7. Does Money Grow on Trees

Are you really the winner

I really liked Rex's last post and hope lots of people sent out copies. It got me thinking about when I was younger and how I would have loved to receive a massive cheque but not so much now......

The Plan

So for this post I wanted to create a animated GIF, never done it before and always wanted too. So what is a GIF it stands for Graphics Interchange Format and i've attached a short video I found the other day.

When I started thinking about Rex's post the first thing that came to mind was money and what would be good animated. 

So I sketched out a tree in Photoshop and then began my work, you create animated GIFs in photoshop by creating multiple layers and then adding them to the timeline below.

The Result

So here it is my first animated GIF! 

So Does Money Grow on Trees?

Sadly money doesn't grow on trees but maybe thats for the best, money won't buy you happiness 

People tend to cling to things a lot. We all get attached to things like our career money etc. Its human nature to become attached even when it doesn't necessarily make sense we can be reluctant to let go.

I remembered this quote from a while ago not sure who said it, but it stuck

“When we stop holding on or clinging to anything, we realise we have everything”

One thing that i've decided in life is if I don't like doing something why do it, if you're in a job that you hate, get out. If your not waking up in the morning enthusiastic about going to work, you shouldn't be there. Why spend the time moaning about it, find another job, time is precious and we should make the most of it!

(Rant over)

and i'll leave this post with a final quote

"If you think sunshine brings you happiness, then you haven't danced in the rain."

Craig

6. Lucky Winner

Letters in the Post

When I read about my friend Craig Osgood's plan to send letters randomly to unsuspecting people, I was immediately taken back to the days when I was still living with my mother in Kansas and we would regularly get junk mail from an organisation called The Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes. As I remember them, these unsolicited letters were often disguised to look like bank cheques made out in huge sums to make you think that you had already won something. I couldn't find a vintage images of those letters on the net but the phrase that stuck in my mind was "Congratulations, You are a Lucky Winner" - and thus I decided to create my own Lucky Winner scheme.

You are a Winner

The concepts of luck, happiness and success seem to be an endless source of fascination to most of us. Does the possession of money or fame or objects bring happiness to people? Perhaps it's just being able to compare our relative amounts of good luck in relation to the people around us that helps influence the state of mind we inhabit in regards to whether or not you consider yourself a "winner". Thoughts that spring to my mind include the idea that anyone who owns a device capable of reading this blog post on the internet is indeed a Lucky Winner in comparison to the many people on this planet living in poverty who can still only dream of owning the kinds of gadgets that we consider out of date as we yearn to be lucky enough to one day be able to buy the next great whizzy this, that or the other. 

The Certificate

So as my response to Craig's letter writing campaign, with your help I would like see if I could spread some happiness and good cheer to a few people. I would like you all to have your own copy of the Lucky Winner Certificate which you can download by clicking on that last link. As an added bonus I would be entirely thrilled if any one who reads this post would go so far as to actually print out a copy of the certificate and present it to someone you know. As you can see I have done the same myself in the form of a greeting card that I sent to my friend Victoria Wright because Victoria mentioned that she liked Craig's last post about hand-written letters so much. The card itself is hopefully a nice thing to receive but additionally, in my letter to Victoria, I mentioned some of her qualities as a person that I feel mark her out as one of life's lucky winners and of which she should be proud.

Please feel free to resize or make any changes you would like to my design and of course print as many copies as you like. The crowning glory would be if any of you could respond in the comments of this blog with stories of how you made use of the Lucky Winner certificate. Best wishes to all of you Lucky Winners out there.

Rex Boyd

5. Par Avion

Thoughts.....

So Rex took my airline and made it into a paper plane....... which is something I never considered. For my response I knew exactly what I wanted to do but not overly sure on the execution so here goes.

The Idea 

So I took the two words and looked up the definitions:

paper |ˈpeɪpə|noun1 [ mass noun ] material manufactured in thin sheets from the pulp of wood or other fibrous substances, used for writing, drawing, or printing on, or as wrapping material: a sheet of paper | [ as modifier ] : a paper napkin | [ count noun ] : toffee papers. 

plane 2 |pleɪn|nounan aeroplane.

          [ no obj., with adverbial of direction. to travel in an aeroplane. 

- So paper is used for writing letters! 
- Planes help people travel and produce amazing stories 

    I seem to get hundreds of emails a week (half of which are junk) and then in the post I seem to only get bills.

    So letters, can you remember what they are? they sort of look like an email, but it's printed on paper, then neatly folded and put into an envelope.

    I believe writing a letter to someone is the next best thing to seeing them in person. I read a really good quote the other day from Catherine Field from the New York Times

"A good handwritten letter is a creative act, and not just because it is a visual and tactile pleasure. It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability, because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way that cyber communication can never do. You savor their arrival and later take care to place them in a box for safe keeping."

So the idea is to write a series of letters to complete strangers telling them a little bit about my journey in life so far and getting them to add to the letter and forward it on to someone else.

The Tools

Paper

I visited my Nan a few days ago and mentioned what I was planing, my nan is a very well travelled lady and I always remember when I was younger receiving post cards from the far ends of the world. My nan then let me have some vintage airmail writing paper. Although she did think it was a bit odd when I said I was writing to a complete stranger, but as normal she smiled and gave me a biscuit. 

The Ink Pen

I love writing in ink and you need a good pen to get the job done! 

My pen of choice is the Lamy Safari. I've had about 4 of these in the past and they last forever, my most resent purchase is the Safari aquamarine. It's made from sturdy ABS plastic and sports a chrome - plated stainless steel clip and the coolest part its designed by a guy called Wolfgang Fabian.

The Execution 

So I've decided to write to six people to increase my chances of getting a response. I spent about ten minutes hunting around for the yellow pages (the only time you need one its not around). I typed in random address generator and it came out with this address generator site.

So my letters are being sent to the follow places (I did have to look some up)

• Munlochy
• Prescot
• Pwllheli
• Matock
• Westminster
• Whitchurch

So what did I say in the letters, I introduced myself, and explained my idea of sharing journeys. I then wrote down the link to the address generator and asked them to add their story to the letter and send it on. Finally when the letter reaches 20 people it gets posted back to me. 

I'm not sure how Rex will react to this post, or if i'll ever get anything back. Its something i've always wanted to do so fingers crossed something will turn up in my mailbox 

4. Paper Plane

The Idea

This time I didn't have an idea straight away about what to create in response to Craig's very nice corporate identity piece for the new Polair airlines. Rather than fret about it though, I decided to leave it for an hour or so and work on other things. Later, while showing Craig's post to my family, it eventually did strike me that I wanted to make a paper plane emblazoned with Craig's new branding. I have also been looking for a video project to work on anyway, so I decided to combine a bit of old fashioned, school-boy hand-drawing and folding skills with a bit of high-tech computer animation and video editing.

The Technique

I used to make endless numbers of paper planes as a child, so that part of the task was just second nature to me. I have also always enjoyed the challenge of creating a 2D design that becomes folded into a 3D object. As a child I also used to make little paper houses folded out of one piece of paper that could I could then use while playing with my beloved Hot Wheels toy cars. 

So here was a two directional challenge: how to get my hand-made airplane into the Motion 5 software to animate a title in 3D and then next how to line up Craig's airplane logo and design on to a flat illustration that would then be folded to become a flying 3D creation.

Motion

Motion is a motion graphics, animation and special effects software package made by Apple. Less than two years ago if you wanted to use Motion you needed to buy the entire Final Cut Studio package for more than £700. Things changed drastically when Apple decided to switch from selling it's software packaged on install discs and instead offer it up for download only from it's App Store. Unbelievably, Motion now costs only £34.99 even though this program is much more in-depth and featured than even the Final Cut Pro software which it so well compliments when creating titles, transitions, special effects and more. Motion projects can be in a 3D space although it is not a fully 3D piece of software, the difference being that Motion just supports 2D objects which can be manipulated in 3D space, which is of course excellent for my use of animating a piece of paper.

Airplane Construction

To align the airplanes graphics in the correct location, I first made a plane which then was unfolded so that I could lightly sketch where I wanted the name and logo. I then scanned that sketch back in to Adobe Illustrator where I overlaid Craig's work and created the swooshing colours to match Craig's design. This was of course then ready to print and fold into as many airplanes I would would like to create. That process was caught on video with help from my daughter Maggie and then the whole thing was edited together in Final Cut Pro.

3. Polair

So here we go my second post, its been a busy and interesting week.

Well I loved Rex's last post, creating a whole new country from a tea towel. So where does it go from there, well what does every country have ..........

A Tourism Board! I love travelling and going on adventures and have some vintage travel posters like this Swiss Air one

and looking at these, I began thinking about how people would actually get to Polarstine. In the UK we have British Airways, America has American Airlines so now we have...........

So Polarstine has a new airline.

So if Rex is planning on visiting Polarstine any time soon, he's going to need to get his passport ready and his boarding pass attached below:

and what does every airline need......  aeroplanes and a crew! 

So there we have it my second post, Rex back to you!  

2. Polarstine

It didn't take long at all for the First Thing to pop in to my head when I saw Craig's polar bear tea towel. Right away it made me think of a flag. I imagined a nation state of polar bears with their own customs, laws, society and boundaries. This made me think that my nation of polar bears would need to have a map.

Maps

I love maps. I can remember looking through my parents' great big Atlas of maps as a child and wondering about all the far away places to be found on the pages inside. I still love maps today including Google Maps, but for some reason I'm not really bothered about SatNavs. I'd much prefer to have a real Road Atlas in the car with me all the time.

The pinnacle of maps in the UK as far as most people in the UK are concerned come from the Ordnance Survey.   Ordnance Survey Website

My idea of a great holiday is climbing the fells in the Lake District with the relevant OS map folded up in my backpack. The detail is superb and I can happily gaze at the maps for hours thinking about all the wonderful places they can take me.

Alfred Wainwright

But even though the OS maps can't be beaten for accuracy, the maps I actually prefer reading in regards to their romantic imagery and depiction of the beautiful Lakeland scenery are from Alfred Wainwright's walking guides. The Wainwright Society

Wainwright's extensive set of books are all completely hand drawn as well as the text being handwritten. He writes in an eloquent and often poetic way about the landscape which is far removed from just showing you where objects are located and how to get from A to B. After a long day on the hills, you have the chance to relive your adventure and plan the next day's by leafing through these lovingly created books.

My Creation

I decided to combine the imagery of an old map along with my own Wainwright style illustration of a polar bear. I found a nice image of a polar bear on the internet and proceeded to scratch away in Photoshop on a layer above with my Wacom tablet until I thought it looked a little bit like a Wainwright illustration.

Next I wanted my illustration to be a pop-out contained within the old-fashioned map. I wanted it to be an old map because I have always been fascinated by the concept of the ever changing boundaries that we humans put upon the landscape when we create our own little enclaves of identity called countries and their corresponding paper resemblances called maps. It is not so surprising that people can of course draw new maps and create new boundaries, but if you look at the earth from a geological timescale, even the landscape is just as changeable as the imaginary lines drawn upon it. Polarstine, the name of my imagined polar bear land is meant to conjure up images of global warming, the struggle of adapting to change, and the political conflicts that go alongside the creation of maps and nations and boundaries.

The final touch was to add the polar bear flag inspired by Craig's tea towel which I hope links it nicely back to my original inspiration from Craig.

Even my daughter Tabitha is sitting next to me now wondering what Craig is going to make of this. We shall look forward to it with anticipation. Hopefully even a few others will be reading this and thinking the same.

1. Printing

So here it goes my first post....

I've never done a blog before always fancied the idea of it but never got round to it. Hopefully this blog will allow Rex and me to explore different creative routes on a variety of  interesting subjects. I love the concept that we have come up and can't wait to see what gets created.

So the word I got was "Printing" hmmm.......

I began thinking about desktop printers and maybe creating a monster out of a printer (then realised I don't actually own a printer). So I then looked into letterpress printing, I really like letter pressed work with it's old-school method of printing through to the tactile feel of the impressions on the page, Sadly I didn't have the materials at hand to create any letter pressed worked.

The next type of printing I looked into was screen printing onto fabrics and this is where I had my brain wave (yes it occasionally happens) of Potato stamps!!

So the required equipment:

1 x Potato
1 x Knife
1 x Ink
1 x White tea towel

So I drew out a polar bear on the potato and hacked away with a knife. I then applied a layer of ink on the potato and stamped it down onto the tea towel to create the following results.

 So there we have it that was my interpretation of the word "Printing" I now need to find away of removing the bright blue ink off my hands.

So over to you Rex......

What is the First Thing...

...that you think of when I say a word. 

Everyone knows of and has probably even had a go at playing this game. Maybe just for fun with friends, maybe in a job interview, maybe you've been visiting the psychologist but that is another story that we don't actually need to dwell upon.

The Idea

My friend Craig Osgood and I took a walk on our lunch break the other day. While out chatting we decided to devise a way of getting our Creativity into action. We were looking for a bit of an ideas kick-starter. A bit of a challenge that should prove to be fun, interesting and productive for ourselves and then of course hopefully others may enjoy seeing what we manage to produce.

The Rules

Ours is a variation on the first word you think of game. We visited a random word generating website which offered us the word "printing" as a starting point. We then flipped a coin to see who would be the first to create something inspired by the first thing you think of when you hear that word. Our creations however will be visual - either an illustration, a photograph, a 30 second maximum video, or we are also allowed, as requested by Craig, to even make an animated GIF if we wish. Whatever really, as long as it is some sort of visual response to that originally suggested word of printing and then the topic will carry on to wherever it takes us.

Now that I think of it there's no reason why we shouldn't also be allowed to respond with an audio creation should we be so inspired. What do you think Craig?

As a result of a coin toss, Craig has the task of creating the first image and to post it to this blog by Sunday evening at the latest or earlier if he chooses. I will then look at Craig's image and will have the opportunity to create the first thing I think of when I have seen Craig's creation. My deadline will be the  following Sunday or then again maybe we should make that deadline to be one week maximum after the previous posting should we manage to find the time to speed things up.

The Inspiration

As well as being interested in a wide variety of creative, artistic pursuits centred around my love of playing with my computer, my real passion of the past few years is dancing. The more I dance the more I love it and the more want to do. Last week I was lucky enough to be at an annual dance event called the Spinderella Ball which is run by Ceroc Oxford at Eynsham Hall. While at the ball I was even more lucky to have met and danced with an amazing dancer named Hazel McNab. I think it was only a matter of time before I was eventually going to meet Hazel because she is at least as passionate and enthusiastic about dancing as I am, if not more so. Our paths were surely going to cross on the dance floor somewhere sooner or later. But being an amazing dancer is not Hazel's only distinctive quality. It turns out that Hazel is also an incredible artist as I discovered by having a look at her ongoing ambition of the moment of creating 366 Hearts in a year.

366 Hearts Blog

366 Hearts on Facebook

I love Hazel's illustrations and her creative inspiration of coming up with a new piece of work everyday, which it must be said was the real kick-starter behind the idea of creating this "First Thing" blog. So now it's time for a bit of discipline, a bit of day dreaming, a bit of work and hopefully a lot of fun along the way. Thank you Hazel.

And now Craig, let's get to work.

Rex Boyd