A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Work
Another post about T-shirts… I discontinued daily posting in 2016, and I don’t usually write anything on Sundays, so take this as a bonus.
Skull Print sent these photos of the first batch of orders from the new shirt range. Very impressive detail and colour quality on both designs, especially the Zones shirt which contains a lot of fine detail. My thanks to everyone who’s placed an order so far!
Previously on { feuilleton }
• More shirts
• T-shirts by Skull Print
I’ve added a couple more shirt designs to the Skull Print page and I’ve also tweaked the ordering process a little. This was necessary when it became apparent that the PayPal purchase system no longer allows buyers to leave a note to the seller even though this option is still available when you create the code for a PayPal button. (I was surprised to discover that the button-creating area of PayPal still looks the way the site did about 20 years ago.) Thankfully WordPress allows you to add contact forms to posts so I’ve added these to each shirt design. It’s an awkward solution but the form does at least allow a buyer to send along details of their required shirt size and shirt colour. A better solution would be a shopping cart arrangement but this will have to wait for now. I’ve been so busy with work for the past few months it’s taken me all summer to even get this far.
Promethea 14, 2001. Art by JH Williams III.
The new designs are two versions of the perennially popular James Joyce design, plus the Kabbalah map which I created in 2000, and which subsequently made a cameo appearance in issue 14 of Alan Moore’s Promethea. This has always been popular as a print at CafePress but people also like to have it on a shirt. I’d suggest white shirts only for this design but the decision is for the purchaser.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• T-shirts by Skull Print
I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve partnered with T-shirt printers Skull Print to make shirts available featuring my artwork. See this standalone page for details. Skull Print are a small business based in the UK who specialise in music-related merchandise. Joe Banks pointed me in their direction when he was wondering if I’d considered doing a shirt design based on the cover of his Hawkwind book, Days of the Underground. To thank Joe for this, the first shirt is an adaptation of his cover design, which is followed by a very old piece of cover art for the Zones album by Hawkwind. Skull Print cater to a substantial Hawkwind fanbase so it makes sense to make this one available. And since we’re now in the horror month, I’ve added a couple of recent Lovecraft-related designs which have been tailored specially for this purpose.
A design based on my cover for Lovecraft’s Monsters, an excellent story collection edited by Ellen Datlow.
I should emphasise that these aren’t the only shirt designs available. Skull Print operate on a print-on-demand basis so in theory any artwork of mine may be printed as a shirt if someone makes a request for one. (With a couple of exceptions; a few designs are subject to copyright restrictions.) The advantage that Skull Print have over other services such as CafePress is that I don’t have to spend time uploading the artwork to a website then creating a special sales page for it. Anyone who wants a shirt can now send me a request for one then I send the artwork to Skull Press and they’ll take care of everything else.
I’ll be setting up a few more designs with PayPal buttons when I have a spare moment. Some designs have been surprisingly persistent sellers at CafePress, such as my ideogrammatic portrait of James Joyce which is often ordered in the run-up to Bloomsday. A few years ago a shirt bearing this design was ordered by one “M. Atwood” of Halifax, Nova Scotia. I’ve been hoping ever since that the M. Atwood who everyone knows as a writer might turn up somewhere dressed in this item. If anyone sees a photo like this then please let me know!
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hawkwind: Days of the Underground
• The Chronicle of the Cursed Sleeve
• Rock shirts
• Void City
I said at the weekend that I’d recently designed an all-type cover, and here it is. This is my second design for Joe R. Lansdale’s detective duo, and like the earlier Of Mice and Minestrone this one went through more iterations than usual. It’s often the case that the more popular a book is likely to be, the more constraints will be imposed on the cover design. Hap and Leonard are very popular characters so this commission arrived with a number of prerequisites regarding the amount of text, the size of the type and so on. It also required the inclusion of the word “Stories” to emphasise that the book is a story collection rather than a novel. The latter feature is a recent trend in American publishing, one that follows the not-so-recent trend of appending the words “A Novel” to the covers of…novels. As a reader I find these labels to be superfluous and even mildly insulting but as a designer I have to follow the brief, and the brief was to present all of this information in a suitably harmonious manner. Most of the early iterations tried to do this with the addition of some illustrative graphics but the results were persistently unsatisfactory, hence the decision to let the type do the work.
Born for Trouble will be published by Tachyon in March 2022.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Foiled at last
• Of Mice and Minestrone
Gerry Barney’s logo for British Rail. A page from the British Rail Corporate Identity Manual (1965).
• RIP Russ Kick, writer, editor, and founder of many websites/blogs such as Rare Erotica, Books Are People Too and (notoriously) the several iterations of The Memory Hole, a space dedicated to keeping visible information that successive US governments would have preferred to remain unseen. I’d known Russ remotely for many years, initially as a reviewer of the Savoy comics in Outposts. Savoy Books later helped find him a publisher for Psychotropedia: A Guide to Publications on the Periphery, a wide-ranging overview of alternative/underground print culture in the late 1990s. In 2004 his information activism gave him a fleeting taste of world-wide attention when he forced the Bush administration to make public the photos of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq. The scandal put his name on the front pages of newspapers that should have been finding those photos for themselves instead of cheerleading the war. A run of books for Disinformation presented his archival researches for the general reader, then in 2012 he edited The Graphic Canon, a massive three-volume collection of comics and illustrations based on classic works of literature. I was among the many contributors to the latter with an adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and would have worked on the follow-up collection of crime stories if I hadn’t been busy with other things. I had hoped that we might work together again in the future.
• “‘The new mainstream has attempted to erase the innovations of the avant-garde from jazz history,’ the film declares.” Geeta Dayal reviews Fire Music, a documentary about the jazz innovations of the 1960s.
• I don’t have the hardware to play this but Sable is a new computer game from Raw Fury whose design owes much to the desert landscapes seen in comics by Moebius.
• New/old music: Stealing Sheep and The Radiophonic Workshop reimagine the score for René Laloux’s animated science-fiction film La Planète Sauvage.
• At Spine: Savannah Cordova on how to perfect your book cover’s typography. Having recently designed an all-type cover design this is timely.
• Mixes of the week: Isolatedmix 113 by Sunju Hargun, XLR8R Podcast 714 by Soela, and Holograficzne Widmo ze Bart De Paepe by David Colohan.
• “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Gerry Barney, designer of the British Rail logo, doesn’t like the green reworking of his design.
• Scottish lord goes blood simple: a teaser for The Tragedy of Macbeth by Joel Cohen and some bloke called William Shakespeare.
• “It’s unmanageable.” Ellen Peirson-Hagger on how the vinyl industry reached breaking point.
• Macbeth (1973) by John Cale | Rail (1994) by Main | Logotone (2013) by Steve Moore