Grim up North Heath

Tag: Heath Way Prints

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Where do orcs go on their holidays?

    Where do orcs go on their holidays?

    I’ve not done much with Steve the orc for a while. I think the Dolly Zoom was the last thing I blogged about. I’ve also done a version of Banksy’s Flower Thrower, but haven’t blogged about it.

    He still needs a proper full-time job. His stint as a stand-up didn’t go well, he made the papers after his misplaced dwarf joke caused mayhem at the Mordor Improv.

    Clipping from the Mordor Express that carried the news about Steve’s misplaced Dwarf joke. A delegation from Khazad-dum had just walked in and they did not appreciate Steve’s offer to buy them “a round of shorts”. Much rioting occurred.

    So now he’s got a job as a model to drum up tourism business by Mordor’s Sea of Núrnen.

    Mordor is so bracing!

    Late draft of the ‘Mordor is so bracing’ image. The only things I changed after this were the position of Steve’s right arm and I added an extra starfish.

    There are a number of inspirations for this picture. The obvious one is John Hassal’s 1908 poster for Skegness. Second, the painting Coalbrookdale by Night (1801) by Philip James de Loutherberg. And, of course, the image of Sauron’s tower Barad dur is inspired by the design used in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

    By ‘bracing’ they mean ‘bloody windy’. The jolly fisherman is so firmly associated with Skegness, that there is now a statue of him in the town.
    Coalbrookdale by Night, Philip James de Loutherbourg; Science Museum; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/coalbrookdale-by-night-179866

    A skipping orc

    The main image is Steve mimicking the jolly fisherman. The process is easier than it might have been, since I spent quite a lot of time building Steve last year and setting up rigging so that I can pose and animate the figure.

    It took a while to get the pose right; the floppy hands and tilted-backwards-in-mid-air pose needed to capture the gay abandon of the original.

    There were a couple of ways I could have done the beach and sea. The easiest would have been to make a copy of the original as a flat plane, maybe make it in Canva and use this image as the background. However, I wanted to get a reflection of Steve’s boot in one of the puddles like in the original. Reflections are simple enough, a smooth metallic surface will do that.

    The beach and sea are one flat plane which I used Texture Paint to colour yellow for the beach and blue for the sea. Putting my artistic hat on, I added some white foam and random deeper blue in the sea. The beach itself includes puddles and footprints. The footprints are a darker shade of the yellow for the sand. The puddles took a bit more thinking.

    My artistic hat. Not shown: my artistic licence.

    What I ended up doing was colouring in the puddle areas black and then using that as a mask to make the beach transparent in those areas. Then I added another plane under the beach and coloured that silver. The end result is that the silver shows through with a bit of shadow, looking like a puddle.

    The beach for this picture was coloured in (left) using a dark yellow for the sand and green-blue for the sea. Surf and dark areas add some extra dimensions to the sea. The black areas on the beach are rendered as transparent using a colour ramp. The silver plane underneath shows through to make puddles. The colour varies a bit between what you paint, what you see in the viewport and what gets rendered.

    Barad dûr

    The Lord of the Rings films present Sauron’s great tower as an impossibly tall stone tower, topped with an all-seeing eye. The One Ring’s magic strengthens the foundations; when Frodo / Gollum destroys the Ring, the tower collapses.

    To model this, I started with a cylinder. As I extended it I altered the width to make it a bit more interesting. At the top I added a cradle for the Eye of Sauron and the Eye itself.

    Building Barad dur. How it looks in the Viewport with an extra little tower to lend scale, some rocks for it to sit on and the Eye of Sauron nested in a special holder. Then, basic colour (mainly black) and an orange glow for the Eye. Finally, how the tower looks with proper rendering, some fog to make it look really far away and surrounded by pollution, and some clouds. Added orange glow, as seen in Coalbrookdale by Night.

    The eye is a sphere, flattened and pulled around (that’s a technical term). Selecting certain parts of the solid mesh allows you to colour in some of the eye as bright orange, the rest is black for the pupil.

    To strengthened the illusion that the tower is very tall and far away I added some clouds. I made these using the rock generator add-on in Blender to make semi-random shapes. Then I shaded these to an off-white and stretched to make clouds.

    Final scene

    The final scene has some added starfish and lettering. I added the letters in Blender, though I could also have used Canva for this. The initials ‘GMR’ stand for ‘Great Mordor Railways’. This is in contrast to the original ‘GNR’, or Great Northern Railways.I have assumed Steve and his family have taken the train to the coast; roads in Mordor can be murder in the holiday season.

    The final picture makes a cameo in one of my ‘wall smash’ videos (see below). It probably works best as a poster, but it’s available as a t-shirt and on other goodies.

    Canvas print
    T shirt
  • 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. ↩︎

  • 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. ↩︎

  • What’s new in the shop?

    What’s new in the shop?

    Recently, I updated the Facebook site and the Wix site. I designed a new banner for the shops to showcase recent designs. What I haven’t done for a while is make a new advert. But I fixed that.

    Previous adverts only had a few designs on them. This time I think I put twelve designs on, because I decided to re-use some of the videos I made a while ago and I have learned a few more tricks in CapCut.

    Heath Way Prints shop

    New banner

    This features four recent designs: One disc golf, the Vitruvian Meeple, “Stupid Euclid, stop pickin’ on me”, and “Sit on a Cake“.

    It’s only now that I’m doing this post that I realise I’ve not blogged about disc golf1. That will have to change2. I also know I’ve not written about the ‘Stupid Euclid’ design; that’s because I only completed it yesterday.

    Stupid Euclid

    The inspiration for this is pretty obvious – there’s a song from 1958 sung by Connie Francis called Stupid Cupid. Cupid and Euclid sort of rhyme. But where does an ancient Greek Philosopher, the father of geometry, come into it?

    I’m not unique in having done maths at school; it’s a compulsory subject. I took it further than most, I studied it for A level. I did OK, but I realised early on that I don’t have a maths brain. For those who do, maths lessons are an exercise in being shown the obvious. For me, I could do calculus and learned how to use the chain rule, differentiation by parts, I got the hang of surds quickly enough. But it was never a natural thing, as it is for my brother3 and oldest child4. It was more like following a recipe than knowing how to cook something.

    So Euclid, the man whose “Elements” is the oldest textbook that is still useful, personifies the trials of maths and gets to be the target for this design (white printing – black printing also available).

    Designs in the video

    Old and new designs – Game over, Outpaced by snails, Caffeine!, Blue neon meeple, “I will not be shushed” and “How did that get there?” sticker.
    Further designs – small disc golf, Quinoa and fist, ‘Sit on a cake’, Thinking about disc golf, Vitruvian Meeple and ‘Stupid Euclid’.

    I’ve blogged about some of these designs, and will write about others that I’ve missed. The Game Over design is one of my favourites; the How did that get there is popular, as is the Sit on a cake – both part of the growing Taskmaster collection.

    Heath Way Prints shop

    1. It’s like ball golf, but you throw frisbees at a basket instead of hitting a ball into a hole with a stick. ↩︎
    2. Although I’ve done a pretty full summary of the sport in the previous footnote. ↩︎
    3. Who’s a maths lecturer. ↩︎
    4. Who is about to start a Masters in Mathematics. ↩︎
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