More Sleeve-Rolling

Here's some further progress on my sleeve-rolling.
I finished cutting paper versions of those positions.
I can take it in a number of directions. Here is the full array for now...

and the pleasing sheets of painted and patterned paper that I cut the shapes out of.

And here is an animation!

Rob and Louise

These pages of flipchart illustrated my speech as best man at Rob & Louise's wedding reception on Saturday. I did them in a great hurry but they livened things up.

Louise and Rob

Today is the big day for Rob and Louise. Here is there invitation card, made by me!
It's a scorcher here in Exeter and I wish them all the best.
I have the rings.

My Grandfather Nero

Your forebears knew how to dress up for parties. This is the best photo of the grandfather I never knew.


And again, with my grandmother, some time in the 1940s:

Rolling Sleeve Love

You know, sometimes I actually do some drawing.

What's it about? Well, I love rolling my sleeves up and I'm amused by the process and how my arms fly about as the sleeves go up.

This is just a set of sketches from a video, but I want to develop it further.

Record Sleeve Love and Girl Groups

As I think I've mentioned before, old record sleeves are a constant source of inspiration or fascination. Best of all are the old paper sleeves from 45rpm 7" singles.

Things that I love:

1. the typefaces
2. the limited colours
3. the wear of the thin paper
   
4. the way that the designs work with the hole in the middle
5. the occasionally-misaligned printed blocks
6. the arcane company addresses
7. the enthusiastic advertising language

...and I could go on.

Well, they're hardly in short supply: you can go into any charity shop and find boxes of singles to rifle through. You can probably find a relative with a box somewhere.

Today I've found a website that does that job for you and collects gems from all eras and styles of music on vinyl: Record Envelope: The Little Library Of Factory Sleeves.

I've dipped into my parents' little carry-case again and again over the years. The designs are often fun to behold, but even more interesting are the advertisements that used to cover inner sleeves. The same goes for paperback books from around the 1940s. Advertising wasn't any less pervasive in those times.

Here's the back of a Colombia Records sleeve, on Des O'Connor's "Thinking Of You", the b-side of "I Pretend",

Before bed-time...
A Great Morphy-Richards Offer!
"Simply beautiful hair"
by French of London

It's a cross between an instruction diagram and a teen-drama comic strip, another bit of pop culture that is revived from time to time. Here's Betty Rizzo's moment in the titles from Grease (from a full dissection at Clothes On Film).

Those titles in turn inspired Kenickie (if the name wasn't an obvious enough homage), the band that Lauren Laverne fronted in the late 1990s. They started out with a strong girl-group / heartbreak / biker gang vibe, like the Shangri-Las, the Crystals, the Shirelles and so on. Here's the cover of the "Punka" single from 1996.

The style pops up every few years: The Pipettes were doing much the same thing; and over the past few years The Girls, two British artists (Andrea Blood and Zoe Sinclair) have been installing their exhibition / performance art piece "The Paper Eaters", making modern-day teen-drama photo-stories. They had amazing dresses made out of comic strips.

Back to the sleeves: other great finds at Record Envelope include the Micron Music sleeve (the black one near the top of this post) and the home-made Elvis Presley sleeve.

Competitive Hatcraft

Today I have already been compared to Frank Gehry and Lady Gaga.