Snowtrees: A collaboration with Dr. Ed Garland

Our friend and long-term Inkymole collaborator Ed Garland is finally on Instagram, after moving away years ago and becoming Dr. Ed. This is good news.

After meeting up with him for a weekend recently, I’ve been thinking of all the projects we worked on together. Obviously I hope there will be more now that his gruelling study schedule has eased off, but I wanted to share a few as they emerged at a time when social media was still new, and were therefore only seen by the people who received a copy, attended an exhibition, or were part of the project.

This is Snowtrees. We had just put up a big installation called ‘The Witches’ in the repurposed church building of our regular clients TBWA\Manchester, for which Ed had written the words, and we were in the van on the M6 driving home, knackered and full of chips. I checked my email. It was mid-October and, thinking ahead, I’d asked Ed to write a piece for our annual Christmas mailing, which would take a different form every year. I would illustrate whatever he wrote. His story was in, and I read it; crying, because it was so beautiful and it was exactly what I’d hoped for. Even a little more than that, in fact.

I made a black and white ink illustration to go with it, indulging my longing for eerie stories to illustrate and my love of all things creepy and atmospheric. (Whenever the opportunity arose for some personal or promotional work, this is often the direction it would take). We had a 1000 copies printed to A3 in navy blue ink, foldable to A6 (sorry Kelly, who did all the folding). They were addressed individually and sealed with a tiny label, and it stood like a Christmas card with a snowflake-tree on one side, inspired by a duotone 1950s fold-out birthday card we’d had on the studio wall for years.

And there it was. Ed will probably do the thing people often do when confronted with old work — shrugging off my praise, pointing out all the things that are ‘wrong’ with it, maybe even cringing a little— but I love this piece of writing, and more importantly, I love the creative response it triggered in me. Although I too can see things I would do differently now, I love the outcome.

I woke up under the Snowtrees in a cradle of roots. The branches dripped sunlit water around my head. I’d been told about this forest. “It attracts the wrong crowd”, I’d heard. I wasn’t convinced. I could hear wolves treading icy crackles somewhere almost close, and cold crept in where my coat didn’t meet my trousers. But I didn’t want to move. I was happy looking straight ahead at the branches tickling the sharp blue morning. Snowtrees had perfect fractal features at this time of year, and there wasn’t long to wait before they expired. Today or tomorrow they’d come apart all at once, in whispering white-gold explosions. 

One tree becomes a thousand pale fragments, making a soft, deep cover for the ground. The whole forest bursts into a shimmering blizzard and then a freezing flatness. People witnessing this feel a release, as with fireworks and demolitions, and great distance is travelled to be within it.  I was, by some forgotten accident, in a prime position, if only it would happen before I got too cold. Sniffing and howling from the wolves now, and I thought about the tension my absence might be causing at home. They weren’t expecting me at any particular time, and the sun seemed to say I wasn’t worryingly late, yet. I could hear others arriving to watch. 

“Any minute now, someday soon” we said, and wondered why anyone wouldn’t want to be here.

†

The Inkvent Calendar

My latest project, released this week and already sold out at the time of writing, is this first-of-its-kind Inkvent Calendar - for pen and ink nerds like me!

This calendar has not 24 but 25, brand new shimmer, sheen and plain inks specially created for the calendar. The colours are beautiful, and VERY Christmassy, but the names are exquisite: Ho Ho Ho, Purple Bow, Midnight Hour, Polar Glow, Fire Embers, Winter Miracle, Gold Star, Gingerbread, Triple Chocolate...so much fun must have been had coming up with those!

The calendar has been two years in the making and was the brainchild of Diamine Inks, who I've worked with for many years (more on that later!) Director Christine and her nephew Phil are an inkredible (*drum roll*) couple, having taken on a company established in 1864 and taking it to the modern, mega-successful company it is today. Having designed all of their packaging since 2014, when Phil The Ink Wizard asked me to work with him on this project, I was ecstatic, even though my first thought was 'why didn't *I* think of that!'

Intended for fans of ink and fountain pens, artists and collectors the world over, the calendar was a massive investment and risky project to undertake: would it sell? who would buy it? would there be enough demand? will the inevitable price point put people off? Regardless, Phil and I ploughed on, putting all our faith in the mad ink love of scribblers and artists worldwide.

The artwork was created in ink on cartridge paper, after first being sketched out in pencil around the busy template that the manufacturers had worked out. This was a deep box, to accommodate the tiny but girthy glass bottles of ink - and the Special Thing underneath number 25. Unusually, Phil had taken the decision to introduce a 25th window, so that there was something special to open on Christmas Day. Another first!

There were a number of technical problems that needed solving both in terms of the preparation of the art (which needed to go from organic ink-on-paper to colour-separated vector-ready for a RIP machine) and the placement of numbers over windows. Not as easy as it sounds, each number had to be large enough and clear enough while being different from the last, and not every one could sit exactly over its window - or that would have looked too symmetrical and regimented.

The manufacture of the 225 brand new colours of ink in their specially-made bottles was another challenge, particular for an already-manically busy little company. Diamine are a robustly hands-on team, and the sheer scale of the man hours required to make this, the first batch of calendars, was not to be underestimated. Initially planned for 2018, the postponement until 2019 bought us time to review and tweak the artwork, refine the copy on the back and really get it into perfect shape.

And then: it was launched. We needn't have worried. Launched just 4 days ago at the time of writing it's already sold out, with shops requesting more stock to fill demand. If you've ordered one and not had it yet, they're planned for despatch mid-November.

Watch the film of me looking around the finished product and revealing SOME of the content!


Here are some places you can get one in the UK, there's still stock in the US here and here.

Large and colourful thanks go to Phil and Christine at Diamine for inviting me into their colourful world, and the opportunity to be involved in so many of their projects. Here's to the next ones!

Mole Loves Christmas - a 2xC90 tape marathon!

The last monthly Molemix of 2018 is not a mix actually, but a three and a half hour (or two-tape) Christmas sesh with a heavy emphasis on the non-traditional...though there's a bit of that in there - of course there is! 

I've been doing monthly mixes since July (though they're really just collections - despite having run a radio station or two and owning 6000 records, a pair of decks and a mixer for the last 20 years neither of can actually 'mix') but this one is the one I was looking forward to the most. Despite not 'mixing' the chunes, it's quite a job to source and assemble them in an order that makes sense and create a journey - especially when, on this occasion, there are so many to choose from. And to remember to add those ones that pop into your head in the middle of a working day!

Some of the tracks don't exist digitally so needed to be recorded by me from my 7" vinyl copy and artwork added - Nathan Fake's beautiful version of Silent Night, for example, and Kate Bush's December Will Be Magic Again.

I love Christmas and the cheesy old classics (except the Pogues because it upsets me, ditto Wizzard, behind which there lurks the tragic story of a new talking Palitoy dolly who died on Christmas morning and had to go back AFTER CHRISTMAS) but electronics are closest to my cold aluminium musical heart, so you'll find many twinkles, bleeps and sparkles are made by machines in this set.

Interspersed with those are sweeping film soundtrack excerpts (from one of my favourite Christmas films ever, the sob-inducing gothfest Edward Scissorhands, and The Nightmare Before Christmas), new re-interpretations from the rich canon of classic Christmas music, little narrations and realistic sounds as the C90 tape turns over and clocks off at the end.

Enjoy Sufjan Stevens, Aphex Twin, Arvo Part, Kate Bush, Nathan Fake, Low, Marvin Gaye, Bat For Lashes, The Strokes, Plaid Kurtis Blow, Isaac Hayes, The Leisure Society, The Knife, 47Trees, LCD Soundsystem, Fleet Foxes, Amina, The Shirelles...and LOADS more.

Listen on Apple Music

or listen on Mixcloud

The Christmas Radio Times Cover

Every illustrator of a certain age knows that a Radio Times cover is up there among the traditional bucket-list jobs - along with an album cover, a Royal Mail stamp or maybe a cover for a book by your favourite author. 

I've done the stamp and the album cover and the novels, but I'd never done an RT Christmas. I've got colleagues who've done them - Mick Brownfield being the most marvellous and prolific! - and once upon a 2015, I almost did too.

In 2016 I created the festive page headers for the Christmas RT, and a nice big bit of cover type and a hand-lettered DPS for the July edition too. 

But, before both of those, the 2015 Christmas RT almost had a dramatic, type-led cover bursting with stars (astronomically and celebrity-wise), over a night-time snowy horizon. It was different, for sure - but just a little too different for the audience. The art director and I were mega-keen, but sadly, in the end, the senior decision makers went with tradition and a beautiful image of a Briggsian snowman. And who can argue with that, albeit reluctantly?

These sketches are as far as it went and have lain hidden in my archive ever since, but I thought it was time they saw daylight - I like this idea that, maybe, this job will one day head back over Mole's way.

Who knows! After all...more unlikely things have happened after throwing a little cosmic ordering into the air...

Merry Christmas Telly to all!

  

GIANT BAUBLES IN THE SKY

We've spent the last few weeks (well months in total) working on the Christmas window display for Cocoa Amore, the new chocolate shop of whom we were appointed Creative Directors this year.

The job's been very involved - music, merchandising, signage, branding, interior decor, other aspects of the store that you can't predict being involved in! - but these massive ink baubles have been a lot of fun. Last year's windows were hand-painted snowtrees - so this year had to be a big contrast:

Here was my Photoshopped vision for the windows:

The baubles were to be enormous versions of the tiny ones drawn for my Christmas 'Vintage Bauble' wrapping paper:

I bought A1 paper, foam board and the fattest Japanese brush pen I could find, and set to with my 50s and 60s baubles references from my own wrapping paper, recreating them with bright, dry, coloured acrylic drawing inks:

Left to dry on top of the wood burner, the design was repeated for the back of the each bauble, then spray-mounted onto black foam board - haven't spray-mounted that much since I was a student!
O, the smells...the toxic vibes!

And they were hung, courtesy of some ladder-based acrobatics and drills held aloft to the ceiling, over the shop's window of goodies, flanked by fresh Christmas tree branches and (real) red sparkly baubles, a handful at a time:

Here was my Photoshopped mockup of the plan for the windows:

...and the real thing!

cocoa-amore.co.uk