Grim up North Heath

Category: Heath Way Prints

Online shop I set up to learn about ebusiness and generate income using such creativity as I have. This is where links to the shop on RedBubble can be found and a discussion of the creative process.

  • Smash it up – Casablanca with The Damned!

    Smash it up – Casablanca with The Damned!

    A lot of the designs I make are mashing two disparate things together. Punk and Taskmaster, pop art and Columbo, pop songs and mathematicians.

    Three of my previous mash-up designs.

    What can I mash up next?

    Casablanca (1942) is often in the list of greatest films ever made. In among the intrigue, humour, double-dealing and secrecy, there is Ingrid Bergan. There is a strong case that Bergman in Casablanca is the most beautiful woman to appear on screen. She has a luminous quality in this film, grace and poise and the ability to wear even the most outrageous hat and still look gorgeous.

    Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund. I used the image on the left for this design. The one on the right, where she asks Sam to ‘play it’, is rather soft-focussed and didn’t work as well with the request for a punk song. She looks too happy.

    I had the image of Ilsa with the hat imported into Inkscape, but didn’t really know what to do with it. That was, until I saw a poster for Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks’ 1974 comedy horror.

    This colouring gave me the nudge to ty a three-shade effect on the picture of Ingrid Bergman I’d not known what to do with.

    I’ve done a couple of punk style designs already. One featuring Columbo, the other with Alex Horne of Taskmaster.

    This is a posterised image using three colours. Why not see what happens if I make Ilsa’s mid-tones pink? Why pink? Because the combination of black, yellow and pink is punk.

    Well, adding pink improved the image. Her eyes have some shape, the hat and her hair get some mid tones and also the fabric on the coat appears.

    Original two-tone Ilsa compared with the three tone final version. The pink adds detail that the original misses.

    Caption time

    Now I had to decide what caption to go for. It was clear that Ilsa would ask for a song from the early punk era, since that is the vibe of the design. But what song?

    Ideally I would have gone for a song whose title has the same rhythm as “As Time Goes By” – four syllables, emphasis on the second and fourth. And it had to be reasonably well-known, at least to music fans, and not too obvious otherwise it doesn’t appeal to those in the know. Songs such as New Rose, Teenage Kicks, and Blitzkrieg Bop have the wrong rhythm. Anarchy in the UK, God Save the Queen and London Calling are all well-known.

    In the end, I had a choice of three: Oh Bondage, Up Yours (X-Ray Spex), Too Drunk to Fuck (Dead Kennedys) and Smash It Up (Part 2) (The Damned). The Dead Kennedys would fall foul of RedBubble’s non-rude-things policy1, so it was one of the other two. I tried them both (see below) and plumped for The Damned, since the song name looks good and they’re an excellent band.

    Two different songs to choose from. “Smash it up” is a bit more satisfying, and also not at all rude.

    The font used here is mostly Drunken Hour, a ransom note font. I added a 2 in pink Gagalin (the original 2 wasn’t very clear) and the word ‘up’ is an upside-down ‘dn’ in Special Elite, the typewriter font I make a lot of use of.

    Final design looks best on dark clothing.

    T shirt advert for Instagram, one of a few styles of advert I make for the t shirts etc.
    T shirt
    mug

    The Damned

    The Damned are one of the earliest English punk bands, they released New Rose on the 22nd October 19762. This was the first single released by a UK punk band. Note the adjective – ‘UK’ is important, because American punk acts such as Ramones (Blitzkreig Bop), New York Dolls (Personality Crisis) and Television (Little Johnny Jewel) had released singles earlier. In the case of the New York Dolls, they had released two albums and broken up3 by the time New Rose was released.

    The Damned in their early days.

    The Damned are still going, they have been doing some 50-year concerts recently and even did a gig at Wembley. They have drifted away from punk over the years and are more a rock band with gothic-horror overtones4. But they still play the very old stuff. To do otherwise wouldn’t be sensible.

    Target audience for the design

    I had to explain both parts of the design to our 22-year-old. Neither Casablanca nor The Damned are on their radar5. I always say that the best jokes are the ones you have to explain.

    1. I could have written “F@ck” or something, but I hate that type of self-censoring. Swear if you want, don’t swear if you don’t have to, but don’t allude to rude words. It’s not big and it’s not clever. ↩︎
    2. Link to performance on The Jonathan Ross Show in 2002, when Patricia Morrison was bassist. ↩︎
    3. For the first time. ↩︎
    4. They even appeared on The Young Ones, playing a specially-written song in the horror episode Nasty. ↩︎
    5. Though they do know of Patricia Morrison, since Sisters of Mercy are in their orbit. ↩︎
  • Just one more Minimalist Columbo

    Just one more Minimalist Columbo

    I’ve been exploring Inkscape a bit more recently. On the back of the pop art images I did previously for Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, I found that I can replace a photograph with an unshaded version with a restricted colour palette.

    Columbo and Blender

    I’ve had a lot of fun with the image of Columbo saying ‘one more thing’. There’s a pop art version, and I also made a minimalist version in Inkscape. What I also did with this one is play around in Blender.

    Minimalist Columbo on a mustard background. This colour fits the 70s aesthetic that the show embodies.

    Inkscape’s native file format is .svg (scalable vector graphics). This type of file is scalable (as the name says) which means the image will not be degraded by being enlarged. However, it needs certain types of software to produce images from. For this reason, when I make something in Inkscape I have to export it as a .png file for use in other software.

    Blender, though, has the capacity to import .svg files for use in 3D designs. One of the first things I did in Blender that I blogged about was importing a beer logo and mucking around with the colours and the refractive index of the glass.

    The Columbo file from Inkscape has seven individual pieces – one for each part of Columbo (hair, face, raincoat, hand, shirt, tie and the lines for his hands). These seven object could be coloured and animated as separate objects.

    With animation there’s a huge choice of what paths an object can take, I can scale the object as it moves and change the colour as well. But I wanted this to be a simple animation, in part taking inspiration from TV station idents such as ATV, where the logo would appear. So the parts start off invisible, thin edge to the camera and then turn on various axes to show the hair, face and clothes. The hand is the last thing to come in, from one side as if remonstrating with the criminal.

    Video advert

    I’ve not done one of these for a while. Taking the animation I did for the Columbo Minimalist design, I used CapCut to make a short advert. The advert is bookended with the animation above and the ‘cloth reveal‘ animation I made some time ago.

    Three products are shown – two t-shirts (a ‘lay-flat’ and modelled version), a cushion and a tote bag. The tote bag animation was something I had the idea for and then wished I hadn’t.

    The static image of the tote bag isn’t very exciting, however much I like the Columbo image against the mustard background. So to add a little interest I thought I could use Blender to make a realistic swinging animation. I was right on that, wrong on how easy it was going to be.

    But, I did it after a couple of hours thinking ‘why the hell did I start this?’ It’s a thin cube with the image from RedBubble projected onto it. The cube is given physics and a hole at the top. This is off-screen, where the handles of the bag would go over a peg. There is a cylinder through the hole, around which the bag swings.

    All fairly simple in concept, but I had to do quite a lot of fiddling around with various settings – including how much air drag was involved – to get a nice, slow swing.

    For the final video, I added a background scene to all the images except the pillow. The scene is a postcard from the 1970s of Moscow, Idaho. With a Sears store and a Chevy pick-up, it could only be America and the colour quality spoke of the 1970s.

    T shirt
    cushion
    Tote bag
  • Return to Cabot Cove – murder capital of the world!

    Return to Cabot Cove – murder capital of the world!

    Cabot Cove, Maine, USA, witnessed a murder spree like no other from 1984 to 1996. 64 murders in a population of 3,500 puts it above any place in the USA in terms of murder rate1. But who was really to blame?

    Murder, She Wrote

    I’ve blogged before about Murder, She Wrote, the detective series that starred Angela Lansbury as the successful mystery writer Jessica “JB” Fletcher.

    We like to joke that Jessica is the real killer in all the episodes and manages to frame some poor schmuck who is gaslit into confessing. I made a design that celebrates Murder, She Wrote and uses a snowclone to explain this.

    ‘Cabot Cove is calling’ design.
    Redbubble design
    wordpress shop

    Snowclones

    There is a rhetorical device that you will be familiar with, but may not know the name of: the snowclone. These are sayings where the sentence format is well known enough that the subject can be changed2. For example:

    Orange is the new black

    In space, nobody can see you boogie

    Have spacesuit, will travel

    Horsey McHorseface

    A phrase I’ve seen on a lot of t shirts is a variation on the original “The mountains are calling, and I must go.” This comes from a letter the naturalist and mountaineer John Muir wrote to his sister, Sarah, in 1873. On t shirts, ‘the mountains’ is replaced by Australia, London, Lagos, the ocean, adventure… anywhere, really.

    The design

    This is a simple enough design. It features an image of Angela Lansbury as Jessica, a New England-type scene in the background and the phase ‘Cabot Cove is calling and I must kill’.

    The font choice was the main sticking point. I’ve used Badhorse here, though I used Art Nuvo in the previous Murder She Wrote design. The show itself used Art Gothic, but that’s not available in Canva.

    The ‘Cabot Cove’ t shirt, modelled by the model I think of as Ryan.

    I’ve added a white outline to some of the designs to help it stand out against some backgrounds. As it is, it works well with light backgrounds, but I like a colour on things like mousemats and phone cases, so a white outline and a default sky blue background is what I’ve gone with.

    1. Above anywhere in the world. The Turks and Caicos Islands have a homicide rate of 76 per 100,000 inhabitants. For the twelve years of Jessica’s spree, that figure was 143 per 100,000 in Cabot Cove. ↩︎
    2. According to Wikipedia, they are a phrasal template based on a cliché. They are both memes and clichés. ↩︎
  • Holding Columbo to ransom

    Holding Columbo to ransom

    I’ve been exploring Inkscape a bit more recently. On the back of the pop art images I did previously for Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, I found that I can take an image and posterise it using Inkscape. I’d already done this using Blender, to make a Jason Mantzoukas / Taskmaster design (which I realise I haven’t blogged about) to celebrate his energy in Season Series 19. I wanted to see what Inkscape could do. But what to make?

    Posterised image of Jason Mantzoukas from Taskmaster Series 19.
    How did that get there?

    Ransom note

    Looking around for inspiration, I had a found some Punk aesthetic boards on Pinterest. One, a poster for Blondie from 1976, popped out. This might not be an original image, but the aesthetic and the colouring – vivid yellow on black – are what drew me to it. The ‘ransom note’ style is also seen in the merch of punk and indie bands to give a home-made feel to posters, fanzines and other advertising.

    Inspiration (left) and end result (right) for the ‘Columbo ransom note’ design.

    Columbo’s catchphrase – “just one more thing” – would arrive when he knew he had the killer and had found the weak spot in their story. That, and Columbo whistling This Old Man, were the signs that the clues were there. But had we, the viewer, seen what Columbo had seen?1

    Making the catchphrase into a ransom note makes it rather more sinister than Peter Falk would ever dream of. I had a few options of how to make the letter, the simplest is to use a ransom font such as Hit me, punk! and Fanzine. The drawback is that the letters are regular, so all the ‘a’s will look the same. So I did a slightly more complex route so I could have random shapes around the letters.

    I typed out ‘just one more thing’ in Canva, duplicated it a few times and changed the font for each repeat. There’s a mix of serif and sans-serif, to mimic headlines and banners in newspapers, then downloaded the page of text. Letter spacing is varied a bit, and I also added letters to make it possible to clip a neighbouring letter to add a bit of realism.

    Source text for the ransom note.

    I used an app in Canva called ‘choppy crop’ to roughly cut around an image. I took the page of text and, using choppy crop, cut out letters and small groups of letters to use in the final design.

    Columbo stencil

    To get the image of Columbo himself I used Inkscape. I had a go in Blender, but I fond the Inkscape image slightly better. There is a yellow outline in the Inkscape version (right, below) that sets the image off against the black background.

    Columbo ‘stencil’ done using Blender (left) and Inkscape (right). The Inkscape version took a bit longer to do, but the result is better. If I could have found a way to add a yellow outline around the Blender version, that may have been preferred.

    I’ve used this to make patent images by removing background, but the ‘Trace bitmap’ function can be used to posterise an image. In this, the colours or grey levels (you can chose which) are fitted into bands of similar shades/ colours. You can determine how many shades; to remove a white background on a black printed document you would chose two and delete the white bit. For images of people I used more; in Columbo’s case it was 19. That’s 18 for him plus one to be deleted for the background.

    With 18 layers of varying grey, you have to determine how many shades to keep yield an image that is interesting but also recognisably Peter Falk when it’s rendered as a yellow on black.

    The easy way to do that is to turn all the layers yellow, add a black background and hide the layers from ‘dark’ to ‘light’ until it looks good. In the end you’re left with black areas of shadows, yellow highlights and – if you’ve done it right – a recognisable picture.

    Columbo ransom t-shirt

    Video fun

    One of the more popular types of video on YouTube shows simulations of walls of blocks being smashed. I’ve done a few of these; Mrs S suggested I try to make a video with my designs on a wall that gets smashed down.

    The simulation – done in Blender – collected a few different techniques. To add some realism, I had two walls – one of bricks and one of plaster – both of which get smashed by a ball and also interact with each other. There’s dust and also some grime around the edges of the wall and dust and debris that gets thrown out.

    1. Of course, we knew who the killer was, but how did Columbo catch them? There is a theory that Columbo was actually a hopeless incompetent who only got the killer because a TV crew was there to film the murder. ↩︎
  • How to turn an idea into fake reality?

    How to turn an idea into fake reality?

    I think I’m getting better at doing stuff with Blender. One of the side effects of this is that I can think about Blender’s capabilities and apply them to designs and animations that I can use in the Heath Way Prints shop and as adverts for the shop.

    Turning blocks

    The sketch below is from my notebook1. I did this one evening and set about making it the next day. It took a few hours of a day I’d have otherwise spent doing the crossword2, watching the Tour de France3 or interacting with my family.

    Notes on the construction of the ‘six cubes’ workshop animation.

    I knew I could do the animation. However, some of the ‘how to’ bits needed me to dive back into the University of YouTube. In particular, the use of Drivers to simplify the animation needed a refresh.

    Blender Drivers

    Put simply, a Driver is an object that affect another object in an animation. For this animation, I had two drivers. One driver rotated 90° back and forth. The angle of this controls the position of four of the cubes, just as a real mechanical lever might. The second rotated through 360° throughout the animation. The angle of this driver’s rotation controlled the rotation of all six cubes.

    The video below shows how drivers work.

    Driver demo. I’ve animated the red cube to go up and down. The blue cube turns as the red cube moves, and the colour of the third cube also changes. You can control many different objects from one object. Not sure of the limit, but the six I’m using in the turning cubes design is well inside the capability of Blender.

    The animation of the drivers controls the movement of the cubes. Setting up the drivers makes timing the animation simpler than animating each cube individually.

    Display board images

    If you can decipher my writing, you’ll see that I planned to have one big image with four design adverts on to be displayed. I made the single image with four designs in Canva. The fiddly bit was making sure the faces on the cubes matched the parts of the image that had to show. This took a while to get right, but I plan to use this setup a few times, so it’s worthwhile making the effort.

    Each face of the six cubes is mapped to an area of the image. To set this up I made a grid with numbers and colours to stand in for the final image. I made sure each face that needed one had the right part of the right image in the right orientation, after which I could substitute the image I wanted to use for the advert.

    Calibration grid (left) and the four images that show on the cubes once they are rotated in place.

    Put it all together

    There’s a few extra bits I added to make it look like an item that’s been installed long-term in a workshop environment. Some grime, a bit of background noise and camera shake. Ferrules cover the holes where the rods at the top and bottom of the unit go into the floor and upper display. This is to hide the otherwise odd-looking holes where the rods disappear. It also gave objects for the grime to collect against.

    Future stuff

    Other things to add might be a lever in front or to on side of the cage and a control knob that turns to show which cube is being shown. But that’s for the future.

    1. Yes, that really is my handwriting. You won’t think of anything to say about it that I haven’t heard over the last 50 years. ↩︎
    2. This week’s Private Eye crossword is giving me trouble. ↩︎
    3. I can’t get used to the Channel 5 commentary. Rob Hatch leaning into the pronunciation of French and Spanish names is a big distraction. ↩︎

  • Do you own a fridge?

    I’ve been exploring Inkscape a bit more recently. On the back of the pop art images I did previously for Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, I found that I can replace a photograph with an unshaded version with a restricted colour palette.

    Simple logos

    There are a few names for this style of image, Minimalist Vector Portraiture or Faceless Flat Illustration are two that AI gave me.

    Before and after pictures of John Kearns. in the screen grab he’s asking Greg “Do you own a fridge?” To which Greg replies “I’m not being arrogant. I have three fridges.” This got a ‘woo’ from the audience.

    On the face of it, it’s a simple enough process. You trace over an image to make shapes that you colour in. This is the sort of thing you could also do with paper and scissors, but using a computer means you can change the colours when you like.

    I used a function called ‘Colour Picker’ that’s part of MS PowerToys to get the correct colours. I choose a pixel on an image (in this case the original photo) and the hex code for that area is shown. Then I used that as the colour for whatever I’m making. For areas like John’s face and his hair I selected a representative colour.

    For a design that can go on RedBubble I added a short quote from John Kearns’ time on Taskmaster.

    Taskmaster

    John was on the 14th series of Taskmaster, a show I have written about previously. Of that cast, I knew Dara Ó Briain and Sarah Millican. Fern Brady, John Kearns and Munya Chawawa were unknowns.

    This was one of the best casts in the show’s history; the last three series (19, 20, and 21) have all been top notch. Ó Briain and Millican were the ‘established anchors’ on the panel. This gave the younger, less well known, members the freedom to go their own way. They could do this safe in the knowledge that the others on the panel – and Greg, Little Alex Horne and the crew – would be on hand to provide scaffolding and support for them.

    John in particular seemed to struggle with the show, and with the concept of having fun. At one point, Greg suggested that John ‘processes fun in a different way to the rest of us’. The prize tasks in particular gave him some trouble, until he hit the jackpot with his final prize, a fridge magnet of Jet from Gladiators.

    The exchange leading up to the reveal of the prize started with John asking Greg: “Do you own a fridge?”

    “I’m not being arrogant,” replied Greg. “I have three fridges.” This got a ‘wooo!’ from the audience. It was quickly established that Greg had no magnets on his fridges, maybe he would like a Jet from Galdiators magnet. Greg said he would, and gave John top marks.

    To go with John’s face, the first line from the exchange is included. I opted for the Badhorse font for this. The theme of the series 14 was ‘circus’, this is a suitable font that is also very clear.

    Final design, with Badhorse text, and modelled on one of my tame virtual models.

    The t-shirt is available in the Heath Way Prints shop. You can also get a fridge magnet that asks ‘Do you own a fridge?’ for a fridge-based existential crisis.

    Fridge t shirt
    Fridge magnet

    The new face of Heath Way Prints

    Up until now I’ve used a cartoonised version of an old photo of me as the ‘face’ of Heath Way Prints. I’ve now replaced ‘handsome Dave’, as I called him, with the minimalist version of a recent photo that Mrs S took1.

    Minimalist vector portrait of me, now being used for RedBubble, Facebook and Pintrest.

    For the hair, I used two colours. Since I’m greying at the temples, two grey bands work there. My main colour is dark brown, so that’s what I used for the top of my head.

    RedBubble shop

    1. The main purpose was to update my listing on the background artist agency I’ve been registered with for a year. No work yet, but there’s always hope. ↩︎
  • Columbo – just one more pop art design

    Columbo – just one more pop art design

    Pop art style

    I’ve blogged already about the pop art style Jessica Fletcher design. This time, I’m having a go at some Columbo designs.

    I’ve done a few designs based around Columbo, now. The first were pop art style, using a halftone filter and then colouring in the image as required. These were based on Andy Warhol prints – Shot Marilyns and the Elvis triptych.

    Two of Warhol’s best known works – Elvis and the Shot Marilyns. Also the man himself, after a close encounter with an electric socket.

    The original images for my designs were taken from a Google Image search for pictures of Peter Falk as Columbo. I used two – one full length and the other of him in the classic “Just one more thing” pose.

    Columbo triptych

    I processed the original full length to get the “Three Columbos” using Canva, then Inkscape. In Canva, I removed the background of the Peter Falk full-length, desatured the image (made it black and white) and then applied the “Screen” filter to make it look like an old newspaper. You end up with an image that resembles Warhol’s Elvis.

    Four Columbos, decreasing image quality.
    The journey from the original to the processed halftone image.

    I could have stopped there, I suppose. But I wanted to have an image that had three overlapping Columbos. I could do this in Canva; the ‘screened’ image is only the black dots, so it’s effectively transparent. What I also wanted, to take it a bit further, was to have coloured overlapping Columbos.

    A weakness in Canva is that I can’t find a way to make freeform shapes. I’m sure there is a way, but I’ve not found it. So I took the screened Columbo and exported it to Inkscape.

    The components used to make the Columbo triptych.
    The components used to make the Columbo triptych. The coloured parts have a flat top, this is hidden behind Falk’s hair.

    Once I had the image in Inkscape I could draw around the image and then colour in the outline. This outline was then put back into Canva, copied twice and recoloured to magenta, yellow and cyan. By making the coloured images slightly transparent, I got orange and green in the overlap.

    The black and white and the coloured versions are for sale on the RedBubble shop.

    Full colour
    Black and white

    One more thing

    The second Columbo used the same process as I used for the Jessica Fletcher design. The image was a screengrab from an early episode (I forget which one), just as he’s saying his catchphrase.

    “Just one more thing” aka “Pop art Columbo” from start to finish and also how it looks on t-shirt and mug.
    Pop art t shirt
    Pop art mug
    HWP shop

    Instagram adverts

    As an alternative to the animated adverts I’ve done for Facebook, I’ve made some fancier static adverts. These will go onto Facebook and Instagram, and will also be featured in the Pinterest site I will be launching soon.

    Changing up the adverts that I use on Instagram and Facebook. This is a ‘grid’ style advert, with a model as focus and some mock-ups to go with it.
    This advert uses the artwork as the background. With small adverts – for example, a Facebook ad on a mobile – it can be hard to see any details of the design. Here, the design is blown up and overlaid with a flat t shirt mock-up.

  • More meeples than you can shake a stick at

    More meeples than you can shake a stick at

    Following on from a previous post about meeple and designs featuring these things, I’ve made more meeple-related stuff for my RedBubble shop.

    RedBubble shop

    As well as the da Vinci inspired designs (plain and with text), there’s a multiple meeple and a meeple of meeples.

    What’s a meeple when it’s at home?

    The meeple is an iconic figure within the board gaming community. They are a humanoid (or other-oid) playing piece that originated in the game Carcassone, but they escaped the confines of the game and now appear everywhere that board games appear.

    Wooden meeple. This is what they normally look like, used in many board games as a substitute for more decorative pieces.

    After the da Vinci ‘Vitruvian Meeple‘ design, I made a meeple of meeples and what started as just a load of meeples but ended up with a Parklife-inspired slogan.

    Meeple of Meeples

    A Meeple of Meeples. A simple-looking design that took a bit of thinking through to get right.

    I turned to Blender to make both designs. With the meeple original as a .svg (Scalable vector graphic) I imported this to Blender. After some faffing around, I created a solid meeple, ready for manipulation.

    I used a geometry nodes set-up. The original curve that I imported became the framework for the design. The solid meeple that I made is then distributed around the curve. A bit of jiggery-pokery and the meeple point outwards1. I learned how to randomise colour when I made the wizard’s workshop. I applied this technique to the 42 meeple, and the design was ready.

    The Meeple of meeples, outline of a meeple made of meeples.
    Meeple black outline
    Meeple white outline

    Parklife!

    There are a lot of meeple in the Parklife design. 232, to be exact.

    For a few years in the 90s, Blur’s song Parklife was everywhere. With narration by Phil Daniels, it is an ode to the joys of easy access to a public park and the importance of regular exercise. But not jogging.

    Black outline and white outline versions of the ‘Parklife’ meeple design.

    As a side note, the white outline version of this is the 100th design on the shop. Go me!

    The basic Meeple that I used for the Meeple of Meeples was used again. This time, a function called Array was used to make about 200 Meeples in an offset pattern. The same setup for random colours was the same shader node setup as for the Meeple of Meeples.

    All the meeple black outline
    all the meeple white outline

    We the Meeple

    With the 250th birthday of the USA coming up, what better way to celebrate than with a Meeple flag? Go on, name one better way!

    The Array function was my friend here, again. It’s a 9 x 7 array of Meeples with colours added to make a sort-of stars and stripes pattern.

    This flag isn’t on the Redbubble shop. Redbubble don’t do flags, so I’ve expanded to using Printify as an additional supplier and I’ve set up another shop on the WordPress site. I’ll be adding designs there over the next few weeks.

    We the Meeple flag

    The plan is to keep the RedBubble shop as my main site for designs, with the shop here on Grim Up North Heath for special items such as flags, bandanas and embroidered items.

    And the Village Meeple are also on the shop, but that’s another post.

    1. I will do a video to explain how all this was done. ↩︎

  • Let’s make cartoon noises!

    Let’s make cartoon noises!

    I do struggle to find a consistent theme for the shop. It doesn’t help that my mind rarely settles long enough to think about business plans and that sort of thing. I think everything falls under the heading ‘Stuff I like or that I know other people like’, which is neither useful nor concise.

    Cartoon effects t-shirt.
    Buy the t shirt!

    So this is another in the ‘General’ pile of designs.

    Comic sound effects

    I read a lot of comics when I was a boy, that’s not unusual. I even read one comic when I was a young man (Viz) and dip into it occasionally. One of the visual elements that I loved in comics was the sound effects. I stumbled upon a library of comic sound effects while I was researching this design.

    The original sketch (below) is most of the way there. I need to find a way to convert that into something that I can upload to RedBubble and put onto t-shirts and stuff.

    Original sketch for the cartoon noises design.

    Process

    I redrew the sound effects, using the same rough off-white paper as above. Then I took a photograph of the page, uploaded to my computer and then pondered how best to get the image into a form I could manipulate digitally.

    Inkscape was my first call. I have had a lot of use from this app, it’s great for removing background (for patent images) and has an easy-to-use colouring-in function that I use for pop art-type designs. However, the paper I used is off-white, so it was a challenge to get a crisply defined edge to the lines.

    I used Blender in the end. I added the photo as a background and traced over the lines using the drawing function. The lines are easy to edit and move around, just as well since my lines were a bit wonky. Once I was happy with the lines, there is a “Fill” function that fills the shapes. I did a few different colours for variety.

    I exported the lettering from Blender and then used the images in Canva to do the final composition. The lettering used the font Waterlily. This isn’t the comic book style I was after originally, but seeing this with the sound effects made sense to me.

    Comic letterers use India ink to get the clean, crisp letters that carry the text. There is a font called whizbang which I could have used, if I’d known about it before I finished the design.

    Tiled version

    I’ve recently learned how to make tileable designs. So I took the noises I’d made, copied them, changed the colours a bit and made a tilable alternative to the ‘straight’ design.

    For clothing, you need an all-over print. In RedBubble, the options are the Graphic Tee and the A-line dress.

    Tiled version on an A-line dress and a t shirt. Can you see the join?
    A Line Dress
    Graphic T Shirt

    Making this pattern – and the others I’ve made recently – means I can put the design onto items where the other images (like rubber ducks – see below) wouldn’t look so good. Large items such as shower curtains, scarves and bedspreads, work well with a repeated pattern. Some smaller items – mugs, mouse mats, desk pads – also look good with certain repeated patterns.

    Beach towel with lots of rubber ducks. The ducks are a tiled design, the towel itself is for sale through the Grim Up North Heath shop, since RedBubble don’t do towels.
    Ducky towel
  • Tonight on Murder, She Wrote: the killing continues

    Tonight on Murder, She Wrote: the killing continues

    One of Mrs S’s favourite genre of telly and book is the cosy crime.

    How to define this? Murder happens, but we don’t see any blood. The case is solved by an agreeable character who might be an amiable old lady (Miss Marple, Jessica Fletcher), an avuncular older man (Diagnosis: Murder, Father Brown), a group of middle class chums (The Marlow Murder Club, The Thursday Murder Club) or a quirky detective (Poirot, Columbo, Death in Paradise). What is missing is grittiness, angst and suspense.

    Columbo

    Of all the programmes listed above, Columbo stands out. Columbo is one of the greatest telly programmes ever. Peter Falk brought an impish charm to the title character: a common man prying into the world of the upper classes of San Francisco and always being underestimated.

    Watching Columbo lead the murderer into a false sense of security remains a delight. He has them believing that they are going to get away with it, until Columbo finds that one clue (lack of paint on the floor where an artist was supposed to have been), or the killer gives the game away (realising that his stock of wine has been ruined by a heatwave) and Columbo starts to whistle ‘This Old Man’ and we know he’s got the killer.

    There is the theory that Columbo wasn’t all that as a detective, and only ever caught the killer when there was a TV crew to film the murder. But what kind of sick mind would come up with that theory?

    Murder, She Wrote

    With Murder, She Wrote we get to see a stalwart of Hollywood – Angela Lansbury – act a succession of actors off the screen while solving crimes. Jessica Fletcher starts as a dowdily-dressed widow mooching around the little New England town of Cabot Cove. Later, as her crime-writing career takes off, she glams up and travels widely. We see her in New York, New Orleans, London and, my favourite, Ireland.

    This isn’t the Ireland you’d recognise if you visited. This is Oireland, where de accents are laid on tick as you loike, to be sure, from actors with at least one Irish great grandparent, an’ all an’ all.

    There is a theory that Jessica is not as innocent as she seems. We believe that it is Jessica who commits all the murders (286 over the twelve years of the run) and had Doc Hazlit and Sheriff Tupper cover for her. Maybe she had blackmailed them.

    In some cases the killer wasn’t Jessica, but her oh-so-innocent nephew Grady or his wife, who wasn’t really as wet and irritating as she pretended to be.

    New design!

    After all that, we need a new design for the shop.

    Got away with it again! JB Fletcher gives the thumbs up as she gaslights another innocent into confessing to a murder she herself committed.

    The image is a still from the end of one of the episodes. A big, happy thumbs-up. Not only did she get away with another murder, but she pinned the blame on some other sap. And furthermore, she managed to gaslight this poor soul into confessing. An evil genius, by any measure.

    I used a combination of Canva (processing the image of Jessica to get the half-tone, newspaper effect), Inkscape (colouring in to get the silk screen effect) and Canva again (arranging silk screen images and adding the text). I like the pop-art silkscreen look. The Alex Horne design works with and without text, I think Jessica needs text to set the design off.

    Finished design, and a mock-up of one option from the RedBubble shop.

    This blue t shirt is on the WordPress site (Grim Up North Heath shop) and the design is also on RedBubble, on a variety of items.

    Blue t shirt
    Other designs
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