Grim up North Heath

Author: Fraser Steele

  • A Beaker, An Ox and a Massive Yacht!

    A Beaker, An Ox and a Massive Yacht!

    This week in the shop

    I’ve not written much about what I’ve been up to in the shop, so I thought a ‘this week in the shop’ thing would be a good idea.

    In between working part-time (school lab technician), I do at least two days a week working on Heath Way Prints. This is the shop I set up about 18 months ago. I got six new designs up this last week, which is pretty good going for a one-man band.

    How I work

    It’s taken me a long time to figure out how I work best for being creative. The last 30 years have been in labs and offices, and it’s always clear what needs to be done and creativity in science is different that when you’re designing t shirts, mugs and posters. What I’ve found I do is have an idea, work on it, and then finish it. However, there can be massive gaps between the three stages and the ‘work on it’ may also take months.

    Two of this week’s designs represent extremes of this.

    Beaker

    The Beaker idea came to me at about 8 o’clock, I had the basic image by 9:15 (having showered, hung out laundry, done the dishwasher and cleaned the bath) and by 10:30 it was done along with the text.

    Comparison of a final design Beaker and the two images that inspired it. The images are of Joe Pesci with the caption 'Funny How', there's an image of Beaker with a long quote that he never said, and also one of my images, Columbo posterised.
    Final Beaker design (left) and the Pinterest board that inspired it.
    Beaker – funny how? T shirt

    The Beaker design was sparked by the collection of images above. I was interested to see what interested the people who had been saving the pins I’ve been putting on Pinterest. A board called ‘Profound Statements’ by Sheri Granger had my Columbo posterised image along with a photo of Joe Pesci from the film Goodfellas and a photo of Beaker from The Muppets.

    The contrast between the tough Tommy DeVito and the hapless Beaker triggered something, and I thought I’d put the two together. The green line across Beaker’s eyes was happenstance, it appeared as part of the posterisation process and I decided to keep it. Adds menace.

    Getting the collars right was the most time-consuming part. In the film, Henry and his friends wear these weird shirts with collars that stay close down to an extended point. I’ve never seen this style anywhere else; they are known as spearpoint collars, according to Mr Google.

    The text is in Abril Fatface. The glow effect is done by doubling the text and adding a Neon effect to the bottom layer of text. This mimics how the credits in the Goodfellas film glow and seem to bleed into each other.

    Wait (for ages), what?

    By comparison, the Dara O Briain idea has been knocking around since I started the shop. Over a year from idea to starting, then a couple of weeks faffing around with the design before I realised how to get the effect I wanted.

    wait what t shirt

    Dara’s picture is treated using a halftone filter in Photopea, then I used Inkscape to add colour. Then it’s back into Canva for the text and final render.

    The text is in Special Elite (top, which I use a lot for Taskmaster stuff) and Negrita Pro (bottom).

    A Massive Yacht!

    The Massive Yacht took the longest to actually make. I tried a few different version, all based on a still from one of Mitchell & Webb’s funniest sketches.

    The traced-over version looked wrong, that arm isn’t right, even though it’s traced over a real arm. Adding a texture didn’t help. In the end, I used Inkscape to make an outline trace of the image, which gave me a lot of black lines to act as reference points. Then I added white lines to make the checked pattern, using white lines at 50% opacity. This was an easy way of making the overlaps look white, as they do on a real checked jacket.

    Three images of Robert Webb as an eccentric billionaire with the caption 'you may already have won a massive yacht'.
    Progression of the ‘Massive Yacht’ design. The arm looks wrong in the original, so I decided to cover it up for the final design. I also got rid of the facial features for the final design.
    Massive yacht t shirt

    I also got rid of most of the facial features (see middle image), mainly because I could get the mouth to look right if there was a colour behind it.

    The text is in League Spartan (top) and Negrita Pro (bottom). Even with the different colouring, the arm looked wrong, so I ended up covering it with the text.

    Spit Spot!

    This Mary Poppins design is similar to the Ingrid Bergman design I did a couple of months ago.

    Punk posterised images of Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins and Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund. Both use a pink, yellow and lack colour scheme.
    Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins inviting us to ‘spit spot’, whatever that might mean in a punk context. The style is the same as the earlier Ilsa Lund design (right).
    Spit spot t shirt

    The text is in Lacquer font with an Echo effect, which suited the vibe a bit better than a ransom note font. Punks were infamous for spitting back in the early day of the movement, this graffiti style fits that idea.

    The Ox – a musician, at last!

    For my first musician design, I’ve gone for John Entwistle of The Who.

    John Entwistle (1944 – 2002) was the bassist for The Who, joining the band before they were called The Who. He had two nicknames with the band. “Thunderfingers”, because of how loud he played, and “The Ox” because of his remarkable constitution. It’s the second nickname I’ve used here.

    Two images of John Enstwistle, bassist of The Who, above the caption "The Ox". The colours are muted on the right hand image.
    Bright and muted colours for “The Ox” design. I prefer the less bright look on the right, so that’s what is in the shop.
    The ox t shirt

    The design is a cut-out image of John, posterised and made monochrome. The roundel is a traditional mod image, used a lot as a symbol of mod rock. I went for muted tones rather than brighter colours, I liked the look better.

    Quite a lot of my favourite bands emphasise the bass guitar. Iron Maiden, Metallica, Motörhead, Rush, New Model Army – all put the bass up in the mix. For Iron Maiden and Motörhead, the bassists (Steve Harris and Lemmy, respectively) are/ were the leaders of the band, so that’s no surprise.

    The lettering is in Noot, which is quite a fun and chunky font. Chunky like an ox, fun like John Entwistle had a lot of in his 57 years.

    Yes, your telephone

    Series 20 of Taskmaster ranks among the best, up there with UK series 7, 9, 14 and 19 and NZ series 2. I loved seeing this rather angry cast meld into one fist of fury at the inconsistency of Greg’s scoring. They rounded all dressed as pirates for the finale as a protest.

    Leading the fury was Reece Shearsmith. He came to my attention as a member of The League of Gentlemen, a sketch show set in the fictional town of Royston Vasey. I never got on with this programme, not sure why. But I did enjoy Inside No 9, which Reece co-wrote and starred in with Steve Pemberton (who was in Taskmaster Series 17).

    Reece Shearsmith being confused and the design on a t shirt.
    Reece Shearsmith being confused and the design on a t shirt.
    My telephone t shirt

    The design here comes from the first task shown. Reece (who was 55 when the series was filmed) gets very confused at being asked to scan a QR code as part of the task. He is told to get his phone, and responds with a bewildered “My telephone?”

    In the studio, Greg (aged 56) rips the piss out of him for being a muddled, crotchety old man and wonders, “Who in this day and age calls it a telephone?” Greg even calls Reece “Gramps” at one point.

    So anyway, I took a screenshot of his confusion as the basis for the design. I have used the process before, for the Columbo pop art design.

    Once I had removed the background, I added the halftone effect (as I did for Dara) to make it look like a newpaper picture using Photopea. Then I traced over the image in Inkscape to make the background colours. I needed four Reeces for the design, so I changed the colours around so that the background, shirt and coat all rotated colours. I changed the shading of his face between each one as well. This is similar to the shading changes in Andy Warhol’s Shot Marilyns, the inspiration for this design.

    I then arranged each of the four Reeces using Canva and added the text “My telephone?” using Special Elite font.

    Buy the look!

    If you’ve made it this far, you might be wondering where to buy the t-shirts. All the designs are on my RedBubble shop, or click the buttons in the text.

  • I made an orc!

    I made an orc!

    What’s the best online course you’ve ever taken?

    Last year, as part of my efforts to learn Blender, I took Grant Abbitt’s Character Creator course. There’s a fuller story in other blog posts about making a mechanoid and the creation of Steve the orc.

    Stylised mechanical gun, a two-legged machine with pink and yellow colouration.
    A pink and yellow mech standing in a spotlight.

    At the end of the course I had a model of an orc that I could pose and animate. I’ve praised Grant before and I’ll do it again. He’s a methodical tutor, engaging and doesn’t skip bits.

    The course ran to 17 hours, it took me longer than that to finish. But I have Steve the orc, a wannabe stand up comedian, beach model and appeared in a Bansky.

    Beyond the course

    The course gave me a lot of tuition in using Blender and gave me the push to try new things with the software. Modelling the surrounds to the Mordor Improv would have seemed impossible without the insight from the course.

    Orc part way through a comedy routine. He's holding a mike, standing in front of a neon sign saying 'Mordor Improv'.
    “Two hobbits walk into a bar. Must have been a low bar.”

    The bigger project of “Mordor – it’s so Bracing!” scene was also taken from the course and seeing what some other people had done with their orcs.

    ‘Mordor is so bracing’ – Steve on the beach at the Sea of Nurnen. A pastiche of the famous ‘Skegness is so bracing’ poster. ‘GMR’ is ‘Great Mordor Railways

    The Bansky was good fun. The pose and shading were fairly easy, it’s often having the idea and knowing you can make something that is the tricky part.

    Stencil image of an orc letting go of a red heart-shaped balloon. Similar to Banksy's Girl with Balloon.
    Orc with Balloon. Final image of Steve with his balloon.

    Grant has a lot of videos on YouTube as well. He’s a great teacher, so if you want to learn Blender or game development, he’s your man.

  • Bill Bailey

    Bill Bailey

    Which celebrity would you love to meet, and what would you talk about?

    Bill Bailey is the comedian I’ve seen more often than any other. Five times over 35 years. I’d love to meet him in person and spend some time just chatting.

    Other comedians that I like are dead (Victoria Wood, Eric Morecambe) or I don’t know I’d get on with (John Cleese). But Bill always seems modest, engaged, engaging and funny.

    I don’t think I’d try to impress him, as I might try to do with Michael Palin or Stewart Lee. Just chat about music, comedy, cider and life.

    No musicians on the list

    Many musicians I like, but I don’t know what I’d have in common with them. It’s an odd thing, but when I see lists of music that artists I like listen to, I’m never very impressed with them. Maybe there’s a musician I can’t stand who has taste that exactly aligns with mine.

  • I’m a doctor, not a poet!

    I’m a doctor, not a poet!

    Today’s Limerick challenge was to rhyme the word ‘disease’.

    I was going nowhere with this for ages. There are plenty of rhymes available, but how to make it interesting?

    Initially I tried to work in words to do with living by water for some reason. I worked on the idea that living by the sea or a river would be healthy. That went nowhere.

    Later – after writing another blog about weird films, going shopping, doing a bit of design work, cooking dinner (Thai green curry) and watching an episode of Taskmaster NZ, I mentioned the trouble I was having to Mrs S. Among the words she suggested was ‘Socrates’ (from the film Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) and I thought “hang on – who’s the Greek guy that the Hippocratic oath is named after?” Took me a while to remember.

    So-crates, the old Greek philosopher dude, benefits from 20th century wisdom.

    Hippocrates, that’s the bloke!

    Younger daughter helpfully added that Hippocrates used to drink wee. Not for leisure purposes, but to detect diabetes.

    If I could make Hippocrates fit into the meter of the limerick, I was most of the way there. And then jam as many rhymes into the last line as possible (see the ‘absurd’ limerick for my previous go at this).

    The middle section was the last part to be written, which isn’t how I usually go. I’d tried ‘before you say ‘wick’/ they’ll make you less sick’ which wasn’t satisfying English, and ‘wick’ as a synonym for ‘fast’ is quite specific Lancashire dialect.

    Other names for doctors passed through my mind. I thought about ‘bone-setter’, to rhyme with ‘get better’, then hit on the most famous sci-fi doctor, Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy. His nickname is short for ‘saw-bones’, a Victorian epithet for surgeon.

    It’s worse than that, it’s a limerick, Jim!

    Why do you go to a doctor? Because you’re ill and need to moan to someone. And with that, the short lines were done. 

    Got lurgy, a cough or a sneeze?   
    See a modern-day Hippocrates   
    A decent saw-bones   
    Will attend to your moans   
    Then squeeze fees to ease your disease

    The idea of a doctor demanding a fee is a bit old-fashioned, at least in the UK. Even if you go private it’s a matter that the insurance company sorts out.

  • What, like salad with no dressing?

    What, like salad with no dressing?

    What’s the weirdest movie you’ve ever watched?

    Naked Lunch is a weird film (by David Cronenburg) based on a weird book (by William Burroughs). The title has nothing to do with a salad without dressing; it’s a misreading by Alan Ginsburg (who helped the drug-addled Burroughs collate his writings) of ‘nakedlust’.

    I didn’t finish the book when I tried to read it in 1990-ish; I gave up where they were breaking the spines of young boys they were having sex with. If that makes me sound like a squeamish prude, then so be it. I just thought “I’m not enjoying this, I’ll go and read some Terry Pratchett.”

    Peter Weller, who I knew from Robocop, plays the main character. I don’t remember much about it, but there were a lot of giant insects and his giant ant typewriter talks to him. It just seemed weird for weird’s sake. If you want to see a film with Peter Weller in, then Robocop is a much better bet. It’s a funny satire on 1980s big business with a massive robot and lots of explosions.

    I watched the film with a couple of friends when we were at University. Our reaction was very much like Krusty the Clown’s reaction to seeing the Czech animation ‘Worker and Parasite’.

    Krusty the Clown saying 'what the hell was that?'
    Krusty’s reaction to the bizarre cartoon ‘Worker and Parasite’. I had much the same reaction to ‘Naked Lunch’, but I’d not seen The Simpsons then.

    This being 1991 in the UK, I hadn’t yet seen The Simpsons; I had another six or seven years for that delight, when I saw the season 8 episode Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious.

    Terry Gilliam’s weird world

    Many of Terry Gilliam’s films are weird in places. Brazil was Mrs S’s suggestion. The setting for this dystopian satire is an odd retrofuturism. Ducts are a primary architectural feature, lots of dinge and mountains of bureaucracy. The main character Sam (played by Jonathan Pryce) is a fantasist. The story itself isn’t that outlandish, based on a case of mistaken identity, infatuation and plumbing. It has Michael Palin and Robert de Nero, both playing against type, and is worth a watch.

    Some of Gilliam’s other films are more fantastical. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a series of tall tales, based on the collected tall tales attributed to an 18th century German nobleman, Hieronymus von Münchausen (1720 – 1797).

    Time Bandits (1981) is one of my favourite films. It’s a fantasy romp, with time-travelling bandits who accidentally kidnap a young boy, Kevin, and travel trough time and space stealing (and losing) vast fortunes along the way.

    He was also responsible for the art direction in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (another favourite), and for the ‘what the fuck?’ part of the film where Brian is kidnapped by space aliens. Apparently, they couldn’t think of another way for Brian to get down from the tower.

    Back to The Simpsons

    The Simpsons could also be a bit weird at times. The weirdest thing the ever did was probably the 30 second cartoon Worker and Parasite.

    The style is based on the Zagreb Film Studios 1961 short Surogat, winner of the 1961 Oscar for Best Cartoon. The film is weird enough, funny in places and has some good use of cartoon physics. But not as deliberately alienating as some of their other work.

  • Casserole Dance – the movie!

    Casserole Dance – the movie!

    Following up on the design of the ‘Absolute Casserole‘ Taskmaster design, I made a short video of Mike Wozniak doing the Casserole Dance.

    Process

    I made the video using in CapCut. I reused the cut-outs I had made for the original design. The banjo tune I found on Freesound forms the music and sounds a bit like a balalaika. In the first episode, Mike played a balalaika with one hand. Also, for the first prize task – bring in something you can carry, but only just – Mike brought in ‘a tune’, and gave us the immortal animals song.

    The casserole dance itself is made using the two extremes of the pose. In time with the music, they are alternated and moved around a bit. The background is the interior of Roman Abramovich’s private plane.

    The final seconds, where the four images appear and move and are then transformed to the final design involved a bit of trial and error. Getting the parts to match where they should be took a bit of time. Then a cut-out mock-up model in the shirt appears and the music plays us out.

    White t shirt
    Black t shirt
  • Tanks for the inspiration

    Tanks for the inspiration

    Following up on the limerick challenge about the word ‘tanka‘, and how it took three goes to persuade autocorrect that that was the word I wanted, I thought about a limerick on tanks.

    Last weekend the work was ‘tatanka’ – an Iroquois word for bison. I couldn’t think of any new rhymes for this word, except ‘Jovanka’, the surname of one of Doctor Who’s companion1. Maybe the Doctor and Jovanka meeting a tatanka in Sri Lanka… nah.

    Inspiration – tanks a lot!

    Mrs S asked me what sort of tank I was going to write about, she suggested ‘tank top’. After a wee bit of thought, I said ‘all of them’.

    Well, not all of them. There are a lot of tanks and there are only so many syllables you can fit in a limerick. Though a limerick that just names tanks and nothing else… no, that’s too daft.

    Middle section

    I often find that getting the middle section (the couplet of lines three and four) helps suggest the tone of the limerick. I’m not sure that ‘tone’ is the right word. But, whatever. Younger child gave me a couplet a while ago for a limerick about the 1970s. I need to do something with it.

    Sofas in plastic
    And food set in aspic

    If not a limerick, maybe a new version of A Few of my Favourite Things2.

    The idea that food in aspic was a staple of 1970s cuisine is very much from the Columbo episode Murder Under Glass. While she’s not a particular fan of Columbo, these episodes are on often enough that she is very familiar with this programme.

    For the ‘tanks’ limerick, the question ‘which one?’ could be answered with ‘military tanks’. Or, in limerick terms, ‘the type with a gun’.

    A list of tank types that fitted the rhythm for the final line would round off the piece. The list (below) are the ones I could think of. I’m sure there are more.

    Water, septic, rocket, fuel, Tank Girl, think tank, tank top, fish, oil

    Nine of them. Not so many, but I could get a last line out of a list. The question then was – what’s the last word, and what’s the rhyme going to be? Of those words, the one that fits best to the end of a list is ‘fish’.

    A fish tank. One of many types of tanks.
    A fish tank. There are many types of tanks, and this is certainly one of them.

    Time to finish this

    So on to the first two lines. I’ve done poems about love already – the pentastichophobe limerick, for example. Now, Mrs S isn’t a fan of poetry and I’ve never written her love poems3. Would she like me to start, now that we’re both over 40 (hem, hem)? No. She would dismiss the thought with a ‘pish and tish’, channelling the high-minded lady of the manor she was born to be. She wants a poem about tanks – this was her idea, after all.

    "A love poem?" she said. "Pish and tish!
"A verse about tanks is my wish!"
"But tell me, which one?
"The type with a gun,
"Think, septic, top, water or fish?"

    I think that fits the brief.

    1. Tegan Jovanka, an Australian flight attendant, played by an actual Australian, Janet Fielding. She stayed in the role for four years, bridging the Tom Baker – Peter Davison eras. ↩︎
    2. A bike like a Chopper/ An orange Space Hopper… ↩︎
    3. I’m squirming at the thought of her having lovey-wovey poems I wrote in my 20s. Sheesh! ↩︎

  • Limerick about poetry, poem about a cad

    Limerick about poetry, poem about a cad

    Today’s Reddit limerick challenge had me dashing to the dictionary again. The challenging word to rhyme was tanka.

    I’m not the only one unfamiliar with this word. It took three goes before the auto-correct would accept that I wasn’t trying to type ‘tanks’. The tanka is a Japanese verse form, five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. So another form that would repel a pentastichophobe.

    I don’t know how much poetry has been written about tanks, armoured, fish or water.

    With its strictly defined syllable structure, the tanka has a similarity with the limerick; though because the limerick is a comic verse form you’re allowed to muck around with this.

    Let’s get this limerick writ

    My first thought was that it may be possible to write lines that could be rearranged to change the meaning of the poem depending on whether it was presented as a limerick or tanka. Brian Bilston did this in his poem Refugees, which reads differently depending on which direction you read it in.

    I didn’t think too long about it before I realised it would be quite a very tricky thing to do and I wasn’t up for that challenge right now. Or maybe ever.

    So, to write a limerick with tanka as a rhyme and have someone from somewhere in Japan as a subject. I couldn’t think of any places in Japan that rhyme with ‘tanka’, so maybe put that into the third and fourth lines. ‘Thank her’ was a placeholder rhyme that made it into the final version.

    The city of Sapporo on Hokkaido – Japan’s northernmost island – is rich with rhyming words; ‘borrow’ came to mind quickly and the idea of stealing someone’s work came from that to the final form. Some mucking around with the exact words to get a better flow and avoid repeating words gave me the final limerick:

    There was a young girl from Sapporo  
    A poet whose genius I’d borrow  
    She’d write me a tanka  
    I’d fulsomely thank her  
    Then publish as mine on the morrow

    The write of reply

    Now, how would you feel in the place of the girl from Sapporo? You’d poured your heart into these poems only to find that the cad was passing your work off as his own. You’d do what every right thinking person would do: write a poem about it.

    In Sapporo style  
    I would write my love tanka  
    So earnest his thanks!  

    My heart broke when I found his  
    Longstanding plagiarism

    I’ve no idea if there’s a particular Sapporo style to tanka.

  • Do you gavotte a lot on a yacht?

    Do you gavotte a lot on a yacht?

    We normally have the radio on in the morning, Radio 2 exclusively. A feature that Gary Davies1 runs is the Radio 2 Jukebox – listeners suggest three songs on a theme. Today the theme was ‘Clouds’2. Mrs S suggested ‘You’re So Vain’ by Carly Simon for the line ‘there were clouds in your coffee’.

    Clouds in my coffee by Beth Ferris

    I said to her the line was ‘there were grounds in your coffee’. During a dance routine by the Top of the Pops dancers, they mimed grinding coffee before sipping from cups. This is why I thought the line was ‘grounds in your coffee’, but I looked it up to check.

    I was wrong, and told Mrs S as much.

    What surprised us both, though, was the last line of the first verse. We both thought it was ‘You had one eye in the mirror/ As you watched yourself go by.’ It’s actually ‘As you watched yourself gavotte.’

    So, apart from the fact that gavotte rhymes with yacht and apricot, what the hell is gavotting, and why was this man doing it at a party in 1972?

    What’s a gavotte?

    We both knew that a gavotte was a dance that was popular in the late 19th century. This knowledge came from the 1990 book Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. One of the main characters, the angel Aziraphale, learns to gavotte at a discreet gentleman’s club in the late 1880s. He was rather put out when it fell out of fashion.

    Lucky for us, there is a wonderful scene in the the television series based on the book. This is intended to answer the philosophical question ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ The answer in “one, provided it’s a gavotte’. (Apologies for the quality of the video).

    Is there a lot about the gavotte?

    In You’re So Vain, gavotte is used to mean ‘walk around pretentiously‘, rather than all the people at the party doing an old-fashioned French folk dance. In the interview linked above, Simon squashed the idea that they might have been performing such a dance at her sister’s apartment.

    You can use Google Ngrams to see how often a word has been used over the last 200 years. The graph below compares the frequency of ‘gavotte’, ‘waltz’ and ‘disco’ in books published from 1800 – 2022.

    So, even at its most popular, gavotte didn’t make it into very much literature compared with the waltz. The big spike for “disco” in 1980 isn’t a surprise. Why it was a thing in the early 19th century is down to many dictionaries writing words such as “Disconsolate” as “Disco’nsolate”, which confuses the search engine.

    The gavotte featured in Gilbert & Sullivan’s 1889 operetta The Gondoliers. This is the only work of theirs I have seen live3. There aren’t any well-known songs from this piece, though the patter song In Enterprise of Martial Kind is a challenge to sing and was likely very satirical at the time.

    There is also a Chas & Dave number called Give It Gavotte on their album Job Lot. It was the B side to 1982’s Margate, and a departure from the Rockney style they were best known for.

    1. He’s sitting in for Sarah Cox. A steady pair of hands, is Gary. ↩︎
    2. The three selected were Get Off Of My Cloud (Rolling Stones), Little Fluffy Clouds (The Orb) and Cloudbusting (Kate Bush). ↩︎
    3. I had the chance to see The Mikado in 1979 when we were on holiday in London. I was nine and had no idea what this thing was about. So I spent the evening with my dad and little sister while mum took my older siblings. ↩︎
  • We always hang in a casserole dance

    We always hang in a casserole dance

    Once again, I’ve turned to Taskmaster to provide inspiration for a new design for the Heath Way Prints shop. It’s the turn of Mike Wozniak, again. Previously I’d made a pop art-ish picture of him looking his toughest. This time, he’s got to dance.

    White t shirt
    Black t shirt

    Going where mistakes lead you

    I started with a different design in mind. Mike Wozniak is one of the most quotable contestants on Taskmaster. I’ve seen a few designs on RedBubble that are collections of his quotes and nothing more. I wanted to go a bit further.

    I’ve made double exposure images already, such as this one of Michael Sheen. Initially I tried to add text over a double exposure of Mike doing his solo ‘Fart’ task1. But it didn’t look good, the text was too dim and the image behind wasn’t clear.

    Double exposure of Michael Sheen. The profile has been mucked around with, then a glow added behind the foreground image.

    While preparing the screenshot to act as one of the images, I saw that when Mike was trying to fart he was dancing. Why not collect some of these and make a dance montage?

    I took four screenshots, three with Mike at one or other extreme of the dance, and one where he actually farted. Using Canva, I deleted the backgrounds, added a duochrome filter, and arranged them in the order I wanted.

    I saved the collage of black-and-white dancing Mikes and opened it in Inkscape. Here, I traced around the shirts of the four Wozniaks and gave them different colours. The final one is blue, which is the original colour of his shirt. Pink, yellow and green seemed to be suitable choices for the other three. It also gives a bit of a Beatles ‘Sgt Peppers’ vibe.

    For the final design it was back to Canva. I had downloaded the colours as a single image, and also the monochrome version of the dancers. This made it easier to match up the colours and monochrome versions since I knew they were the same size and in the same position on the page. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

    The three parts of the final design. Colour for the shirts, black and white Mikes and some text.

    Matching up the images, I placed the colour version on top and decreased the opacity until the colours were obvious and and folds of the shirts showed through. I’d used more intense colours in Inkscape than I was aiming for in the final design, because I had planned to use semi-transparent image.

    Final design

    Then, some text for the final design. The title of the episode where this task was shown was “Absolute casserole”. They always use quotes for episode titles; this was Mike’s description of his bum after the fart. So what better text to use? The font was Special Elite, a typewriter font I’ve used a lot, especially with Taskmaster related images. And a black background hides the cut-off of Mike’s legs.

    Extra points for making a design that has a lot of black show up on dark clothing. Re-uploading the design to Canva I added a think white outline, which does the job.

    The final design on white t-shirts.

    We always hang in a casserole dance

    I’d dubbed the design ‘Casserole Dance’ and regretted it throughout the design process. This was because Neneh Cherry’s 1988 song ‘Buffalo Stance’ started going through my head and wouldn’t shift. Not that I dislike that song, but a few hours of it gets a bit wearing.

    1. His task was : “Fart. Fartest wins.” He was the only contestant to do this. ↩︎
    Michael Sheen double exposure. I did this to see how it was done, rather than for any particular design.

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