Rocket to the heavens




Fashion kitteh is modelling this season’s must-have accessory collar, available in a choice of five fresh, happening colours for hot young cats everywhere.

I snapped this one while testing cameras out in Goldhanger last week.

I made a poster.
Why? Well, it looked for a while like our cat might have made a friend. That’s our cat, on the left. His would-be friend is Mad Dog Haddock, up above on the right.
Yet it seems we were wrong. All of that sitting together under the trees and down at the end of the garden was more about keeping a wary eye than cosying up. Hostilities finally broke out this weekend – on our decking – but there’s unfinished business. They each departed with fur in their claws and a sneer in their fidgety whiskers.

I’m not sure how we’ve lived in our house close to seven months now but still got so little art on the walls. So here’s a poster I made for the kitchen. I’ll mull it over for a few days and then print it on a mid-size canvas.
The mug started out in Illustrator. It’s just six strokes: one for the outline of the mug, another for the rim, three for the yellow highlights and a fatter tapered stroke for the coffee itself. The steam are five further pen strokes.
I imported it into Photoshop where I overlaid it with the warped text for ‘Man does not live by coffee alone’, and the ‘Have a Danish’ line, plus the red and blue fields at the bottom of the canvas. The mug itself has no fill so I had to cut out the part behind the mug from each of these so they didn’t show through.
The goal was a fifties diner look, as much in the imperfectly aligned parts as in the fonts and design itself, so I’ve used filters to scuff it up and simulate mis-registered red and blue plates.
I’m working on a book about Photoshop right now, so I spent this morning playing with typography, fonts, masks and luminance adjustments. I’m quite happy with the result. The original quote was from a guy called Charles Lamb – an essay writer and children’s author.

We went for a walk at Lake Meadows today. It may be late November, but autumn is still in full swing. Some of the colours were glorious.

Someone wants to go outside.