More envelope art

I haven't posted here in a while... taking photos has instant gratification I guess. Now if only I could photograph all the things I imagine in my mind but don't have the skill to create, I'd be happy :)

This was the envelope for a birthday card that I just had to draw on (I couldn't help myself). I drew the "accessories" in the same theme as the card itself. I forgot to photograph the card though... silly me. It said something like "When I grow up I want lots of puppies and ponies", so of sourse I had to make the card a bit more "edgy" seeing as the recipient was celebrating her 15th birthday and the card wasn't age appropriate whatsoever.

Typical chrome and black dub style with paint markers. I don't like the "G" however, but no biggy, I'm not a real writer anyway.

So I painted on some bandanas...

This idea is hardly new but, much like my plague doctor mask I just wanted to make them.
I'd seen an Oni bandana on the net before, I also had a couple of plain black bandanas lying around. So naturally I had a go at making my own. And because I don't have a silkscreen printer, nor do I have the space (or any real reason to own one) I painted it by hand.

First things first, sketch a pattern. And because it's me it's ball-point pen on a scrap of paper...

I then re-drew it slightly bigger and on a slightly thicker paper. The bits that were to be painted were cut out with a fine point craft knife.

I transfered the pattern to the bandana by tracing the outline with a white pencil. I traced one half then flipped the paper over to create the other half. Doing it this way meant that the facial features stayed in the correct position (if I cut out the entire pattern, the mouth part would be floating about on its own).

Transfered onto the bandana. And because I'm doing this by hand it's not entirely symmetrical, but that's fine. Next, painting...

I mixed acrylic paint with this GAC 900 fabric painting medium. This makes the paint thinner and more flexible which means that it's less likely to crack and peel when washed.

However it produces formaldehyde when setting, so open a window!

A few thin coats of paint...

...and a few minutes pressed under a hot iron and it's done. In my limited experience of doing this type of thing painting light colours onto dark fabric generally takes more coats than dark paint on light. The paint usually ends up showing on the opposite side due to the amount of paint needed, but since this a one-side only thing it doesn't really matter.

At least this time I can show you what it looks like when worn :P


I also made a skull version. I wanted to paint the skull one first, but because I saw the oni mask version I had to start with that.

I had this stretchy skull tube-scarf-type thing, it looked a lot like this:

In fact this is the exact same design that I bought off of a Bay that starts with an "e". I liked the idea of this, however I didn't realise that the skull was printed IN THE MIDDLE of the scarf. This meant that if you wanted to wear it like the polystyrene foam head is modelling, you have to fold it which meant doubling its thickness and halving its length. I ended up gifting this to my cousin, then bought some plain bandanas to recreate this skull scarf in bandana form.

Anyway the skull one was made with pretty much the same method as the oni mask one, except that the pattern wasn't symmetrical. I found a half-skull picture (the same one printed on that scarf above), created a template from it and traced it onto the bandana. Then hand-painted it, leaving gaps for the contours and outlines.

It ended up a little bigger than I envisioned, but seeing as it only cost a few squid and a few hours of my time I wasn't complaining. In time for Halloween? Yeah, I suppose.


(Back in December!)

Plague doctor mask (WIP, part 4... part done?)

(part3) (part 2) (part 1)

I suppose the main mask is finished now. Here's how it's progressed since the last post:

I painted the mask white to remove the distraction of the news print. This is when I could really see all the bumps and lumps from the cardboard structure.

I rounded off the edge of the face with some scissors. I then added this piece of cardboard to help round off the bottom of the mask. (I also tried to do some of the crossword but I got bored of it.) I then covered this card in some papier mache and a little polyfilla. Now this is the step that I didn't document, but all I did was apply some polyfilla to the entire surface of the mask to intentionally make it bumpier. I decided that trying to smooth the whole thing out would take way too long, considering that I'm not even following a plan and I'm correcting mistakes I find as I go along (and I've spent long enough on this already :P) so I would just mask (pun intended) the bumps with some surface texture.

After a liberal application of polyfilla and some gesso. Getting ready to paint!

I added some cardboard rings to the eyes to make them less jagged. This also gave the eye pieces a ridge. I also fixed the beak tip with some card and polyfilla so that it's a bit more pointed. Without this the tip looked flat like the front of a ballerina's shoe.

A brighter day and the painting is done (acrylic paint, finished a couple of weeks ago). I experimented with a an earthy brown-yellow to to try and emulate leather or old cloth but it looked weird, less plague doctor and more Big Bird from Sesame Street. I then ended up sticking with white, but mixed in a tiny bit of black in places to break up the uniform whiteness of it.

Eyes were painted dark brown and black. Dry brushed on some grey/black around the eyes to make it look worn out and grubby. I found a really crappy pair of cheap sunglasses and cut out a couple of circles from the lenses to fit into the eyes. It took a little bodging with some scissors but I managed to get them to fit. Held in place with a dab of superglue on the reverse, and also friction (they were a very tight fit!)

I would have preferred them to be tinted brown rather than black, but seeing as the sunglasses were free I'm not really complaining.

I also dry brushed a dark line along the top, the sides and the bottom to give the impression of some kind of join or seam.

The side ones end up emphasising the whole beakyness of the mask.


I suppose I could call it done, the only problem with that is that there's no way to actually wear the damn thing. It's too heavy to use normal elastic like on the V mask I modelled this on, so I'll have to make some kind of tie, or a strap with adjustable buckle (I have a big ol' head). At least the creative part of the process is done.

There are probably much better instructions out there on the internet to make one of these masks quickly and easily. I just made this because I wanted to have a go. I had no idea what I was going to make it out of, and how I was going to make it. I experimented ON the mask rather than on scraps of card or paper. I made things on the fly, adjusted on the fly, readjusted on the fly. There were no exact measurements, just my eye and a lot of guesswork.

If you're thinking about making a mask like this, don't do what I did. It'll probably drive you bananas unless you have a lot of patience. Plan out what you want to do beforehand and get your materials ready in advance. Oh, and use a ruler! Otherwise you'll also end your last post 4 months from the first one. And note that I didn't spend 4 months entirely on this mask. I also left it well alone for long periods of time too ;)


I have a couple more mask-like things to post which I made a few days ago, but those can wait. I'm just glad that this mask is finally done*.


*or is it? I might update this post with the final head strap or whatever I end up putting on it, but since that's not really creative it might end up being sidelined.

Illustrated envelope fun time

So, when the theme is a glamorous Pre-Oscars party, and you have a birthday card with an unbelieveably boring envelope and a box of felt tip pens, you obviously customise the envelope. Obviously!

(felt pen on... an envelope!)

From cruddy ball-point sketch, to pencil outline, to fill in.

I should have stopped there, but the back was as dull as the front was before I got my grubby mitts on it, so I did a little Googlin' and found some images of the official Oscar envelope design, for a little inspiration.

The back of the official envelope...

...and my humble little homage/rip :D

Any excuse to customise something :)

Last Donut of the Night

I was supposed to start painting my idea for Kinga Bee's and my illustration project, but I got side-tracked by this round piece of cardboard.

 EXIF says September 2010

Primed and ready to paint after 9 months...

If I remember correctly this was a random piece of packaging from the box of an electric kettle. When I first saw it the customising cogwheels in my head kicked in and I thought donut. So I primed it with gesso, with the intention of painting it to look like a donut. When it had dried I put it in a box and forgot about it. Then last week when I decided to start another painting for some reason the cardboard donut sprang to mind.

Two sides to a donut

The design was partly inspired by Stones Throw's Donut Shop, a 2 disc vinyl LP of J-Dilla tracks that has slipmats designed to look like donuts. I decided to paint a donut on each side so, if you feel like a strawberry glazed donut you can pretend to eat the glazed side. Or if you're in the mood for some sprinkles, the sprinkles side.

Donuts for the eyes and ears.


Doughnuts, donuts. Whichever you prefer. They are both tasty.

I am not a vandal (Happy birthday, Morgan)

I made this as a birthday present, not because I was raging against the system:

(spray paint on... a wall, derp)

The closest I'd ever gotten to writin' my name in graffiti on the wall was when I was a teen and did a few simple tags here and there, but that really isn't in the spirit of graffiti, or writing (if you're a graffiti snob). Plus that spirit involves hitting spots at crazy hours of the morning, hiding from the law and racking your paint, none of which I really fancied doing. I'm still a huge fan of graffiti and it's place in hip-hop culture, so for the most part my graff has been kept on paper, until yesterday.

My cousin and his partner pretty much asked me to draw a little something on their daughter's wall for her birthday, with the words "lil' star" incorporated into it. I normally do the usual greeting card but with an unusual design on the envelope (a la keeping it on paper). My cousin suggested that this would be an extension of that tradition but on a bigger - and vertical - surface. I'm pretty sure he wasn't thinking the whole wall but I already was.

from the paper to the wall

I ended up having to stack the words on top of each other as it would have been too long to fit on one line. The funny thing is that they will be rehoused in a few months as the council are supposed to be demolishing their building to make way for a new development, which means that this will also fall into a big pile of rubble. Kind of sad to do something like this only for it to disappear down the road. But I guess that's one of the things about graffiti, that it's never supposed to be permanent, even if this was legal and not going to be buffed out by anti-vandalism cleaners :)

I like that the time-and-tested combo of chrome and black really stands out. I did have a few problems with it though:

• I have NEVER drawn anything as big as this before, in any medium... ever, so I got a bit excited with the size of it. It's a little too big.
• The paint kept dripping. This was most likely due to the wallpaper not wanting to take the paint properly. Wallpaper isn't a very good surface to spray on unless it's matt and super absorbant, which this wasn't.
• My white spray can kept sticking and clogging. How annoying is a can that splatters instead of sprays? It also made adding the highlights harder, and made my fingers hurt from pressing down so hard.
• I got tired at the end and my fingers were starting to cramp, so the final simple details kind of went a bit wonky.

Fortunately the pictures hide most of the drips and smudges. It probably is best admired from afar. Maybe if I had more than a couple of hours, a better surface and much more practice it would have been cleaner and crisper. But for a first attempt at anything more than a tag in about 15 years I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Beats, Rhymes and Life

I'm in the middle of doing another painting (I know, right?!) but in the meantime here's a custom Mini Munny that I did a while ago:

Painted with acrylic. The flagpole is a wooden dowel. The flag is white denim - it was stiff enough to hold the flag shape without needing constant wind :) - and coloured with Sharpie markers and white paint.

This little fella, standing proud at 11cm (4 1/4" in The Queen Measurements™) initially had an acrylic lily painted on his head. It was going to be a gift for a friend but I decided not to finish it, and instead repainted him as something completely different. Much simpler but different nonetheless. I decided on making him into the red and green figure found on many of A Tribe Called Quest's albums:

I think I was going through an ATCQ phase at the time and I listened to all of their albums from start to finish. My Munny is based on the cover artwork of Beats, Rhymes and Life. This cover is also my favourite as it's done in a graffiti style and I'm partial to a bit of graff:

So yeah, that's that. My painting will be posted when it's done, that or it will be put in the bin if it turns into a disaster.