Music Ramblings 1

I have 3 things in my life, design, music and food (there's a girlfriend in there somewhere). I can not live without out them, it's true. I am a complete hound for new tunes, or atleast new tunes to me (I've been on a blues bender recently, some of those guys have been dead for 30 years, so it's hardly "new" music, I digress), so I have decided to expand this blog into other random things that cross my path and I think are of some interest.

I was working on the layout change, (nice huh?) and my girlfriend shouted "Come down here now, there is an amazing band on Jools Holland!" I get down stairs to be greeted by a brass band. I have a bit of a soft spot for this new breed of hip hop/funk inspired brass bands (Youngblood Brass Band and The Dirty Dozen Brass Band are fine examples), they just blow my mind!

The brass band I am going to recommend now are:

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble.



That is an awesome video!



The live videos are truly something special aswell.

These guys have some serious soul, end of.

Happy Listening.
Michael

Links
Hypnotic Brass Band
Youngblood Brass Band
Dirty Dozen Brass Band

DF Poster colab!

This is a rather exciting idea, I have covered the Design Forum poster design contest in a previous post, that poster however was done by me and just me. It was fun to do, and considering we were allowed to do more than one entry, I asked if any of the other members fancied collaborating with me.

Step forward Peter Barlows, we agreed I would handle the image, he would handle the text. Sorted. Well this is my part of it.



I have only just sent it to Peter, so I will update this post when he gets back to me....

I'll leave the links the same.
Michael

Links
Larger Version
Badlans on IMDB
DF Comp
Peter Barlows on Twitter

CD Artwork

Well this is one of those jobs that I have and haven't enjoyed doing, mainly because the layout you will be able to see just below was actually one of my first drafts! And then there were 20 something or so drafts (you should have seen the deleted post!) with minor and major changes...basically if you hit the nail on the head the first time, how are you meant to feel?

Well regardless, this isn't actually finished, as this was meant to be a promo/sale ready CD printed with a card sleeve, and that is being skipped and due to something I don't remember right now, it is going into dual cases! So I will have to re-jigg it. Nothing major, the cover is done, that is the hard part!

But anyway I wanted to post this, as I feel it's done what I was asked to do and I like it. Now the goal posts have been moved slightly (not in bad way mind you) I will have to rethink and have more detail.

As it was meant to be...



I'll throw some more links up when its done...
Michael

Links
Larger Version

Poster

I am on a message board called Design Forums all the time, it is by far and away one of my favourite corners of the internet! Everyone on there is friendly and supportive, no matter what your skill level as a designer there are friendly people to offer advice and point you in directions should you need it.

Don't worry they have a fun cast of characters too, friendly mods, crazy teenagers, someone who is obsessed with emoticon, a grumpy old man and well, me...

But they are having a competiton to win the Wolverine Origins file. Having seen this in Borders and thought I want that! I decided to enter. The contest was set with the brief of Designing a poster for the (hypothetical) upcoming Quentin Tarantino re-make of "Badlands".

Now, I have been wanting to try and do something a bit like Frank Miller/Sin City style for ages, and this seemed like as good an opportunity as any. I have kinda based it on the original poster (i'll included an IMDB link to the film at the end) and kinda spun it a little.

I enjoyed making this.



It's late...
Michael

Links
Larger Version
Badlans on IMDB
DF Comp

Poster!

Well March was quiet, mainly because I was busy and secondly because my battery had died which meant I was ignoring my computer and not chasing things, but thats beside the point, a new poster and another one for TJ's, which always makes me happy!

Metal is good, there is no escaping it! Metal is a great thing in this world. So a chance to make a poster that was more METAL was exciting.

Blaze Bayley, now do you remember him? I do but for different reasons to most, he was in a band called Wolfsbane and was in Iron Maiden (according to Wiki, he was in there for 5 years! Now that was a suprise!), I remember just getting into Iron Maiden when I was about 14 and them changing from Bruce to Blaze, and really enjoying his time in the band, trust me I think I'm one of the only ones! But anyways after leaving Maiden in 1999 he went solo and has continued touring in various forms (solo and with a Wolfsbane reformation).

I will never forget being in Bristol in 2002 at a club night and in a drunken haze thinking it was a great idea to spend the night so we could see him play there the day after, lets ignore the fact that I only live a short journey away, I was hell bent we should party the night away just for Blaze! We didn't because I lost interest after a few more beers...

The poster.

It needed to be suitable for someone who was in Iron Maiden (and someone who has an album called "The Man who wouldn't Die") so I started thinking skulls, doom etc.

Version 1:



Version 2:



Black and White version:



Now I will admit that this isn't all my work, some credit has to go to Jimiyo, and his wonderfull stock vectors.

Back to work...
Michael

P.S. Only just looked at his myspace, perhaps I should offer my skills...

Links
Larger Versions
Jimiyo
Blaze Bayley

A few more textures...

Well one of them should be going live soon enough, but for now, just have a gander...





Nothing big to update, sadly.

I'm going to go get some food.
Michael

Link
Texture Album

How am i supposed to feel about this?

Edit: This issue has now been resolved. And there are now no hard feelings between me and Darren @ Regal Clothing. This post was made when I was rather angry, and I would like to re-enforce that this issue is solved, and I have left this post up so that perhaps this doesn't happen to me again and perhaps it can serve as a warning? I don't know....

I've been a member of emptees for a while now, and it has been a great source of inspiration, a great place to get some help and critique, amongst countless other things. The one thing that has always entertained me has been watching as amazing designers, (godmachine, mumford, jimiyo, collision theory, nicole nimmor...) reaction to crazy kids from the far east use vector tracing to steal their work.

It is amazing to see these guys who are so talented, see the funny side in people stealing their work. I will always remember one post where an artist seem to see it as his right of passage that someone had stolen his work!! The strange acceptance that at some point someone will steal your work and the best hope you've got is to just laugh about it, is amazing.

Well if that is the case then I have arrived, rather sadly.

I did this design whilst I was in uni, it wasn't appropriate for the project I was working on so it was just shelved for the best part of 5 years. I joined emptees and it seemed like a great place to start as it would make a neat little shirt design.



Here is the design as I posted on emptees 3 months ago.

I recently joined Design Forums, wicked message board, and one of their features is a portfolio/slideshow on their page, which members upload and images are selected at random, and I saw part of my design on a tshirt on there!

Now this was a bit of a suprise, as I followed the link to a company/guy who had shown interest in buying the original design and he had just plain copied it!



Now I'm not going to post links to all the relevant places here, but I have yet to react to this properly.

Time to go...
Michael