It’s been a while since I’ve done any bloggin I know.. My excuse? Well I’m in Amsterdam and computerless in the evenings, I need to get a laptop but don’t want to buy one until they bring out the new MacBooks..

Anyhow, I haven’t been completely idle, I’ve also been working on a wedding invite for my brother who is getting married later this year. Which among other things led to this new t-shirt submission for Threadless, if you’d like them to print it, please head over and vote » Sadly it didn’t make the grade, voting has ended early..

It constantly amazes me how far reaching my blog is, merely hours after asking if anyone had a Kickstarter invite on the blog, Lisa Yao came through with one :) Then a couple of days later the founder & Art Director of Kickstarter Charles Adler, dropped me line saying “DO IT. I absolutely loved your CDT project”.

Well I’ve done it, my project - Film about walking 1800 miles across New Zealand has just launched. We’re trying to raise $5000 and to be honest it feels a bit weird/cheeky raising money for something that I’m clearly going to enjoy doing.. But there is a lot of effort going into what I’m offering as ‘rewards’ i.e. maps & finished DVD, so I’m trying to stay optimistically hopeful that other people will want to get involved.

It isn’t all cash in hand of course, the cost of producing all the rewards and mailing everything out is going to take out a huge chunk. But I’ve got a few fun things in there like drawing peoples names along the way and styling my beard which should be a bit more profitable :)

Ideally I’d like to raise an extra $3500 (you can go over your target) which would pay for a mountain guide to take me to the top of Mt. Cook/Aoraki. It’s definetly beyond what I have the experience to do on my own, but is the highest mountain in New Zealand, has the same name is me and would make a pretty spectacular addition to the film!

You don’t have to back my project, there’s plenty of other great one’s on there. I’m backing IN TRANSIT presents: 16mm, pictured above. A film by Jonathan Dueck, who’s been busy scratching & painting over old 16mm films. Also James Taylor who wants to make an ‘absurd game of logic’ - The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands.

Invites
If anyone wants one? I have five, none left sorry.

eep calm, I’m not going to start ripping off Jessica Hische’s ever expanding and amazing Daily Drop Cap. This ‘K’ was a rejected logo concept which I was quite fond of, so I thought I’d make a one-off drop cap to give the poor fella some purpose in life.

If you’d like to use it, paste this code at the begining of your post (in HTML mode):

<img src=”http://www.made-in-england.org/images/K-cap.png” align=”left” alt=”K”/>

Movember + Twitter & Hashtags = Tachetags! This was the brainchild of a mate at Blast radius, who got me in as the ‘moustache expert’ to make it happen.

Basically the idea is you upload daily photos of your folical folly to twitter (using twitpic, yfrog or img.ly) and add #tachetag in the text. We’ll pull them all into tachetag.com where you and anyone else can see your progress and, if they like the look of your hirsute heroics, add a donation in your name.

There a few more features in the wings, like being able to post images directly on the site, personal pages with all your photos and hopefully an animated gif of it growing.

Well we’re 3 days into Movember, so here’s a summary of possible moustache styles in desktop picture format to inspire all those taking part this year. If this is the first you’ve heard of Movember then you should sign up and help change the face of men’s health.

The illustrations are actually taken from a fun Movember related site I’ve been working on, more details when it goes live… soon!

Here a close up of the Zorro tache:

For the past few years I’ve making these ‘fill out your Vital Stats, hand it over to your partner’ Christmas cheat sheets. My attempt to solve the age old problem of buying clothes for your better half at Christmas time. It’s generally been my most popular post of the year, for the simple reason I suppose, we need them!

So basically you fill out one and give it to your partner (or whoever you’re expecting a present off), or get them to fill out one for you so you don’t blow a surprise by asking for a particular.

Here are the printable forms:

• Download the Girls version here »
• Download the Boys version here »

Surprise surprise each year the girls form is downloaded much than the boys, this is the sort of thing girls just remember, us blokes need a handy reminder I suppose ;)

Just back from our wedding tour of the north, here’s some pictures of the Eleanor & Andy’s wedding cake that me & Nicky made!

What inspired me to ask Eleanor if I could make her cake was the Eugene & Louise bakery art show. I blogged about it a while ago and have been itching for a good excuse to have a go since. Working the Marzipan was a bit harder than I had expected, not quite the same as plasticine.. Definitely didn’t reach E&L’s standards, but I think El was pretty happy with it none the less :)

The best bit was making all the marzipan men for the top. So much fun in fact that ended up with so many that they couldn’t all fit on the cake. We had extra marzipan for all the kids to make their own, took them about 10 minutes to realise it wasn’t plasticine and start eating it!

I think me & Nicky had the most brightly coloured wedding attire at the wedding! Although with everyone else on our row we almost had the whole spectrum.

Had to post a pic of this amazing old bus ticket machine, I was bus conductor on the way to the church and had to stamp the specially made tickets with it.

I’m afraid we were too pissed to take any pics of the cake actually being eaten.. but I’ve got a vague recollection that it tasted extremely good.

For those interested, more wedding pics and cake making pics on my Flickr.

I was doodling last night with the intention of drawing a bear, but I ending up with this horse. Stuck it on my desktop and I must say, it’s the best one I’ve had on there for a while. You can download it for yours here »

See all my Weekly Destops here »

I made a new invoice template today, my Dad told me I should be putting invoice numbers on them.. so it needed updating. Anyhow if you google invoice template you get a load of garbage, thought I’d upload mine, might be of use to someone.

Basically it’s a Photoshop file, which you can download here. All the coloured shapes are just masked off flat colours so it should be pretty simple to change the colour scheme, stick a you’re own logo in etc. All the text is editable, although if you don’t want to change the fonts, you’ll need Knockout, Phaeton & Numbers Indicia.

If I’ve made any massive invoice faux pas, please let me know!

More goodies.

I‘m in the process of editing the video of our Swiss walk. I’ll not bore you with the whole thing, but here’s the intro. We had probably the worst weather I’ve ever had on a walking holiday, but when it wasn’t raining there was a few days of glorious sunshine. The intro reflects these two opposite experiences, starting off with all the bad stuff, then as the song changes, so does the weather and all is good :)

Set ot the beat of - Freedom Rock / Mister Freedom by Serge Gainsbourg.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a new desktop and I’m getting bored of looking at my last one. Who could resist the chance of having a voluptuous lady swimming across their screen all day? Well grab yourself the desktop here »

Me and Nicky were invited by my mate Rob to enter his Pimp my Trunki challenge! If you’re not aware of Rob’s luggage for little people, check ‘em out here. I remembered when Rob was designing the original Trunki at University, his first sketches were all of a furry animals. I always thought at somepoint he’d release a big furry version, but he hasn’t, so I’ve done it for him!

I’ve made it so that it’s basically just a stuffed cover that could be easily slipped on and off (and packed away inside). The material I used (toilet rugs!) was a bit on the think side, had to hand sew everything and it only just about manages to pack away inside itself. Nicky made the little caveman rider, I’m sure all you crafters will want to know how we did the hair - I’m not entirely sure what it is, some sort of hair piece (but ring shaped?) from the big wig shop at the beginning of Ridley Road Market in Dalson.

It’s going to be displayed along with about 10 other custom trunki’s from other designers and artists at this years Bristol Design Festival, 5th-11th June 2009. I’ll be going down on Saturday to check it out.

Update: What I didn’t realise (should of read the brief..) is that the custum Trunki’s are getting auctioned off to raise money for the festival. So if you can’t make it down the auction and would like to own a Cookie & Nicky ridable luggage original, then email penny@magmatic.co.uk with your bid.

Blimey, it’s been over a month since I last wrote a blog post - my excuse? Well I’ve been drawing crabs of course! No that’s a lie, this is the only crab I’ve drawn recently ;) What I’ve mainly been doing is working too hard..

Taking up most of my time is a website I’m designing for Philips, with my new pals at Tribal DDB Amsterdam. I suppose it’s more of a web app than a site, it’s certainly proving to be one of the most complicated beasts I’ve ever worked on. But it’s a good brief and it’s big budget, so unless we totally fuck up, it should pretty amazing :) I don’t think they’ll be too happy if I spilt the beans, so you’ll have to wait until the end of the year to find out what the hell it is.

Also a bit of an ongoing project this year (which I’m back on this week), is a load of illustartions and icons for Skype. Their normal (consumer) stuff was done by the talented French Illustrator Genevieve Gauckler, but they wanted a bit less crazy hands action for the new re-vamped business section. They are rolling stuff out bit by bit, we haven’t quite finished it yet, but it’s coming along.

And finally, the last thing I’m frantically trying to get done in the evenings this week is a series of T-Shirts for my friends at Social Suicide. My T-Shirts are for next summer’s collection, so again you’ll have to wait a bit to get your hands on them. But they’ve just opened a store on Ganton street for this summers collection, as always with them there’s a twist - “The hotter the day, the less you pay” - the temperature in London, in Celsius, at the moment, is the discount you get in percent, at checkout (both in store and online). Well we are supposed to be having a heatwave this summer, so there should be some bargains to be had :)

I found out yesterday that my documentary of the CDT has been selected as an Official Honoree of the 13th Webby Awards. In some ways I’m quite sad about this news, would of liked to got a proper nomination… Mustn’t grumble though, it’s still good news eh :)

And thanks to Nicky for paying the submission for me (birthday present).

Game set and match to Rex by the look of the votes. If you missed it, you can still view the match volley by volley here » I think in the heat of the moment I kind of forgot about the ‘layer’ aspect of the game… The advantage of us both being in the same room was I could see what Rex was drawing and start sketching ideas for my return volley before my 15min had even started. But that kind of led to me just doing a doodle and not re-using any of the layers. Nevermind, it was a great match and we both had fun, especially the post match drinks :)

I was impressed with the speed that Rex could knock out full colour visuals. My usual style is to pencil sketch, scan, then work up vector outlines and then colour last. Not a hope in hell I could get all that done in 15min, so I just stuck to the pencil sketches. Rex though works straight into photoshop with a Wacom tablet, it was quite an eye opener, might have to get one and give it a go.

Thanks again to Anne for her commentry, check out her reflections on the game. And of course thanks to Coudal for inviting us to play :)

Here’s the both of us in action: