Colouring in is the new rock and roll

Colouring in books for adults are the latest hip trend some selling millions of copies, a colleague has even seen a typography related one (which is maybe a little too hipster). At first i could not see the appeal of colouring in which i thought was something i grew out of when i was about 8 then i saw the Haynes Cutaway colouring in book...

Yes cutaway drawings of cars from Haynes manuals to colour in! I got the book today along with a pack of coloured pencils and happily began colouring away. As others have said it is relaxing and takes you away from the cares of the world and also gets you away from technology. I recommend doing some colouring in. Even typography. As for my first project well it had to be the Lada Riva which was my first car...

Leeds College of Art

Lovely mosaic on the Leeds College of Art Vernon St building. Its still an important part of the college's visual identity.

New waterways map!

I've finally got around to transferring my Canal Tube Map into the right format for the graphics program i use nowadays (Photoshop) and while doing so i decided to update it a bit... and then a bit more and in the end quite a lot! So proudly presenting version 3.0 of what is now a Canal and Navigable River Map.

I first created the map a number of years ago, seeking to create a Birmingham Canal Navigations map in the style of the London Tube Map, over time the map has expanded to include canals like the Stratford-upon-Avon and navigable rivers in the West Midlands. The style has also deviated from the London tube map somewhat.

Version 3.0 has the following updates:

• New font used for titles, no reason for changing really apart from the fact i really like the typewriter font now used! Its a digital version of the actual font of my Brother typewriter in fact.
• Amends to a number of canals including Titford and W&E.
• Rivers now more clearly shown
• A few extra places shown

I hope you find it useful or at least mildly diverting... 

Free vintage posters

Its sites like this which make the internet so wonderful, Free Vintage Posters does exactly what it says on the tin. It has hundreds of vintage and period posters available for download. I love so many of them but my favourite are the Art Deco designs. Its the sort of site that can drag you in and before you realise it you've spent ages browsing the available riches...

The Rootless Forest

The Rootless Forest is a project by Beth Derbyshire, a fellow of Birmingham Institute of Art & Design in conjunction with the Canal and River Trust and the Arts Council England (who are providing the funding). The project involves planting a mini-forest on a barge and then travelling along the canals around Birmingham and Walsall. The forest plays the sound of "recorded stories about adjustment, homecoming and relocation, told by two families from the military and UK Afghan communities".

The project launches next Friday and will travel the canals for 6 weeks before residing at New Art Gallery in Walsall until October. The project has a website here where you can see the latest progress. The project is using the unpowered barge 505560 which i photographed at Brindley Place (where the journey will start) back in June.

Tanya

Earlier i cleaned up the mesmerising painting that is at the top of my stairs, a print by J.H. Lynch called Tanya apparently according to this website on the artist. J.H. Lynch was a British artist who sold thousands of prints of exotic looking ladies in the 1960s and beyond. These paintings might be considered kitsch these days (usually by hipster idiots) but i think they have a real feeling and soul about them.

My Tanya was passed down to me from my Grandmother who had the painting in the hall of her house ever since the print had been bought sometime in the late 60s and i always loved this painting. After my Nan passed away i just had to have Tanya (no one else wanted her anyway) and she has been in my house for the last 10 years. I can see her as i open my bedroom door so she is usually the first person i see every day, and what a lovely sight she truly is!

The art of post-it art

This week i got an album by Tender Forever, and pretty good it is too. One thing i noted immediately though (apart from the fact the CD seems to want to kill my Macbook's drive) is that the title of the album on the cover had been done using post-it notes.

And very cute too... the post-it notes of course. This reminded me of a similar thing i did at work a number of years ago. Every year each office competes with their Christmas decoration display, usually though in our office we takes ages to do anything because we are a) so busy to bother with such trivialities b) can't be arsed.

However a couple of years ago i decided to put up a decoration but do something very different as befitting someone in Creative Services. I created a Christmas tree out of post-it notes.

Did it create a stir? Well it certainly generated some comments. We did not win the competition though as apparently its better going to Poundland and turning your office into a tack-fest, not that i am bitter of course.

Last year i also went all creative with post-it notes though this time i decided to take it to the next dimension... i went 3-D. I created candles and a nativity scene out of various pieces of cardboard and decorated these items with post-it notes and pieces of felt. You see the humble post-it note is the most important invention in human civilisation since the invention of fire. They are just so useful, i do all my financial modelling using them for example. Sometimes you can even use them to leave yourself a note too.

Who was Zara?

On the wall of my bedroom hangs a painting, it has been in the family a long time, for years it hung on the wall in my Grandmother's house and when she died the painting passed over to me (or rather i saved it from the skip). The painting is not famous or valuable (i suspect) but i love it, and i wish i knew more about it.

The painting is very simple, showing a number of sail boats in a bay somewhere. A critic would probably think the painting was rubbish but it takes me away to a more relaxing place, maybe a sleepy bay somewhere that smells of fish. Where the painting came from i do not know, i assume my Nan bought it on holiday somewhere back in the 50s and 60s, it does seem to have the air of a print from that time.

Its signed "Zara", of course Googling "Zara painting" does not get me very far, does anyone know any good ways of trying to find out more about this artist and maybe what other work she did?