10/18/2023
Welcome back to another issue of the blackhat Buzz. This week, well heck… I don’t even know what all happened in the studios this week. I mean, I can see the studio calendar, but that doesn’t mean I’m able to keep tabs on our engineers and clients. I actually live 2.5 hours away from everyone and do the majority of my work remotely. I get that good mountain air without all the tourism in the San Bernardino mountains. In exchange for my excess of trees and unhealthy amount of bears, I lose out on a lot of the best parts of the studio life. Unfortunately for Matt and Rhey, that means I get to pester them multiple times per week to see what they’ve been up to.
What I’ve gathered for you this week is nothing short of…well, normal. There was a show last Saturday with Paint the Town Rad! Then on Sunday there was a recording session with Ian Seabolt to lay down some violin for his new single “Nostalgia”. Violinist Jas was in the studio recording for Ian’s new track. We hadn’t worked with her before, but I hear she was delightful.
This week in the art cave…
I have been focused on churning through design proofs for both the Loose Affiliates and Troy Story Band. They are each ordering new lines of shirts for their merch tables. I’ve been toying around with an old flowing hair logo we made for the Affiliates several years ago. It was a black and white design that appeared against a groovy floral background that we had printed as stickers. The affiliates still had some available the last time I saw their merch table. Originally the flowing hair design was to be printed as a stand-alone image, but Connie asked to see it with some groovy flowers like the sticker. It is now mostly drawn up and ready for approval and vectoring before being sent off to the awesome Storm House Printing to be put on some lovely new ladies scoop neck tops.
Mock up of the new Loose Affiliates Lady logo.
I’ve been a bit stuck on a sticker design for Troy Story Band. I ran with a neon sign idea and it just kept feeling like it was missing something no matter what colors we changed or how many times we tweaked it. As of Monday evening, we still had not settled on any of them and are probably going in a completely different direction with the design. Luckily the work I had done with the neon light theme was not the most time consuming and I was not in love with any of the looks or color combos we tried. Sometimes the vision is superior to the execution, but trying despite possible failure is how we learn and grow our skills. I definitely had to walk away from that design for a day. Tomorrow is a new day and I will try a completely different approach and see if I can actually get something workable done.
I didn’t hate this one, but the tri-color lettering in this combo just screamed toothpaste. I can’t unsee it.
I called this one Happy Days because it gives old school jukebox energy….
To be honest, I’ve been a bit under the weather this week. It’s been a struggle to keep up with everything going on, especially with my home life, and all this extra work for me came up so suddenly. Matt’s hoping to finish up working on the Troy Story EP in the next few weeks. Rhey’s got her Gallery nights at Frogee’s coming up early next month. In the meantime it’s business as usual for all of us at blackhat Studios. Until next time…
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