Trekstock Spanish Ants Tee

Youth cancer charity Trekstock have made a lush t-shirt of my logo design for James Yorkston's Spanish Ants single. I think they made them to sell at the Field Day festival, alongside designs by the likes of Django Django, Animal Collective and Purity Ring, but you can buy one NOW from their site!!!

It was the Scottish Fisheries Museum's annual open day last weekend, so I paged my official photographer, Vicky Brown, and headed over for an impromptu photoshoot. (The amazing life-sized inflatable sea beasties were made by a chap called Andy Peters, you can have a look at his website here.)

The t-shirts come up quite big, size-wise - US sizes, perhaps? I'm wearing the large, which is nicely billowy and voluminous. The colours have come up really great (although I suspect a few new mines may have needed to be sunk to source the rare minerals required to render the lurid colour scheme).

Buy a JY Trekstock t-shirt here, and help young people with cancer whilst looking really really fashionable looking at the same time!!

Spanish Ants in your Dancing Pants

Here's some artwork I did for the digital release of James Yorkston's Spanish Ants EP on Domino. It's an earlier version of what eventually became the t-shirt logo a few posts below. Check out the EP here! As well as the excellent title tune, it includes remixes by The Pictish Trail, OnTheFly and James himself - it's killer material; all bangers, no mash. Disco sausage.

Record Store Day 2013

So, it was once again Record Shop Day and, although I was unable to get to any participating shops to snag that MGMT cassingle, or the Roky Erickson 7", I did manage to grab the above haul from my local vinyl purveyor, The Community Kist. I got a Rhythm & Sound comp, Night Eyes by Eyes (!), and Malcolm McLaren's Madame Butterfly on 7" - nice! 

Every day is Record Store Day at the Kist.

The Kist is a newly opened charity shop in Anstruther, Fife, run by Elizabeth Gordon, with assistance from various other volunteers, raising money for a variety of local causes. I recently designed a logo for them, and would heartily recommend you come and have a look at the shop if you're in the area.

Elizabeth, forced to pose with random objects.

It's genuinely an Aladdin's Cave of wonders, with you as likely to find yourself lost in conversation with Elizabeth as amongst the large selection of books, CDs, clothing and much more. Magic lamps, a cyclops, they probably have those somewhere too, although I suppose that was more a Sinbad thing... answers on a postcard delivered by a miniature Dynamation horse. Or a robot owl.

A big batch of donations being processed!

Check out the Community Kist on Facebook here!

Springtime Wardrobe Alert

I've designed some t-shirts for James Yorkston. They have a cat on them. James is just heading off on a mega-carpet-sale three-piece-suite tour with The Pictish Trail and Seamus Fogarty, so head along to one of these dates if you'd like to snag one (I imagine they'll also be available at Gnomegame).

Here's Seamus here modeling the navy blue version. I should say, Seamus has some new t-shirts of his own as well, which are also pretty good. They have cows on them. And Pictish has some depicting the eastern seaboard of his face (do not feed the gulls). So. There are the main facts as they currently stand. That is all. Good luck with the springtime and any fashion plans you may have for the season.

It Takes Tea

Kettle-keen Edinburgh tune-brewers Randolph's Leap have got into the mug game, and they got me to design it! So, for just £6, plus postage, you can own one of these ceramic beauties, as well as getting an immediate download of an excellent new Leap tune, "News", taken from their forthcoming album!

You can order one now from here, or why not head along to their Edinburgh Queen's Hall megagig this coming Saturday, and pick one up there? The Leap will be joined onstage by Jo Mango and Snowgoose; in such a fancy venue, it promises be a special event indeed!

Here's a close-up pic of the bad-arse rap baboon featured in the headline story (on the mug)..

Wild Things

Just did this poster for a tasty triple-decker sandwich of acts at the Queen's Hall in February. It's a sort of Hitchcock-meets-some-old-blue-and-orange-Pumas design, with inconclusive jaunty beasties. There should be copies of the poster for sale at the gig, you can find all the gig info here..

Wobbly Dog

I've just done a poster for The Pictish Trail's upcoming tour with Eagleowl. Johnny Pictish has been hugely supportive of my vague efforts to draw more pictures this year, and gave me free reign with this design, a tragic lapse in judgement which has led to this heartbreaking image of a wobbly dog, lost, with inconclusive packed lunch, in Volcano Bacon National Park. Let's hope he gets out of there okay, and that this doesn't mark the end of my association with Fence. Anyway, a pleasure to draw something totally free range, so thank you Johnny! Go and check out the tour, it is going everywhere, it's a big bus and you cannot miss it.


Michael Rocket by The Pictish Trail

Eagleowl - Eagleowl vs Woodpigeon (Live in Pittenweem) by RadioMagnetic

Easily Fed

I seem to keep seeing news stories about how we'll all be subsisting on fried jellyfish and Kelloggs cockroach flakes in thirty years time, so it seemed apt to have a cat licking tentatively at an ant on this poster for celebrity vegan James Yorkston's upcoming Edinburgh show with Kathryn Williams. I'm a huge fan of James's music, so it was a total pleasure to put this poster together.

The gig is in support of James's new album, I Was a Cat From a Book, and I think I must have listened to it about twelve or thirteen times in the last week.

On the first couple of listens, I wasn't sure if it sounded quite as cohesive as a collection of songs as some of his previous albums. But I was wrong - it turns out that it is simply that each song is so incredibly good that it demands your complete unswerving attention, like a series of intense but captivating one-to-one conversations with different people in a crowded room, your mind always vaguely conscious of the surrounding social clamour whirling around you, but everyone else nonetheless briefly fading to nonexistence. Some of the songs are so heart-breaking that they can't help but stand out in the room. But it's an all together relaxed gathering, exquisitely coordinated - and the finger food is smashing. And, by the end, everyone is dancing and it's an evening no one is likely to forget.

http://www.dominorecordco.com/uk/albums/09-05-12/i-was-a-cat-from-a-book


Bonkers Border Song video by Blair Young/Forest of Black

Eye O' The Dug

I've designed a logo, and have also been working on a few posters and web bits for a braw new festival that Fence Records are staging in St. Andrews this April - Eye O' The Dug!

The artwork is intended to tie in with the cartographically-inspired artwork for their new Chart Ruse subscription 7" series (David Galletly is designing the sleeves for those, and the first one is a beaut).




The original brief was to produce a logo representing St. Andrews as the dug's eye on a map of Fife, but I've since manhandled the project down a dank tangent of my own making, which basically means that I've gotten to draw some dog-based cyclopean sea monsters. Good times.

You can find all the info about the festival at the Fence site here, or at the official Eye O' The Dug website (currently still in the tweeking stages at the time of writing). All up in the Facebooks here.

More sea beasties still to come!

A Nutcracking Night Out

Better out than in.. especially with a line-up as heavy as that of Kid Canaveral's second all-day Christmas Baubles event, happening at Edinburgh's amazing-sounding Summerhall.

Alas, it has already sold out, but here's a poster I did for the night - a wry seasonal warning, with an unfortunate nutcracker blowing bogus snow chunks. Take it easy on the mince pies kids!




http://www.drinkaware.co.uk/

Hanging on for a Heron

I did this last-minute poster for a James Yorkston/Pictish Trail gig at the Queens Hall in Edinburgh this month. The heron is collaged from pages of Yorkston's highly recommended collection of tour reminscences, It's Lovely To Be Here. The pages cut up real nice.

Originally there was a cowboy Jesus (?) as part of the heron's beak, but it looked better without it. There is a weird painting of a donkey in there somewhere though.

The background elements are all taken from a Facebook gallery chronicling the custom-build of James' new guitar. But it probably just looks like I got some photographs of some chipboard and some scrunched up Quality Street wrappers, I know.

Love Is.. A Warm Record

I recently designed a poster for Fence, paying cheeky homage to Kim Grove's Love Is..
These are being sent to independent record stores which order Fence stock, with each one personalised to the shop in question. Spreading the love!

The photo above is swiped from the Facebook page of Glasgow's Love Music, and the one below is from Fence's Facebook page, showing a magnificent display in Music's Not Dead, a new shop in Bexhill-on-Sea.

If you'd like a closer look at the poster, then please make your way to your nearest quality record shop! Avalanche, Monorail, Norman*, Unknown Pleasures, and One Up should also have them.. and if you're lucky you might manage to pick up one of the Fence Autumn catalogues, featuring a highly desirable nerd-ready checklist of every Fence release to date (which is a lot of releases!).





* Don't really try to visit Norman, it's only in the internet!