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, and for this next one, we start in 2015:
00276
My friend Graham Paul Kendrick has, in the past, organised house gigs with his friend Mark and one of them was an evening supporting Tom Robinson. It was quite weird walking in the house and past him sitting outside. He was wonderful, charming, funny, entertaining, and a great performer. He liked what I did too which was very nice to hear.
The Coo Card was obviously important to me and took aaaaaaaaaagggeeeessssss (ages)! I cut out everything you see there from shiny card and hung it all as you see there from the ceiling and took shots of it and... the photos looked terrible!
So, in Photoshop, I cut out everything you see there from the background, placed them in the right place, took a photo of the bare wall, and photoshopped the threads and shadows and then played with the reflections on some of the letters. Yes, it took a loooong time, but I think it was worth it. Very pleased with it and a great memory of a great evening.
00351
Another Coo Card that took a while was this one, done for V-Dub Island 2017. I think Katie Waygood (more about her in a future blog entry) was hosting the stage this year.
I hand drew the astronaut, traced the head and guitar from photos (it's my guitar) and digitally drew the planet. I'm very very fond of this one, love the look, colours, type, feeling of the guitar floating.
Quite a lot of favourites in 2018 and 2019:
00358 (another work-time endeavour in part)
00360 - took a while as I had to hand move each letter around the lens
00365 - get it?
00382 - cows, cows, cows
00383 - hand-drawn forest, turned out nicely
00388 - placed the leaves, then half of them blew away, then placed them again, then half of them blew away, repeat for about 20 minutes until I finally got a good shot of them behaving
00391 - seemed very popular, this one.
00394 - hand stamped, then Photoshopped, very time-consuming
00397 - my friend Fabia, looking very cool
00408 - tin foil over ice cube tray letters, then Photoshop-composited together, another very time-consuming one
00416 - another very special wedding
00419 - my friend Ellie, also looking very cool
00421 - a wacky looking king
00432 - Becoming Branches Acoustic Showcase night (see what I did there?)
00401
I think I wanted this one to be 00400 but the numbers didn't work out.
This was at Vinilo Record Store in Southampton, a cool but fairly tiny place that I would sometimes frequent in my lunch hours while I was working in Southampton. There were, I think, 3 other artists playing and I was third. Some friends came over from the Isle of Wight to watch which was a surprise and a delight, and the atmosphere was amazing, like the best Ringwood Unplugged nights, everyone was laser-tuned in to what we were doing, which made it intense and intimate but wonderful. I'd like to play there again sometime.
And the card, well, I think it speaks for itself. What I would say is it's very hard to find suitable reference material for some Lego pieces and it's also very hard to draw Lego convincingly and get the angles and the feel right. I was going to put the effect of this being a folded page on there but when I tried it, it felt like it had enough power as an image on its own without adding anything more, so I didn't. There isn't (currently) a Lego torso with the Coosticks logo on.
Until the next time, dear reader x