Catholic Guilt

This is the final video of the Art Creative Project I did for my final term at University. It took me an age to do, but I think it was well worth the effort, especially considering it got an A and helped me to get First Class Honours. Yes, I'm now allowed to put BA (Hons) Digital Art at the end of my name!

BENDRS!

Ah.... Grindr... helping gay men find local talent since 2009. I occasionally make use of their services, so I thought I'd do some jovial, lighthearted spoofing by creating an even less classy variation on a similar theme. I give you.... BENDRS! XTRA.

Slags!

In the same way that I've taken the piss out of "womens" magazines, I decided to have a go at lad's mags - stuff like Nuts, Loaded and the like. I figure they're just porn mags for teenagers and guys in their early 20s who don't have the balls to walk into a newsagents and pick up a copy of Mayfair, Razzle or Escort, so I took my cue from that....

Take A Shit!

We've all seen those ridiculous women's magazines sitting on the shelves, right? Shit like "Chat", "Take A Break", and "Bella" - they manage to be completely mundane and incredibly crass and vulgar at the same time with their endless stories of hardship, family problems, unlikely affairs, virgin births and rapey stepfathers.

I decided to put a more humorous, outrageous, and celebrity focused spin on them. In the world of Take A Shit, anything can, and probably will happen at some point!

Showing some love for FIAT

BMW Bashing!

This is always fun, especially when they launch two brand new and equally ugly cars within a matter of months.

Audi A1

I find the price for the Audi A1 somewhat hard to swallow.... up to £21,000 for what amounts to nothing more than a gussied up Volkswagen Polo you can buy for half that money? Audi are laughing all the way to the bank, especially in the image obsessed UK.

On the Up and Up!

Volkswagen's new Up! city car. Not only does it have a completely stupid name... it also has two rather undynamic looking siblings from SEAT and Skoda. Badge engineering at its most cynical and obvious.

Some completely unnecessary Porsche bashing... purely for the hell of it!

The Scottish Creative Network

Some publicity/promotional materials I designed for the Scottish Creative Network, a new organisation with the aim of bringing creatives across Scotland together - be they photographers, models, make up artists, designers or generally just creative people - to network and collaborate on new and exciting photography and art project. These are the slides which are shown as part of the photography slideshow which takes place at every Scottish Creative Network networking event in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Digital Renaissance

Long time, no post.

I've been busy. Very busy. Very, very busy! Not only with finishing my dissertation, my final Art Creative Project and dealing with Artworks/Presentation & Promotion, but also with doing my bit to help organise our own, vaguely independent 4th year Digital Art Showcase.

Around a month ago, my fellow students and I were greeted with an unfortunate, perhaps even depressing reality. We were taken to the Centre for Contemporary Arts on Sauchiehall St. in Glasgow - a prestigious and highly sough after arts venue - and shown the space that UWS intended for us to exhibit all the work we've created this year. I use the term "space" very loosely, as there was precious little of it on show.

The room they'd booked, Gallery 5, perhaps the smallest gallery space in the entire building, was far too small to accommodate even a quarter of the work we have spent all year slaving away over. It had served them very well when there were perhaps only six or seven Honours' Students on the Digital Art programme, but when it came to accommodating the work of almost thirty, it was found to be sadly lacking, especially in light of the University's encouragement to "go big" with our art.

Very shortly after viewing the space at the CCA, we reached the collective decision to find a more suitable exhibition space, independently of UWS, and put on the show ourselves. Mary Pettigrew, a student in the class, very much took the reins of this task, and became the driving force behind our efforts, managing to exceed our most optimistic expectations and obtaining a two-week FREE residency at The Lighthouse, another prestigious Glasgow Art & Design venue. More than that, she secured us a residency in Gallery One, which is perhaps the largest gallery space in the entire building, occupying around three quarters of the first floor of the building. As you can imagine, we were overjoyed at this development.

There is, however, a sting in the tail of this happy event. The Lighthouse insisted on exclusivity of all artworks being displayed at the exhibition, which meant we could no longer even consider exhibiting within the main UWS Showcase event at the Centre for Contemporary Arts. This meant that we had to notify the University of our withdrawal from said event, a development they did not initially react positively to. The Academic staff were very supportive of our decision, but the managerial staff were more sceptical, wondering if we were capable of delivering a show of a suitably professional level to represent the University to the general public.

We stuck tour guns as a group, despite UWS's initial reservations, and eventually managed to bring them round to our way of thinking, as we'd managed to secure a vastly more suitable gallery space at little or no additional expense to the University. Unfortunately, there's another "but" coming - due to the University already having paid for the booking of the gallery space at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, there was little or no money left in their budget with which to offer us any form of financial support, although they were willing to offer us limited technical support and guidance in the staging of an exhibition of this scale.

Now that we're reaching the very tail end of our time at University, and our final hand-in is drawing ever closer, thoughts have turned towards the staging of the show itself, who to invite, how to invite them, and how to get our message across to the general public. The Lighthouse have very kindly offered to print us a number of free posters to publicise the event, although these posters' design is still subject to UWS approval to make sure it fits in with their corporate guidelines on branding and the use of the University's logo - all pretty dry, boring stuff to be honest. We had a very productive meeting this morning, during which we decided the fairest way to curate the exhibition and select which artworks are shown, should any decisions need to be made, is through the formation of a curation panel, comprised of four students (myself included) and two lecturers, who between them have a considerable number of years' experience of staging shows of this magnitude.

I've also been put forward to be the lead person for marketing and communicating our message to the press, which is rather scary, but I've already drawn up a list of local newspapers to contact, and will be getting in touch with the UWS press officer in order to use his extensive list of contacts to further distribute our message to the four corners of West Central Scotland.

Finally, some bumph about the show itself:

"Digital Renaissance - a celebration of the work of some of the freshest, most exciting emerging artists, animators, designers, and filmmakers. A wide ranging selection of innovative and creative artworks, both digital and traditional, will be on display, including: animation, illustration, sculpture, photography, typography, interactive new media, painting, 2D & 3D animation and much, much more. This is one Degree show you won't want to miss!"

The show opens with an invitation only gala preview event on Thursday the 26th of May at 6pm, and will be open and available to the general public from 10am on Friday the 27th of May until 5.30pm on Saturday the 4th of June, at:

Gallery One,
The Lighthouse,
11 Mitchell Lane (just off Buchanan St),
Glasgow
G1 3NU.
Tel. 0141 276 5360

You can find more information on both the show itself, the artists, and the art being shown at the website, which is http://www.digitalrenaissance.org.uk, on Facebook by searching for Digital Renaissance, or on Twitter, by following @digirenaissance.

Catholic Guilt - The St. Peter's Project

Scott Agnew - Pride (In The Name of Love)

My mate Scott Agnew (Scottish Comedian of the Year 2008, and a finalist in 2010's 'Take The Mic' competition) e-mailed me on Friday night, in a terribly panicked state. He explained to me that his Edinburgh Fringe show, "Pride (In The Name of Love)" was due to start on Wednesday (which is tonight!), and that his usual graphic designer had been rendered unavailable due to a family emergency which required him to return home with all due haste.

This unfortunate turn of events left Scott in the unhappy, and quite stressful position of having a month long run starting in less than a week, but having no flyers with which to publicise his grand comedic opus! He then asked if I could perhaps step into the breach and provide him with a rush job over the weekend, which I duly agreed to do. He roughly explained the motivation behind the idea he and his other designer had been working on, and left me to interpret it in my own way.

A few hours later, I'd produced what you see above. He seemed to be very pleased with them, so much so that he asked me to scale up the design for an A3 poster, because the venue were giving him a hard time about not having any.

Cutting to the end of the story, after a lot of worrying on my part about whether or not the flyers would turn out as well in printed form as they looked on screen, I have just recently been informed that they have turned out brilliantly, and are currently being disseminated to the great and the good of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe scene as we speak! WOOP!

GO SEE IT! HE'S HILARIOUS!

GTA: No Mean CityPackaging

Random

Nat King, FiFi LaShay and LaFayette "Thuggs" Velvet have invaded Springburn!


The whole thing's a GHASTLY, GHASTLY, GHASTLY NIGHTMARE!!!!!