Chayground - Illustration & Animation

A place to showcase my current projects and work in progress, alongside my website at www.chayground.com

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Daily Design - Tuesday 14th July To celebrate the New Horizons probe finally reaching Pluto, here is a pattern I designed, featuring cute planets and space exploration! Available on a range of products from pencil cases to phone covers, cushions to bags and even leggings! It is also available in a range of colours. Via RedBubble: bit.ly/SpacePattern #Pluto #Planets #SolarSystem #Sun #Probes #Landers #Robots #Asteroid #space #RedBubble

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Daily Design - Monday 13th July This is a design from my series of A3 prints, inspired by some of the song lyrics that we dance to in our Chester SwingStompers Lindy Hop lessons. Bei Mir Bist Du Schon is a song made famous by The Andrews Sisters in 1937. Available via The Lost Lanes: bit.ly/LindyLyrics #swing #lindy #lindyhop #print #poster #retro #typography #SwingStompers #music #lyrics #lipstick #thelostlanes

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Daily Design - Sunday 12th July This is a greetings card from my "Lab Partners" collection. A great card for your science geek friends; the inside is left blank so it could work for any number of occasions. Available via The Lost Lanes: bit.ly/LabPartnersCards #friends #bff #best #oxygen #bond #molecule #atoms #science #chemistry #school #highschool #card #greetings #thelostlanes

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Daily Design - Saturday 11th July This is a Clockwork Orange greetings card from my "Notable & Quotable: Cinema" collection. Available via The Lost Lanes: bit.ly/MovieCards #Alex #movie #film #cinema #clockwork #orange #violence #moloko #bowler #card #greetings #thelostlanes

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Daily Design - Friday 3rd July

Over the last few years I have been commissioned to create many custom couple characters - they make for a really personal  birthday, wedding or anniversary gift.

Available here in my Etsy shop: bit.ly/CaricatureCouple

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Daily Design - Thursday 2nd July

Following the new Daisy and Fluff episode yesterday, I have decided to highlight one of my designs / animations / projects every day.  Today's design is "It's Not That Easy Seeing Green" - combining an Ishihara colourblindness test and Kermit the Frog, which is now available as a print from The Lost Lanes.  

http://bit.ly/IshiharaKermit

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Daily Design - Wednesday 1st July

I have decided to highlight one of my designs each day, starting with the latest episode of my pre-school learning series "Daisy and Fluff" which is now up on youtube.

Daisy and Fluff blast off into space and take a look at the planets of our solar system, with some simple facts about each one.

Watch it here: http://bit.ly/DaisyPlanets

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Book Illustrations - Reu The Rainbow Gnu

This year I was approached by Nicola Graham at Reuben's Retreat, to create the illustrations for a very special book.

Reuben’s Retreat is a charity that was born in memory of Reuben Michael Graham who tragically passed away aged 23 months.

The children's picture book was written by Victoria C Trundle of Trundlebooks, and I was asked to create a series of 12 illustrations for the story, based on initial layout ideas by her father, Frank Jones.

The book is now available to buy from the Reuben's Retreat online store and all proceeds go towards the retreat project - to provide a retreat in the North West of England countryside that will relieve the distress of families and their close friends who have suffered the bereavement of a child or have a child suffering from a life limiting or life threatening illness.

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Book Illustrations - The Man Who Invented Whipped Concream

I've recently finished working on the illustrations for a children's book by Giles Graves.

It was a fun to work on and Giles was keen for me to create the images in my 3D style and gave me quite a lot of freedom as to the look of the illustrations.  It was challenging to produce an entire book's worth of images but I am pleased with the finished result.

The book is currently available through iTunes for the iPad and should hopefully be available for android tablets at a later date.

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Lindy Hop

Have had a busy few weeks/months with the SwingStompers Lindy Hop dance group. I moved up to level 4 classes so, baring illness, I've been going to level 3 and 4 classes every Wednesday evening.

I designed a new logo for the group which is now up outside Chester Music Theatre, and the T-shirts are nearly ready too.

We've had a series of weekend rehearsals for the Chester Christmas Light Switch On Parade which we took part in on the 20th November; 30 - 40 minutes of almost non-stop dancing through Chester city centre with 8 couples dancing a mixture of 8-beat and Charleston, sandwiched between Chester the Cheshire Cat and Father Christmas!

Alongside the parade rehearsals, nine of us have been rehearsing for a performance at Bunbury Church as part of an evening celebrating the end of filming of a new series set during WWII called "Home Fires" based on the book "Jambusters" by Julie Summers, which should be on TV next year.

We were asked to come and perform a routine and then help demonstrate as Nick (our friend and instructor) taught a basic Charleston lesson to the guests at the event - lots of people joined in and seemed to really enjoy themselves. Everyone else in the performance had done it at least once before so I was a bit anxious about having to learn the group routine from scratch (and work with Ruth, my dance partner, to create an individual routine in the time we had), but I'm glad Nick strong-armed me into doing it, and it was worth it in the end!

The performance was on Saturday so got there early and had a lovely meal at The Dysart Arms pub. The church turned out to be a fantastic venue, although there was a surprise strip of carpet down the middle of the dance floor, but it didn't put us off our moves too much. We performed to a very appreciative crowd, which made all of the rehearsals worth while.

We actually each got paid a small sum for our performance so *technically* I could add "Professional Lindy Dancer" to my CV! 

Then the day after the performance it was my turn to be "Guest DJ" at the SwingStomper Social Dance. I put together a playlist of some of my favourite swing dancing tunes with a few unusual ones and it seemed to go down well! Having guest DJs has proven to be a great idea, as it keeps the socials fresh, so we don't always have the same set of songs that we dance to in class.

Then soon we have our SwingStompers Christmas Meal in town, which is good because I don't get work Christmas meals now that I'm self employed! I'm so glad that I decided to start going to the group last year. I've made so many really good new friends!

Unfortunately all of this dancing has led to a dance based injury - shin splints and inflamed tendons in my right foot, so I've been ordered by the doctor to lay off the dancing and rest my foot until after Christmas - but I'll be back in the new year! (The Mersey Winter Ball in at the start of January, so I have to be better for that!)

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Richard Herring: Lord of the Dance Settee

On Saturday evening I took the train from Chester to Liverpool (always forget how close we live to the city!) to see Richard Herring perform his current show "Lord of the Dance Settee".  I'm currently working on animation for Richard's series "Richard Herring's Meaning of Life" (RHMoL) and he was kind enough to give me a free ticket for the performance.

The Epstein Theatre bar was filled with comedy nerds and there was a decent sized crowd in the auditorium.  I really enjoyed the show - even the routines that were partly familiar from Richard's blog had been expanded, and to paraphrase the late Frank Carson "It's the way he tells 'em". I was impressed at how long the queue was after the show to get programmes signed and buy books and DVDs, people were queuing for a good half an hour.

I hung around to say hello after the crowd had dispersed and to congratulate Rich again on the sprog that his wife is growing in her stomach (as far as he knows, this is how it works). Was also pleased to find a whole page of the programme devoted to RHMoL including some of my images and a mention of my name and website, which is nice of him.

Was good to meet up again - I have a couple more animations to create for the show - both of which will hopefully be finished before Christmas!

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Hollywood Hats App for iOS

A few months back I was approached by Nathan Prescott from Mad App Labs.  He wanted to collaborate on a little quiz app based around the Hollywood Hats designs that I had created.

DOWNLOAD THE GAME FOR FREE HERE!

I provided him with the hat images and created some backgrounds, buttons and layouts, and he then coded the game.

I’m pleased to announce that the resulting app is now available to download for FREE from the app store, and should work on all iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices running iOS 4.3 and above (so even I can run it on my old iPod Touch!)

The game is a quiz - work out which movie each hat is from.  There are a wide range of hats from classic, iconic and family films, some instantly recognisable and some a little more obscure.  Don’t worry there is an option to gain clues, either through sharing the app on facebook and twitter, or through in-app purchase of hint tickets (which also unlocks an ad free version).

If you have a suitable device, it would be great if you could download the game as soon as possible, and also to leave it a (hopefully favourable) review on iTunes and possibly share it on facebook and twitter. Every download helps to increase the profile of the game and we need all the help we can get to reach a critical mass!

Did I mention it was free? Oh and it’s fun too!

DOWNLOAD THE GAME FOR FREE HERE!

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Richard Herring's Meaning of Life: Episode 4 Episode 4 of the internet comedy show by Richard Herring is now available for free now on Vimeo and Youtube.

There is also an extended version available to purchase from Go Faster Stripe.  If you purchase that version (or a badge) then the money goes to help to pay for the show and for future projects.   

I created the title sequence for the show as well as animating the (ridiculously long) sketch in the middle.  Only two more episodes to go - I’d better get animating!

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Neatoshop - T-shirt Review

I recently received a couple of sample t-shirts from Neatoshop.com, featuring two of my designs - Hollywood Hats and You’re Growing on Me.  Of all the places I sell my shirts, Neatoshop are by far the best.   They go out of their way to help during the process of taking designs from the screen to print, they offer a wide range of sizes from junior sizes, to 6XL and offer a lot of the designs in a choice of two t-shirt fabric types.

They sent me a sample of each t-shirt type so that I could see (and feel) the difference, and also see how great their print quality is!  Both are size Medium and fitted me perfectly.  Below are my thoughts on each.

"You’re Growing On Me" was printed onto a regular 100% cotton tee and feels nice and chunky - like most standard tees.  The design is bigger than I expected but looks great - the colours are vibrant and the detail is all there - the design features a large expanse of colour, and this feels a little plastic which is to be expected due to the way they are printed and the sheer size of the image.   

"Hollywood Hats" was printed on their “ringspun” cotton tee and I now don’t want to wear anything else! It’s so soft and light and comfortable I found that I almost forgot I was wearing it!  The hats design features a lot of tiny details (101 hats!) and the print quality is staggering.  The process has picked up all of the fine detail and even the tiny lettering is readable on the Top Gun and Ghostbusters hats, which is quite an achievement.  The colours are rich and accurate, and because the design is more spread out, the print material is not noticeably plasticy like it was on the other shirt.

I wanted to wear and wash the tees a few times before I wrote a full review to see how they held up to everyday use - I can say that they have withstood the trials of the washing machine and passed with flying colours.  They both still look just as good as when I removed them from their packaging, and now that they have lost that slight chemical smell that was part of the printing process, they are even better!

I’m currently waiting on tees from other sites to compare, but I don’t think they will be able to reach the same quality level as neatoshop.

I’m very pleased to finally have a couple of my own designs to wear, and would highly recommend the t-shirts - both my designs (of which there are now 50 to choose from) and the staggering number of other designs available in the neatoshop store!  Less than three months until Christmas! ;)

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New Site

Now that I have a Creative Cloud subscription, I also get access to a free Behance prosite account.  Over the next few days I shall be creating a brand new portfolio site to replace my old one.  I hope to be able to document all my newest projects, including book illustrations, animations for the comedian Richard Herring as well as new prints and card designs in the coming weeks.

Thanks for visiting my blog.

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Sometimes when you call for help, you get a wrong number...

A tee featuring 12 alternative reality Doctors!

Now up for voting on Threadless.com (click the image to visit the voting page)

Hope you like it enough to vote it a 5 and/or leave a comment,  the more popular the design is the better its chance of getting printed!

Thanks :)

[chayground]

Hollywood Hats 101 by chayground

Hollywood Hats 101 by chayground

My hollywood hats design is currently up on Teepublic.  If 30 people buy it this month then it will get made and added to the catalogue.