I like the people I work with. Sometimes it’s appropriate to roll out my skills from my previous life. Meet Luke Cat 🤗. He loved it. Brought a little joy to a Friday for him after a hard week wrangling Webflow.
Making people’s lives sillier, since 1977.
“Draw my favourite car daddy, draw it so it pops off the page”. Obediently draws car… “Well its nice daddy, but it doesn’t pop off the page does it?!
So I googled some proper optical illusions to copy and drew them with the boy
I’ve made two new pieces of self indulgent psychedelia. These things usually start with a very basic premise, and take on their own life as they appear in front of my eyes.
In the first I wanted to do something with the page split loosely in to four. Yep. The premises are that vague.
The second I wanted to play with fractals so I built a Fibonacci spiral and swirled the swirly bits around it.
While I was making the second piece I commissioned the embarrassingly talented and all round lovely human Natasha Alexander ( go check out her work and workshops here: https://www.facebook.com/natashaalexanderart/ ) to create a mandala stone in the same vein as my psychedelic art.
She absolutely smashed it out of the park. I bloody LOVE this thing.
L.O.V.E. it.
I saw a video pop up in my feed on youtube about making a DIY robot arm. I thought it would a nice thing to do with the kids, so I downloaded some basic templates someone posted online, bought some syringes, lollipop sticks, skewers and a hot melt glue gun… and gave it a go one Sunday.
It wasn’t the simplest thing in the world, but we followed a youtube video, and made up the rest.
It blimmin’ well worked! It was probably a bit too difficult for a kids project, but it was ace.
My favourite part about it was the smalls decorated it with chalk pens afterwards so it looks like it belongs in the hood…
“be grarsy and happy”
Inspired by the last post about branding my mates (proper good…) band Polyhymns, it reminded me of the artwork I used to make for my old CDs.
I made a few mixes 20 years ago and cut together the CD artwork using photos I found from old issues of National Geographic that were kicking around the house.
The masters were lost in the great CD theft of 2002 but they still live on in digital format in my mixcloud along with a bunch of other live streams and mixes here: https://www.mixcloud.com/Cropmaster_Flex/
Frogball E.P.
Famously described as ‘a nice mix‘ by Dan Boland, when he’d play it in the pub he was working at.
You can listen to it here:
Croppenphlop, 2000
“The ink spots, really?” – Dan Boland, when he realised there was no turntablism in this mix.
No one really knew what to make of it. I think its some of my finest work. Proper out there eclectic mix of old an new.
You can listen to it here:
Slap Happy Gland
What was I thinking. Infamously described as ‘that crazy mix‘ by some girl I can’t remember the name of that nicked it off my mate Chris who I made it for.
Featuring the only original track I ever produced that made it on to a CD and ‘released’. Shame it was utter toss.
Also featuring the T-Power track played on 33rpm instead of 45rpm. FML. That was Napster for you… yep. Some of these tracks came from the OG unregulated Napster in 2000.
You can listen to it (but probably shouldn’t…) here
I like making paper planes. I used to enter contests as a kid.
So I did an internet
Turns out youtube is stuffed full of people happy to show you how to make award winning paper planes.
Which is nice.
I’ve made lots of pictures for my daughter over the years, but not many for my son. My wife asked me to make something special for him.
Then we went for a letterpress jolly with work.
His favourite joke at the time was:
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Mr Bum Poo!
which, for the record should be the hilarious ditty:
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Big bump
Big bump who?
HAHHahahAHAHAHAHA! you said big bum poo!!!!
So I made it. At the work do. Yup.
I went to the Horniman (fnurk) Museum. It rained a lot. It has a butterfly house. In the butterfly house was an amazing iridescent blue butterfly called the ‘Blue Morpho’. It was beautiful. I very nearly bought a print from the gift shop afterwards, but I didn’t. I thought that if I cared enough when I got home, I could paint my own. I did, so I did.
I didn’t get very far. I intended to do a really detailed painting, but I was doing it from an image I found online. I’ve always had a bee in my bonnet about drawing or painting from photos, so the thought of spending many hours working on this was pretty unsatisfying. So I stopped.
This story isn’t over though. I found a kind someone in Bristol that has a real framed blue morpho who offered to lend it to me to finish the painting. One day.
After playing with Cymatics for reals, I thought it would be fun to make a cymatics inspired bannister thing to stop my old computer bits and bobs falling down the attic stairs.
I like this little design. If I ever branded my speaker builds, it would probably be an iteration of this. Incidentally, I googled my name and auto-correct came back with ‘Turd Crapley’. Thanks Google. But what an excellent silly name for a speaker line.
So ends another all too brief (half a…) term
Not sure if I’m going to make it to next to term. I’m too deep in to speaker building and a DJ world at the moment so drawing might have to stay on the back burner for a bit :/
Who knows though. Can’t plan much at the moment in this wibbly wobbly world xx
Dave Cropley 