20 Ways Pitch

Our friend Peter Kershaw from Duchy Parade films has produced yet another fantastic film "20 Ways" and is now seeking support to complete post-production. In his own words "20 Ways is a comic satire, a metaphor that uses drama, humor and music to explore the question of immigration." Watch this video to see Peter's pitch:

 
The pitch was produced by NMFR at Santa Fe Community College and edited by Gene Mederos. Cinematography by Patrick Reid

You can find out more and offer support by visiting: http://www.indiegogo.com/20-Ways

Coffee & Cigarettes

Our Kooji Collective buddy Kelly Birg (a talented Fine Artist, Graphic Designer and Photographer to boot!) got in touch with us recently and sent us a link to her amazing sketch book:

http://www.arthousecoop.com/users/kbirg/artwork

She submitted it to the Art House Co-op's traveling sketchbook project and it's crammed full of beautiful sketches, photos and groovy patterns all based around the theme of coffee and cigarettes.

Kelly graduated with a BFA in Graphic Design from Western Michigan University in 2005, then went on to make a name for herself as a multi-disciplinary artist. We were lucky enough to meet her at SIGGRAPH (a massive conference held in the USA) the following year and we've been in touch with her ever since.

Check out her artwork on Art House Co-op and be inspired!

CF Studio Launch and The Blank Showcase

Amy and Bek A.K.A Lord Whitney invited us both to attend the launch of CF Studios, their new collaborative workspace and the exhibition 'The Blank Showcase'. They asked their guests to bring along items in response to the initials CF and the collected or created pieces were then added to the exhibition wall.

Here are a few photos from the evening:

 Here's some amusing wordplay from Johnny

 and here's Katherine's feathery fancy

...and here was our submission: Crappy Film (Plan 9 from Outer Space directed by Ed Wood)

It was great to see the creative duo in action once more and to check out their fun social experiment. The pieces on display were really quirky and imaginative and we look forward to seeing what they come up with next!

Visit Lord Whitney here: www.lordwhitney.co.uk
Find out more about the studio: www.cfstudios.co.uk

Miss You - Stuart Menzies Farrant

Check out this beautiful new song "Miss You" by our Kooji buddy, Stuart Menzies Farrant. Stuart's got himself a new profile set up on ReverbNation: http://www.reverbnation.com/stuartmenziesfarrant and Miss You is one of his most recent releases.

Stuart Menzies Farrant

Stuart's portfolio, including the mini album: Le Mal D’Afrique can be accessed at:  www.myspace.com/visionlandmusic

Singer/songwriter stuff and last album can be found here:
www.myspace.com/stuartmenziesfarrantuk

We've been chillin' to his music for years, this new track in particular has a real reggae feel to it - fantastic! We love Stuart's music and you will too!

Introducing NU:VO

Bukkie Dos Santos, one of our Kooji Buddies and long-time collective member, got in touch to show us this groovy showreel for her new venture NU:VO take a look:

Be Daring, Be Different from ART NUVO on Vimeo.
ART meets COMMERCE - A contemporary approach to Brand Vision by Nu:vo

The delivering of creative excitement and contemporary visual ideas to lifestyle and fashion clientelle.

The NU:VO CREED:
Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
-Christian Dior

What a tantalising visual feast! We can't wait to see more :D

Lord Whitney's Shop Now Open!

As a follow up to our last post our friends at Lord Whitney have just unveiled their brand spanking new shop! Take a look at these tasty treats - Scrumptious!

A Plot to Kill Lord Whitney Book - Buy Here

The Curious Circus Sideshow Character Cards - Buy Here

The Curious Circus Sideshow Screen Printed Poster - Buy Here

A Plot to Kill Lord Whitney Full Set - Buy Here

Absolutely stunning stuff for sale and just in time for Christmas too. Only the most respected of book-worms will have 'A Plot To Kill Lord Whitney' stashed on their shelves. Go get a copy! Do it now!

www.lordwhitney.bigcartel.com

A Plot To Kill Lord Whitney

We received this curious invitation (via carrier pigeon of course) cordially inviting us to attend an evening of murder, mystery and merriment. It would appear that some dastardly fiend had attempted to kill our beloved Lord Whitney!

Image © Lord Whitney

We both put on our sleuthing gear and headed straight to the scene of the crime, the Victoria Hotel in Leeds. The clues as to who'd killed the Lord appeared to be hidden amongst a photographic exhibition of 'Lord Whitney's Curious Circus Sideshow' and the book launch of 'The Plot to Kill Lord Whitney'. Not your usual crime scene but nevertheless we soldiered on determined to seek out the truth!

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth! Holmes, is that you?

Our hosts declared that "upon the hour of nine o'clock we shall reveal the detective who has fathomed the most creative but yet believable murder plot theory and award them with a special prize."

Johnny received a special mention for his theory of raging jealousy and deceit:

'I have deducted that Eric was in fact guilty of attempted murder most horrid! Driven by jealousy over little Derek's success on stage and with the ladies, he plotted to capture his vertically challenged companion in a large jar then drown him in poisoned Cognac! However, Rodney Arthur found out and ran to warn someone but tripped over Tramp the Clown, hitting his head and forgetting the whole affair!

Lord Whitney was not the intended target.'

Signed Detective Johnathan Gallagher


Lord Whitney never fail to amaze us with their creativity. A most entertaining evening! We look forward to our next invite ;)


For more about Lord Whitney follow these links:

To see their fantabulous creative workings look here: www.lordwhitney.co.uk

Read all about Lord Whitney here: http://lordwhitney.blogspot.com

Limited edition books, screen printed posters and other delights can be found within Lord Whitney's Shop: www.lordwhitney.bigcartel.com

Help!

The latest issue of the Good To Know Project is out now! Johnny and I had our collaborative doodle and submission for the topic of help featured in the zine. We talked about the friends that we've made through our collective 'Kooji Creative,' how it's been a great help to have a support network of this kind and how important it is that we share advice and information with fellow creatives.

'Kooji Creative' © Katherine Moss and Johnathan Gallagher

Check out the sneek preview on Issuu here or better yet buy a copy here :D

What sort of support do you receive as an artist? What advice would you share with fellow artists about getting help?

The Fireys

Just spotted this blog post over at Lord Whitney and a link to the photographs they took at this year's Emerging Artists Awards, at artsmix, for their 'Cabinet of Curiosities.' An amazing side show attraction style exhibit allowed us to don cool masks and get dressed up as the 'Fireys' from the film Labyrinth.

'The Fireys' © Lord Whitney http://www.lordwhitney.co.uk

Check out Lord Whitney here: www.lordwhitney.co.uk
Read their blog here: http://lordwhitney.blogspot.com

Put It In Context

Our friend Racheal from Underground Art School recently released issue 4: The Simplicity Issue, which includes a resource zine called 'Context.' We are both very honoured to have our artwork (a collaborative piece we called 'Learning Your ABCs') shown in Context Zine. Check out our promotional video to find out more:

Click the TV Screen to Play/ Pause

Context: A Resource 'Zine


Underground Art School Magazine Issue 4: Simplicity

Both Underground Art School's Issue 4: Simplicity and Context Zine are available to buy now! So go on! Do it! BUY IT NOW!!

The Pikaland Community

As a follow-up to our last post, we're really pleased to hear that our friend Amy from Pikaland (a blog about living the illustrated life) has just launched The Pikaland Community! It's a really cool place to make new friends, chat about all things creative and collaborate. The PikaPackage Project is organised there too :D

Go check it out, get signed up and get stuck in!

Stop Thief!

A little while ago I spotted this post about plagiarism on a really cool illustration site called Pikaland. As any creative knows plagiarism and copyright theft of any kind is really serious and something we all think about and often take great steps to prevent. The blog post really got us thinking and so we ended up writing a very long (eek!) reply about a horrible case of plagiarism we came up against last year. After posting our reply I re-read the post and realised it was going to be published in a really cool zine called the 'Good to Know Project.' What's that I hear our readers cry!? Well, "The Good to Know Project is full of advice + inspiration from artists/illustrators/designers on creativity, business and life."

It's great that something so positive came from something so negative, not only did we get our post published in the zine along with a couple of doodles, we got chatting with the creator of Pikaland, Amy Ng, and were so inspired by her work and creativity that we added her as one of our Kooji buddies in the collective.


'Stop Thief!' © Katherine Moss
'A Precious Burden' © Johnathan Gallagher

It's hard to believe that there are people actually out there willing to steal other's people's hard work and worse yet when you discover it's someone you know. Fortunately one of the great things about the internet and social networking in particular is that the culprit can quickly be spotted and have their shame publicly blasted about on the net.


Good to Know #7: Plagiarism

The full copy of the Good to Know Zine issue #7: Plagiarism is available to read online on Issuu here. Better yet, go grab yourselves a paper copy of of the issue here and read it in it's full physicality!

Check out past issues of the zine here.

Bounty Huntress

Today sees the release of collective member, Ste O'Brien's online comic, Bounty Huntress! We've been looking forward to seeing it hit the shelves (web) and now the wait is over. Check it out yourself here.

Bounty Huntress follows the exploits of Seisha Djynn, a deadly bounty hunter with her own ideas of justice (as long as there's a fat pay check at the end). Make sure you click on the TWC link to help support what's sure to be an epic series!

You can keep up to date with Bounty Huntress news on the BulletDollar blog here.

Masters Show gets DOM-inated!

Collective member and expert dancer Dominic invited us over to Patrick Stewart's fine Uni to view the Masters end of year show. Once we had sorted ourselves out with free booze we took a look around the exhibits which covered all kinds of creative design disciplines from 3D vis and textiles to VJ motion graphics and graphic design.


Dom's project explored the design challenge of finding fun and creative ways to deliver scientific data, perhaps to be published in book form. In celebration of his achievement we awarded him with the grand prize, a whole Kinder Egg Surprise!

Apparently the Kinder offspring is now on guard duty?? Well you wouldn't want to mess with him ^^ now would ya!?


It was ace meeting up with Dom's chums and great to chat with Melissa again. We ended up dancing the night away (some really top-notch dance moves we might add, though not enough robot for my liking).


Unfortunately we didn't spot Picard whilst touring the exhibition :(

Underground Art School

Earlier this year I was reading through doodlage, a fantastic website about all things doodley, and came across this blog post about a new zine called Underground Art School. This isn't just any magazine though, it's made by some incredibly creative and friendly peeps and it's jam-packed with the most beautiful and inspiring artwork you've ever seen.


We were hooked immediately and planned on contacting them to ask about how we could contribute, they beat us to it though and messaged us to say hello after we befriended them on FaceBook.

You can befriend them too. Watch this video to learn more :D

With dancing skills like this we had no choice but to ask Racheal Anilyse (whose mind Underground Art School was envisioned within) if we could promote her work through the collective.

The Current Issue 'The SketchBook' is on sale now through MagCloud, you can preview the magazine on Issuu too. I just got all three copies in print last week as a birthday pressie from Johnny and they're SoOOooo good! I did have a sneeky peek pre-birthday, but only because they sang to me from inside the parcel!!

The first issue has tons of affirmation type in it too to make you feel positive and all warm inside, ahhh :)

Open publication - Free publishing - More underground

and if that's not enough you can get that warm squiggly feeling all 365 days of the year with this cool calendar:

Open publication - Free publishing - More underground

Entitled: 'Cultivating Community through the Creative Process' issue 2 is just as ace as the first and really has loads to get your artistic chompers into:

Open publication - Free publishing - More issue 2

SketchBooks! We love ours and have so many now that they've formed their own colony and are breeding in some far away galaxy. We call them the SketchBookonians...

Open publication - Free publishing - More underground

We're both advocates of creative collaboration and community and Underground Art School Magazine is right up our street for this kind of stuff, we just love it. We read the UAS Blog regularly and so should you :D They also have a pool on Flickr, you can watch them on Vimeo or tweet at them on Twitter if you're into bird calls... tweet tweet ;)

570 Media Launch Party

Bukkie from the Collective celebrated the launch of 570 Media's new website in style, with a party held in Leeds, Old Broadcasting House. As well as presenting some of the artist's work featured on the site, guests were entertained with funky tunes by DJ Silvao with the Element dance troupe, a catwalk of models strutting their stuff with some up and coming fashion and who could forget the jelly beans! Yes there were many sweets consumed that evening :)


We also managed to squeeze in some mingling amongst the guests (between scoffing jelly beans and crisps) and met a great couple: Dominic Palmer and Melissa March, who run the social enterprise University of the Fourth Age together. Dominic is a creative who like ourselves mixes his Traditional Fine Art style with his Digital Art work through his Masters degree in Graphic Design. It's just great to meet another creative who crosses both disciplines like this. Be sure to check out his portfolio here.

Kooji Meets Frazer Irving

This month's Creative Networks saw Illustrator and Graphic Artist Frazer Irving charting his climb to the top in the comic art industry and several members of Kooji Creative were on hand to see what he had to say. Bukkie, Steve and Stuart joined us as the event for a collective get together.

Apart from an amazing presentation of Frazer's artwork, from early experiments to the fantastic and varied portfolio of work including 2000AD, Marvel and his own projects such as Gutsville, he had a great deal to say about the comic art and illustration industries.



From meager beginnings jumping between work as a security guard, selling sex toys and various office jobs he eventually managed to make a break through with 2000AD, introducing his uniquely dark and often surreal style.



To say his presentation was inspiring wouldn't begin to do it justice. I was hooked from start to finish and walked away with even more determination to try new techniques and produce new artwork. Not only for paid work but for fun which Frazer mentioned is all important yet so easily forgotten about.