A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 3.

Written on 2/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

This post continues documenting my designing of my Coggingtons Christmas Card (click the link to buy from my Etsy store), and follows on  from A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 2.

This is how I left this pic before the weekend. Since then, I have finished it!

After writing the last blog post, I decided that his cuff fur trim was way too narrow so I widened that up and decided I wanted to texture it a bit more. I was at the house of Jicsi's Jewellery and her littl'un has some teddy bears, so I spent 5 minutes photographing bear bums to use as a fur texture. When I got home, I whipped out an old belt for his belt texture too.

The whole pic was well on the way then. A bit of light and shade in the eyes and bits of shading in other things here and there, and adding Geoffrey's other fingers to the tree left me ready to add the frame and lettering.

My stamping is not really up to scratch so I stamped out the message, but knew I'd need to tidy it up in Photoshop. Then it occurred to me that while I'm at it, I might as well do the whole alphabet so that next time I need some lettering, I can just nick it from the master sheet.

I learnt I can't keep my stamping in a straight line.

I borrowed a frame from Jicsi to photograph, and then put it in the illustration and resized and reshaped it. It is a round frame, which I liked because it was reminiscent of a snowflake, but I was aware that to fit the writing into it the frame would need to be widened so that was an unfortunate sacrifice. To simply make it bigger whilst contraining the proportions would have led to the frame dominating the image which I didn't want.

Then I dropped a photograph of some textured paper I took ages ago over the top with an off-white layer set to 'colour' over the top to take the glare off it. Then I masked it to the right shape and size and used the burn tool around the edges for a bit of shade, then dropped my newly neatened up stamping over the top. I had to make the lettering quite narrow to fit it in which isn't ideal.  I had to play around with masks and his top hat for a bit to get them right but it worked.

That left me here. I'd spent a bit deciding whether I wanted his coat a nice bright red, or a little darker. I'd gone with darker at this point but I still wasn't convinced.

I had some pictures of some cog-esque paper snowflakes I'd made years ago so I did experiment with having them as fairly prominent hazy overlays but decided they were better behind the frame, and as small ornaments in the tree

All of my previous Coggington cards have always been done using just flat colours (apart from the glowing eyes) and textures and for this reason, I'd been reluctant to to add more subtle light and shade from the tree lights. This had been a conscious decision and I liked the way my Valentine's Coggington card could look a bit like it had been done with woodblock prints. Although I'd lost a bit of that with my more recent cards, I'd still always just used flat colours for them.
 However, I just couldn't be happy with the shade of his coat so I decided to very simply lighten Geoffrey on the side nearest the tree (50% opacity white layer set to 'overlay'), and darken him on the other side (35% opacity near-black layer set to 'vivid light'). It looked a lot better than I'd thought it would so then I applied an orange-to-transparent gradient to Geoffrey from right to left. I liked these effects so much, I made the light and dark layers more opaque (the dark one is set to 100% 'vivid light') and applied another similar gradient to him.

He looks warm, don'tcha think?

Right at the end, I remembered I wanted goggles on his top hat. I was excited that I could justify these goggles rather than just having them there because steampunk. (Yeah - I know he's a robot who doesn't need eye-protection when flying a steam-powered sleigh! Shh!)
Off I went to the living room to photograph my goggles whilst trying to stop the kitten from savaging them. I transformed the strap to the right place and applied a 'cutout' effect to them, then put a yellow low-opacity colour layer over the top to help blend them and shaded them and tweaked the levels a little.

I'm very happy with the results you see here.

The card is available to buy from this link: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/204426247/steampunk-christmas-card-with-the 

The finished card!

Cheers for reading this far!

-Curt-

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A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 2.

Written on 17/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

This post continues documenting my designing of my Coggingtons Christmas Card (click the link to buy form my Etsy shop), and follows on from A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 1.

I now have a little more work done on this.

My main point of focus today was getting the Christmas tree to look like a tree. I want the lights on it to pop but also for the rest of the tree, which is mainly black in my photo, to not just blend into the background and become a black smoosh of nothingness.

Erasing the bit of curtains etc that was in the background of this picture of the tree was first.

Then I applied a couple of hue/saturation modification layers to the tree and adjusted the levels to highlight the lights, bump up the saturation, and alter the hue slightly.

Then I created a mask of the tree, and put a layer of gold over the top, set to colour blending mode to make it warm and suggest the yellows of the background.

Then I created a custom brush from a photo of a fir tree branch, colour selected the dark areas, and used the brush at low opacity and with varying shades of green to bring some of the shadows to a nice Christmas tree-esque green.

I lens blurred the background a bit and took the brightness down.

I've started shading Geoffrey's coat and applied the same rusted metal texture I usually use on Coggingtons to him.

Lastly, I've applied the old photograph border I created for my Coggingtons card to this, and darkened selected bits of the background.

I've decided I need to photograph a pair of my goggles for his hat (legitimate reason though: He's been flying a sleigh! I'm not just sticking goggles in because steampunk!) and I think I will forgo the Christmas hat, but may make his top hat festively red!

I want to bring elements of the background out a bit more, such as the stockings.

When Geoffrey's a little more fully coloured, I will need to start blending him into the background a little more.

That's been enough for today though. My housemate is back and has wine!

-Curt-

Part 3 is here!

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Sainsbury's Christmas ad just seems crass!

Or click here to view it on YouTube for a higher quality version.

Hi! We're Sainsburys. War can be horrible and scary and brutal as human lives are manipulated and torn apart by the political powers-that-be in the name of justice and liberty. People die violently and families and communities are devastated. But sometimes, people can retain their humanity in the midst of all this and show kindness and compassion beyond the horror they're experiencing. That's the power of the human spirit, no matter the country we're from or the language we speak. It's what makes us human. And it's beautiful.

Now, buy a turkey. Just £9.99 in aisle 5 with double Nectar points available until December 15th. Packs of mince pies - buy one get one free! Sherry - 30% off! Free footballing trench soldier plushie for every spend over £50!
Live Well for Less.

Don't get me wrong - I think this advert is beautiful. It's made beautifully and evokes real emotion. The production values are good for a movie and staggering for a commercial!

It is scarily though-provoking and more effective than more than one war film I've seen with larger budgets and hours of screen time to utilise.

I've read letters from the trenches before now that detail this event. It really happened that the British and German soldiers met between the trenches on The Western Front, exchanged gifts, and had a kickabout at Christmastime. (Not in all areas, mind. It wasn't universal. It just happened in some instances but has been inflated in the retelling to a magical outpouring of ubiquitous human solidarity.)
That this happened at all is both beautiful and devastating. That realisation that a few hours ago, they were trying to take each others' lives, that the person you're playing a game with now is potentially the very same person that put a bullet through your best mate's skull a few hours ago; That in a few more hours, you will be back to horrifically maiming each other and taking each others lives again despite having nothing against each other apart from the fact that a different political power put a gun in your hand, pointed you in opposite directions and said march that way or die must be crushing and so so confusing. It's powerful to see that realisation re-enacted on film, but to have lived it - I can't imagine how much that would mess with your mind.

I'll think about the advert. Maybe I'll come to think that actually this is appropriate, especially given the partnership with The Royal British Legion. Maybe I'll see it less as an advert, and more Sainsbury's simply pinning their colours to the wall. Maybe I'll come to realise that all ads are used to generate an emotional response in the viewer to prime them to spend and that if we draw the line with this ad, we'll have to start declaring other emotive experience No-Man's-Land for marketers.

This may be a knee-jerk initial reaction, but right now it just feels a bit grubby that Sainsbury's are using it, highlighting the gifting element of it, and using the memory of the millions of fallen soldiers to sell more Brussels sprouts and 6 packs of Carling, shore up their bottom line, and widen their profit margins.

At the end of this advert, Jim is back in the trench overwhelmed with the experience that just happened, knowing that tomorrow there's an extremely high chance that both he and Otto and all the men around them will be slaughtered. They won't be sitting round the telly tipsily watching the new Dr. Who in the new "Tu Clothing Collection - only at Sainsbury's" Christmas jumper their nan gave them for Christmas, with all the presents opened from underneath their Sainsbury's bought Christmas tree.

The short film Sainsbury's have made is beautiful. It makes it dangerously easy to forget that war itself isn't at all.

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A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 1.

Written on 14/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

I have started my Steampunk Coggingtons Christmas card tonight. I won't post this blog post until after I have published the card. (Edit: The finished card is now available here)
I don't know if anyone's interested to know how or why I made the decisions I did about this card, but here comes the reasoning.
Concentrate.

I've had a few ideas about the basic idea. On the one hand, I would like to show Geoffrey Coggington as a Santa-type figure. I have ideas about epic steam powered sleighs and I've got a couple of photos of outdoors in Brum from Christmas from years back to use as backdrops for this.
But also, I want to show Geoffrey as a dad figure with his family. But I have yet to cement the idea of who his family is in my own head, let alone anyone else's. I also have some photos of my own living room from last Christmas that I would quite like to get in there with that concept.

I've decided to kind of combine the Geoffrey as Santa idea with the home idea. I hope to produce different Christmas cards that explore all of these ideas at some point - maybe for this Chritsmas, maybe next.

Here's the design as it stands:

It's my living room in the background with the tones tweaked in it to make it warmer than the photo suggested. There's also a separate picture of the Christmas tree which shows it a little better and I have brought that out of the background and enlarged it to the foreground. It's still got a fair bit of its own background surrounding it.
Obviously, I drew Geoffrey in there.
I didn't know what sort of coat I wanted for him. A traditional done up Santa coat like so was my first thought:

This , though,covers up so much of his chest that only his head really shows, and I don't want him to just look like a Santa with an orange head. For the same reason, I don't want him to wear trousers. I need enough of him showing that people unfamiliar with previous Coggington cards understand what he is. However, with a short coat and no trousers and with his waist/hip area exposed, he could just look indecent. (That said, it worked for Donald Duck. I still don't get why he covers his nether regions whenever he loses his top, though. They're ALWAYS exposed!).

So then I thought about a coat more like this one: 

The problem here though, was that with the pose I'd given him, an open long coat like this just draped awkwardly and looked little like a Santa coat.

Having caught a bit of Star Trek: Generations on telly when I'd gotten in earlier today, this popped into my head as I pondered this problem:

After a bit of Googling for historical military jackets, which fitted in with my idea of G. Coggington as the captain and pilot of his sleigh, I found this which justified that style of jacket with my idea in my eyes:

After toying with the idea of him in a top hat, versus him in a Santa hat, versus him in a top hat with a Santa hat on top, I've decided, for now, to forgo the Santa hat and hope the whole scenario conveys his Santa-ness.

That decided, I've laid down the flat colours on Geoff. 

That's enough for tonight.

Bed beckons and work is peering at me from under the cover of tomorrow morning.

Part 2 is here!

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Me and Music.

One of the many jobs I've had, and one of the ones I'm still actively doing is DJing.

I've been doing it a fair while now. Somewhere in the region of 7 or 8 years.
I started at Birmingham's Subculture and Subside when Subside opened and my school friend Rob, who'd DJed at Subculture for a while, asked if I'd be interested.

Since then I've DJed at Subculture in all its incarnations: Dale End Academy, O2 Academy, Vudu, The Ballroom (so... Dale End Academy again) and The Rooftop. I've DJed Scruffy Murphys, HMV Institute, Barracuda Club, Velvet Lounge, The Marrs Barr, The Doghouse tent at Download, and a fair few weddings and other private functions.

I enjoy it! I was a late started when it comes to listening to music. I didn't listen to music until I was 14. I remember my dad randomly giving me tapes he'd got off people at work because he wanted me to listen to something! I remember TFI Friday being one of the first influences on my current tastes. I distinctly remember Aerosmith being on the show and playing "Don't Wanna Miss A Thing" and I loved it. The next schoolday I was in Goodfellas record shop in Kings Heath, buying the CD single I ever bought. I'm still chuffed that my first single purchase was by Aerosmith! I did, then, go through a brief period of listening to some abysmal stuff: The Honeyz, Spice Girls, and The Tamperer amongst others.

Yeah... I own this.

But I also own this!

And this, actually, for the different B-Side

For a while, TFI Friday fed a lot of my music taste, and Goodfellas supplied a lot of my music collection. I remember Stereophonics being on the show and playing "The Bartender and the Thief" and I loved that too. The next schoolday I was in Goodfellas, this time half-humming half-singing the song at them because I couldn't remember the name of it or most of the words. I ended up getting a reputation with the staff. I was "that humming kid". Remember, this was in the days before I had a mobile phone or even an internet connection at home. Shazam didn't exist, and Google was just around the corner.

I can't remember half the stuff that came out of this relationship between me, TFI Friday, and Goodfellas but I know Manic Street Preachers were involved at some point. And The Beautiful South.

The first album I bought was from my schoolmate Jamie, who I used to walk most of the way home with from school. I remember one time, he was catching a bus somewhere and had no bus fare. He pulled the Green Day album "Dookie" out of his bag and said, "I'm bored of this and I need bus fare. You can have it for a couple of quid." I'd heard of Green Day but never heard them and the album had cartoons on the cover so the deal was made. And I loved them. I'm still chuffed that my first album purchase was by Green Day!

Shortly after, I remember being in a rehearsal for a play, and another schoolmate, Jon-Paul, was playing the Metallica album "Garage Inc." in the rehearsal space while we were waiting for something. Up until then, I'd always been a little afraid of metal. I'd always thought it would be screamy and weird, and dark, and demonic but the track "Mercyful Fate", the 11 minute long medley of Mercyful Fate songs blew me away! It would be sometime before I realised that this track was actually a cover, not Metallica's own material, and sometime more before I listened to the lyrics enough to realise that of all the Metallica songs to convince me metal was not all about demons and satan, this Mercyful Fate medley, covering "Evil", "Curse of the Pharaohs", "Satan's Fall", "A Corpse Without a Soul", and Into the Coven" was an ironic one.

Metallica in 1998: Not singing about Satan... unless they were.

Jon shortly after introduced me to this new band, Slipknot, and their debut album and I never really looked back from there.

I still found the whole image amusing back then...

From then, I enjoyed metal. For a while it was almost exclusively rock, punk and metal. It was a little later I started listening to other stuff, just as I was exposed to it and liked it really. But more of that another time...

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The Suicide of Aaron Swartz

I was reading emails from SumOfUs.org, a group set up in response to large corporations increasing power and often immoral decisions. One email was petitioning for Fox News to have an anchor fired after he called Robin Williams a coward for his suicide. Going after one man for an insensitive comment seemed a little out of place against their other campaigns until I saw the comment from the group’s founder, Taren Stinebrickner Kauffman, saying this one was personal because her partner, Aaron Swartz, had committed suicide 20 months to the day prior to Williams.

I’d not heard of him and I was intrigued about this so I searched for him online. This was the first article I read, and while it might paint a biased picture of the man and his idealism (or then again it might not; I never met him), this is terribly sad.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/02/aaron-swartz-hacker-genius-martyr-girlfriend-interview

To me, it feels sad any time I learn that someone felt that life was so unbearable that they had to stop but this has taken on a sort of symbolic poignancy for me. 

The article paints the man as ferociously intelligent, idealistic to a fault, and also determined to utilize both of these qualities in a realistic and meaningful way to make things better. When he fell foul of The System, which he was trying to make fairer for everyone, it stomped on him. Not long after he was dead.

This has just broken my heart a little.