground comics in the the 60’s and 70’s using 3D it seems but not all of them work because the printing is so bad the red/green division can’t be seen too easily.

A company called Blackthorne Publishing spearheaded the 3D comics surge in the late 80’s, buying up licenses to lots of kids shows like Transformers, GI Joe and Star Wars. Their most successful line was, bizarrely, the California Raisins (!?) but they bit off more than the could chew when they acquired the rights to print Michael Jackson’s ‘Moonwalker’ in 3D. The film didn’t do the business expected and their comic flopped, costing them the company. Most of their titles only ran for 1 or 2 issues and the projected Star Wars line (surely a golden ticket?) only made it to issue 3 before the company folded.

In Bizarre 3D Zone there are a few singular page strips that crop up that are quite bizarre indeed, some don’t even work in the conventional 3D way as they are simply only either the green or red. But in amongst the other separated images they give an odd effect and you realise that this is the ultimate in psychedelic comics as it’s playing with your perceptions of the page. I can only imagine what it was doing to hippies on acid way back when.
Zone 3Robt WilliamsZone 6