That little animation I released yesterday made a bit of an impression and was  today’s featured work on the creative social network, Central Station. Big thanks to everyone at @CenSta.

My sadly neglected Central station profile page is here.

Land Ahoy! is a very short animation that started out as an experiment in 2.5D video in After Effects. I was so  pleased with how it turned out that I took what was initially just a bobbing boat and gave it a bit more polish and some semblance of narrative (not a lot though).

All of the images are made from cut-out paper which was scanned and coloured in Photoshop.

The music is ‘The Trumpet Hornpipe‘, performed and released by Stuart Eydmann under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License (the rest is ©2010 ithinkitsnice). My thanks to Stuart for sharing this.

You simply must go to Youtube to see it in 720p HD which is a hell of a lot prettier.

I managed to expose my separations and make a run of twelve finished prints. A couple of them went wrong for one reason or another (I managed to print separations upside-down) so I’ve got 10 good prints. Not bad, I think, for my first proper go.

I’ve still got some of the inks I mixed for this left and I’m hoping  to go back in within the week to do something else in the same colourway.

The vinyl features reworkings by Seba and Bop, while the digital download features an additional remix by the wonderful Badmammal from San Francisco.

For the build up to the release, Blu Mar Ten also asked me to create some animated titles and visuals for the Youtube previews of the tracks.

Part 2 in the series will be announced in the coming month.

In the past year, Paul decided to cease issuing records on vinyl and released Nerve’s entire catalogue of over 60 tracks for free download. Now he’s decided to wrap it up for good, but it’s definitely going out on a high. Congratulations on everything you’ve accomplished over the years with Nerve, Paul. It was an honour to create the artwork for this release.

And yeah, yeah, digital art made to look like grungy, printed matter is a old-hat. I hope you can see the intention for it to look like a vintage poster is actually the idea. Actually, I don’t care.

Nerve030 – Saburuko vs Morphy is available now. Listen to and download the tracks for free here.

All of Nerve’s previous relelases are now available for free on www.nerverecordings.co.uk

For my big comeback post I’ve got some photographs of the day I spent learning to screenprint at the excellent Glasgow Print Studio a couple of months ago. The image I printed was based on some artwork that was rejected for Bop‘s single Song About My Dog last year, which I think I prefer over what was chosen in the end.

So here is the process from start to finish. Well, sort of — I had hoped to get pics of the screening and other things but I got swept away in the fun of actually making the thing. I was very impressed by the facilities at the GPS and I can’t wait to get my membership so I can get back and do more work.

I’ll start updating soon, probably along with a little change of direction. I promise. Quite loosely.