Mad Dog Haddock

Cat fight boxing poster

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.

A poster for the kitchen

Coffee poster for the kitchen

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.