Betty Lou's got a new tattoo

I am happy to report that renowned style icon and top DJ Craig Steptoe has added to his collection of excellent tattoos with one of my scribblings.

 (apologies for the low resolution)

Craig got his tattoo artist to add the psychedelic colours and I think it works well. The original was from a Brutes/Hi Class Joes/Empress of Fur poster I did a few years back.

Thank you Craig for being the first brave fella to get sumthink wot I drawed etched onto your skin forever! It means a lot to me!

Pin-up Girls

The first three in a series of pin-up girls I'm working on; focusing on extraordinary ladies who did some rather interesting things. Now I love a good traditional pin-up girl pic, but I wanted my drawings to be a shift away from the typical image of a girl who's all surface and little substance.

Beryl Burton was the 12 hour cycling time trial world record holder, as well as general cycling champion. She held the record for years, beating the blokes as well as the women.

Beryl Swain was the first woman to race in the Isle of Man TT race, a hair-raising road race that takes place every year. The men that organised the race decided to ban women from entering for the next 16 years, saying it was 'too dangerous' for women to enter.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was an amazing ahead-of-her-time electric guitarist, gospel blues singer and incredible performer, whose life of contradictions (playing church music and secular innuendo laden songs, marrying 3 times and having a number of lesbian lovers) points to a woman living life just the way she wanted to. There's a good article about her here.

The idea is to turn these girls into two-colour screen prints, as well as add to the set with more fantastic females. Watch this space.

Big Pig.

Painted on a tray rescued from the side of the road, which used to have a pig like this on it:

I replaced him with this happy fella:

Obscuritones poster

A poster for a female fronted rockabilly band, inspired partly by my love of vinyl, and partly by this picture of one of my guitar heroines, queen of trash rock n roll, Poison Ivy Rorschach:

Although the Ivy looks way more badass than my girl, I like to think my girl's sweet on the surface and savage underneath. For the background texture, I used the endpaper from my copy of 'Kon Tiki and I' by Erik Hesselburg, a sketchbook from the Kon Tiki expedition. I layered this up with print-textured colourblocks, and used negative space type to ring the changes. The colours used in the central illustration are complemented by the black line drawing detail in the heart.

MFC Chicken in sickly neon.

A bright one this time! MFC Chicken are named in honour of a fried chicken shop, and this was my take on fast food neon signs. Using a found image of a sexy lady devouring a bucket of chicken, overlaid with a pair of green dancing cocks (thats cockerals, you smutbags out there!) penned by me. I used translucent layers and a print style moire on the background to create a screen printed look.

I found the image for the background by googling 'sexy chicken'. I never want to do that again.

Crazy Japanese R&R poster

This poster was for a gig by the Minnesota Voodoo Men, who, logically, are from Japan. One of the crop of wild wild Japanese garage rock n roll bands that are well worth checking out. The gig was a collaboration with the nice folks who run the very excellent FratHouse club night in Bristol. I wanted the poster to be a tip of the hat to the Screamin' Jay Hawkins-esque brand of American Voodoo in the way that the Minnesota Voodoo Mens' sound is a tribute to trashy 60s American R&R. I included potions, a monkey paw, chickens head, voodoo doll and other paraphernalia of any self respecting 60s american witchdoctor.  I kept the colours muted so the black and white pic of the band didn't look out of place.

Be a Caveman!

The Lava Lounge this month has a time-travelling spaceage/stoneage theme, and as with the last poster for Glasgow garage band The Brutes I decided a low-tech cut paper approach. This uses a variety of monochrome tones to give a charming semi 3D look. I wanted the vox-strumming neanderthal to look like he was being beamed up to the UFO and used a strip of frosted plastic to get this effect. I also wanted to use stalactites to spell out the name of the Brutes, and hand lettered the band names before adding the rest of the text digitally. 

The parts were drawn out separately and propped in position with crumpled paper forming the rocks of the cave. Reflective silver card makes the spacey background, all carefully lit to get the right shadows and highlights.

Some of the component parts:

Here is the assemblage before a bit of tweaking in Photoshop:

This poster was printed pretty big (20x60cm) for maximum legibility.