Most of my work is a mash of all different types of techniques including traditional and digital but this time I wanted to just paint the whole thing. The canvas I used is exactly 12 inches and the inner label canvasses are 6 inches. I feel it is not correct to use metric when describing record covers.

It’s for Mungolian Jetset, it’s called Moon Jocks and Prog Rocks, it’s disco, and it’s coming out on Smalltown Supersound soon.

Inevitable work from someone with chronic long term exposure to lolcats, B3TA, Strongbad, MySpace, Rather Good et al. Here are the printed cards of my new ‘Graphic Interchange Format’ paintings. That’s the .gif file extension for all your geekeroonies… and here’s an emoticon for good measure

Acrylic on canvas – now digital print on card.

…with my work for Mungolian Jetset and Hotrod magazine. www.visuelt.org/vinnere/2010

Visuelt is Norways leading awards for the creative industries and I was very happy to have been recognized here. The jury described the work as “En form – og stilmessig vellykket tolking med en fabulerende og mørk slagside. Dansbare illustrasjoner som vekker nysgjerrighet”.

I have posted the work on this blog before but if you would like to see it big you can visit my Flickr pages.

Translated as ‘For the children’s best, do you dare to think the worst’, is a campaign created by McCann Norway for the children’s welfare charity Stine Sofies stiftelse.

Aimed at raising public awareness of our responsibility to all children and questioning how we often feel we shouldn’t get involved when we see something amiss with a child’s welfare. The site prompts you to take action in a surprising way.
I worked alongside the team at McCann Norway, Paradox films and Christopher Einarsrud and was responsible for the design and interactive direction of the website.

Norwegian language only – www.forbarnasbeste.no/

Here are a few screenshots:

In May I took part in the first Mill Co. group exhibition held at The Russian Club in East London. The theme of the exhibition was community (as befitting a co-operative) so I made a series of paintings to celebrate the crap, cute and wrong images people share on interwebz communities like MySpace – titled the Graphic Interchange Format Paintings after the humble .gif image format.

Lots of great people took part in the show including Patternity, Si Scott, Richard Kelly, Kevin Cummins, Karina Lax, Lisa Stannard, Inventory and loads of other people too. It was a reet boozy doo, collecting the most women from Rochdale in one East London venue ever.

Creative Review were there, and The Ballad Of too, plus Dazed and Confused and various other other happening people popped in to drink the free booze look at the work.
You can buy the work from the show in the shop and all proceeds go to the Mill Co. Foundation – which is set up to help children with health and learning disabilities get involved in making stuff and being creative.

Here’s my work – The Graphic Interchange Format Paintings – acrylic on canvas, none of your digital shit.

I decided to paint a tree on the walls of my apartment – inspired by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and her spotted tree installations and the beautiful wrapping of bare trunks with tiny white lights in the dark of the Scandinavian winter.

Also it serves as a handy perch for my Ed Carpenter designed “pigeon light” which has for the past few years been suspended precariously in the middle of various unsuitable habitats but can now perch safely on the boughs of this painting.

In what teeters between being one of the most self indulgent loads of old crap that has ever gushed from my idiot brain to a masterstoke of highly commercial genre changing childrens writing, I have put pen to paper and started a childrens book.

It’s about my two cats; Chairman Miaow, who is called “The Grand Wizard” in the book and Sooty, who is called “His Very Charming Shadow”. It’s about co-dependence, how one part of someone else makes up the bits you don’t have and vice versa. It’s also about the hidden charms of cats (read people) and how sometimes the people who take the longest to get to know are the people who are really worth getting to know.

It’s also about Britain and the shocking state of the country.

Here is a quick snap of the cover, I will of course be illustrating it myself.

Straight outta Norway! Here’s the design I did for Ost & Kjex (cheese and crackers) and the mighty Mung’s cover of the little purple fellas filthy ditty Dirty Mind.

Released in a limited run of 10″ vinyl which was so limited I don’t even have a copy myself. If you don’t own a copy either you can download it from the information superhighway, put it on your mp3 player of choice and then jerk around your living room while gawping at this on your computer screen. A truly authentic musical experience.

Being from Rochdale co-operation is in my blood, so I joined Mill Community. Set up by Liz Birkbeck and Claire Martin, fellow Rochdalians who have been at large in the world (London & Manchester) being generally entrepreneurial and smart for some time now.

The model is simple – Mill works with the best freelance talent around and brings them together for projects thus keeping everything fresh and particular for whatever is in hand. Doing it this way avoids all the rubbish aspects of a full time employed team sitting around complaining about what they have to work on and getting squeezed into doing stuff not right for them and not right for the client. From my point of view having the high velocity networked powers of Liz and Claire doing the things I suck at means that potentially we are all gonna be happy campers.

Looking forward to future collabs Mill style.

www.millco.co.uk
http://pixeldisco.millco.co.uk/
http://www.creativetimes.co.uk/features/bubble-s-former-md-launches-new-venture

We built Frankenstory earlier this year, it’s an online writing game – you write the first part of a story in 40 words or less and send it on to your friend… the twist is they can only see the last few words you wrote! They write the next part and volley it back to you. End result is a weird and wonderful collaborative story.

So a few months after launch we realized Frankenstory was a hit and we wanted to find a way to showcase some of the stories people were writing. We tried a “Best Stories” list but decided the idea of a “best” or a “worst” story was nonsense, how can one surreal story be better than another? This game is about having fun regardless of how good a writer you are. We ditched the “Best Stories” list and invented the Frankenlab. The Frankenlab is written by the eminent Dr. Emelius Frankenstory, here he dissects the stories which catch his eye and showcases them in the Lab. He gives you advice and inspiration on writing your own story too.

Frankenstory and Frankenlab are bought to you by Mike Stenhouse, Antonio Gould, Nick Lockey and Suzie Webb (that’s me) and are open now for your writing and reading enjoyment.