Hey Coo Kids,
A fairly important part of playing live, for me anyway, is doing a poster for the gig I'm going to play.
I decided quite a while ago (not entirely independently, I'll admit) to start doing gig posters (or 'live notices' as I file them as, or 'Coo Cards' as they are popularly known) and decided to do one for every gig.
I've currently done about 393 of them, so it's been an undertaking!! But it's also been an immense pleasure as it's a creative side I can let out with very minimal worry about pleasing anyone else or worrying what people think.
To explain and do justice to them in 12 images is fairly insane due to how many there are but as the title says, it's a brief history and if you require further investigation you can see all of them, the good, the bad, and the ugly on the Coosticks website's gallery.
So, without further ado, here's a continuation of the history of Coo Cards, this time from 2012 on:
I felt that I started to find my visual mojo in 2012. I did a couple of cards (00126 and 00127) with an image of me on the side of buildings and I was delighted with them. I started to play more with the image of me and what I could do with it, how I could distort it, and came up with a more individual style more often. See also 00159 (check out the 'tashe) 00160, and 00161 which I'm very pleased with!
00139
Visually, this Coo Card was a breakthrough for me. I used a photo of my body, in a suit, which I had used previously for some other Coo-related artwork, probably for the website at the time. Then I took a photo of my eye looking through a fairy light decoration, a material cube with a hole in it, and used some strange alchemy to put the two together. I absolutely love the halftone dots, especially where they bunch up and get denser around the edges of the cube and I love the type and where it's placed. With my slightly more critical eye of today, I feel the Coosticks logo is strangely positioned over the upper body, makes it a bit difficult to read but quirky, so I'm going with this one!
This was at Chaplin's, one of, if not the, best music venue in this area, very bohemian, original music most nights of the week, fantastic place. I vaguely, but not necessarily correctly, remember this as an open mic, and one that I didn't enjoy or feel entirely comfortable at for some reason. Rest assured, I've had many lovely nights there since. This was also part of 'September Sing' as you will see on the card. This was my attempt to play as many nights in September as I could. I managed 22, which I don't think is too shabby at all!!
There were some wild and wacky images in 2014. 00191 is cool, I don't know where the building is but it's obviously near water. 00193 is my son's teddie. 00194 is (I think) somewhere in Winchester but messed with. 00195 is an old postcard. 00202 was a favourite Coo Card for a terrible gig where everyone left the minute I started playing as they had all been there for the previous act, so I played for a guy behind the bar and a dog!! The guy on the door liked it though. 00212 is me with tentacles!!
00238
Of all the cards from 2014 00238 is an image that worked really nicely and was a very special occasion as well. I loved what I managed to do with the shots. I really like the muted CMYK overlaps of colour. They were taken (I think) after I had played so the card would also have been done after. I was visiting someone at Bournemouth Hospital and had been asked to go and play for them in their room. I played for maybe 40 minutes and I know some of the staff were listening and enjoying it from outside the room.
More notable mentions:
00263 - loved the concept.
00268 and 00271 - two of my faves of all time. The Elvis one took a lot of time and Photoshopping and just kept growing into something truly strange and wonderful.
00249/00366
I've never enjoyed working in an office and kind of don't do it anymore, it took 30+ years and a pand3mic to work up the courage to do something about it. But there were good things that came out of it. Like these two Coo Cards as I drew them both in work hours and it was a delight. I eventually got made redundant and perhaps it was partly because they saw me drawing instead of working? Hope so, hahaha!!
I think 00249 is probably a more dynamic image but I have a fondness for 00366 as it took so damn long to draw and then colour digitally. I drew my wife on the far right sitting below the tower and I love the sprawling tree on the left.
This was for Ringwood Unplugged, a totally unplugged acoustic event, hosted by my very good friends, Kez and Elaine. The atmosphere at some of these nights was electrifying (ironically, for an acoustic night) and I miss how special, fragile, beautiful, the atmosphere could sometimes be.