London Live TV interview.

Even more exposure on the scratch card project. I got asked to go onto London Live for a TV interview.

Have a watch here.

Buzzfeed article.

Woah.

Mad exposure for my scratch card project.

It was featured on Buzzfeed! Crazy!

Making my own luck - starting from scratch.

Aloha!

I was staring at my green tea one morning and it occurred to me. Not only is Saturn fast returning, but it's been a good while since I've done any sort of interesting project. So I decided I wanted to be proactive and do a 'social design experiment' (ohhh err).

When I graduated from art school nearly 5 years ago, we were in the middle of a toxic recession.
Job applying was extremely hard, tedious, depressing and down right nearly impossible for creative types. Despite sending out numerous CV's and portfolios, you would rarely get anything in return. Even getting a reply in the form of a template rejection email was a rare treat.

At the time it encouraged me to go and do my own thing - freelancing and gallery work. These days the economy in general seems in much better shape and jobs are now more readily available. I figured it was a good time to approach this again in a creative way, unique to Jamie Kyle.

Anyone who knows me well knows I'm a sucker for a scratch card. I'm not a betting man in the slightest but as soon as I scratch away that silver foil, I go all giddy inside! I've won okay amounts in the past, the most being £100. I even won £40 on two consecutive cards. That was immense. Even when you win £1 it's exciting. This got me thinking, what if you had a scratch card that you'd always win on? Instead of winning money, what if you won a person? What if that person was an exciting creative?
"What a great prize!" I hear you shout!

Well, that's the concept of my idea - scratch away at a scratch card to reveal my portfolio. Interaction is always a strong tool to grab one's attention, even more so if it shows initiative. I'll be making the whole scratch card from, erm, scratch!

With scratch cards, notice how the odds of winning are displayed on the back, which I feel will ring true in this experiment - the odds of any sort of reply or interest are probably against me, making me very much a human scratch card.

In this case, I'm literally making my own luck.

I'll be sending these out to all sorts of companies: global, corporate, design, illustration, editorial and music to spread my odds (pun intended). I'll send these all out via post, everyone loves receiving post don't they?

Depending on the replies and the amount of interaction I receive, I'd like to display the results - perhaps as an infographic - but we'll cross that bridge if and when we come to it.

Let's see who takes a gamble (Pun also intended).

I've worked on this project for the past 2 months, updating this blog post as I've gone along so apologies if tenses are a bit all over the place. 

So, here's the skinny - the card stock and design I'll have no problem with. It's the scratch-able silver foil which will be the challenge. I managed to find this helpful online step by step guide how to do it with basically uses washing up liquid and acrylic paint. Photos below:

I tried the mixture with two types of paint to see which was better suited, I wanted to avoid any colour other than grey/silver to give a more realistic silver foil finish. When I was at home for Xmas my Mother had at a hand the perfect metallic silver that I needed.

Thanks to a suggestion by my Father I even tried a silicone gel to see if that would have a more beneficial finish/setting quality.

Mixed results, the silver paint coming through nicely but definitely needs several more coats. Promising all the same.

Decided to stick to the silver and introduce the silicone gel to a batch (the sample on the right above). As you can see, it did not take at all, it just congealed with the paint and didn't spread at all in the slightest, which was a shame. Oh well, I'll miss the strong ammonia smell.

Few more coats later and I decided to scratch away. The finished looked good, but as soon as I started scratching it all went to hell. It's definitely down to the coated paper, I have a feeling it absorbs too much of the liquid and would prefer a surface that lets it sit on top of it better, either by using a gloss or matt finish with a thicker stock.

Found a matt stock at 160gsm which was thinner than I wanted, printed onto to it to give a test run.

A few coats and a scratch later and really great results. The mega downside to this though is that once I apply the foil mixture it goes really wavy. Need to try and flatten it or find a thicker stock to accommodate the moisture and at the same time be thin enough to be able to be printed through my printer.

A teaser:

 

Mysterious...

I settled on a garish design fairly quickly, threw in a couple of foxes to keep it relative to me. In the picture above: Left is 160gsm card, middle is 300gsm card with the scratch-away answer on a separate piece of 160gsm which is stuck on top  of the thicker stock and on the right is 300gsm.

All foiled up.

Worked on all 3! Pleasantly surprised by this. The least convincing card is the thickest stock which is the bottom sample in the picture above, it was practically tearing apart when I was doing it. But the 'compromise' card in the middle is my favourite. Overall, this will mean a bit more work for me to do but glad it's worked.

I also decided to try it on a gloss finish stock, which ultimately would be a closer match to an actual scratch card aesthetic. Despite the much better aesthetic it became too wavy for a finish product so I'll combine the two stocks = Print the silver foiled answer on the matt stock and the scratch card on the gloss.  Hurrah!

Getting down to print.

First coats.

About 4 coats in.

Looking good.

Ta daaaaaaaa.

Corr.

All addressed and stamped.

Each one will have a shiny tuppence too. I'm practically giving money away!

So here we are. All ready to send. 52 envelopes. So like I mentioned earlier, I'll be sending them to different types of companies with the likes of: corporate, design, editorial, illustration, advertising and music. In all honesty I'm just really intrigued to see who will take the bait and get in contact.

If you're an agency or company who came across this post thanks to the scratch card, make sure you say hi! Drop me an email at jkdraws@gmail.com with your thoughts.


If you're a pal or kind stranger, I urge you to share this post too. G'wan, pretty please.


Let's see what happens!


Until next time.

Is blogging dead?

I was thinking about this topic the other day when I realised about this blog and the ever decreasing frequency that I'll post something onto it. It came to my attention that blogs in general of all genres have really gone downhill in terms of popularity, quality and frequency.

So is the art of blogging on the decline and infact, dead?

Warning - lots of words.

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Blogging was in its heyday back in 2006 when it started to become something of a well known and exciting tool (contextual note: Facebook was just being born around here). The idea of self publishing something of your own content without the need of making and/or building a website from scratch (which from experience is an incredibly laborious task in itself) was exciting. It was basically a shortcut to internet exposure. Facebook hit the mainstream around Autumn/Winter of 2006 and from then on the rest is history. Blogs and blog hosting sites existed hand in hand with Facebook for a good while but with the ever increasing size and power of Facebook it was only a matter of time it squeezed out other competition. One notable feature in particular in recent times was Facebook Pages - it really shot down and squeezed out blogs and the like. Not to say blogs are extinct altogether - I know a handful of very good blogs still pottering about but the point is that they're ceasing to exist. It's a combination of not only Internet Monopoly (I quite want to say Internet dictatorship, as it actually is one but it sounds too strong a word so I'll hold back this time) but also quite frankly, our own naivety to trust a sole company with all of our personal information, photos and details about every aspect of our life.

Facebook caters to all these different services for us at our convenience and we don't question it. The saying 'comfort leads to complacency' rings true here and in turn reflects our own attitudes and behaviours in a way we never have before in terms of socialising. We dumbed down big time, yo.

Now I'm an avid user of both Facebook and Twitter, there are numerous pros and cons to both which we could easily dive into but I want to look at the bigger picture. We're all too heavily reliant on these and other social networks for approval and validation, it may be a sign of the times that we as a species are becoming more selfish, self centred and generally self functioning. In the film Wall-E, remember the obese motorised humans in that? It's quite apt and honestly something you can see happening for real.

I'll use some metaphors now! Do you rely on just one friend who takes up all of your time? No, of course you don't - you have lots of friends for different needs! Do you buy all your food and drink from one shop? No! Do you use the same shoes for every occasion? Don't be silly! Same rules apply here for internet.

Another stigma with Facebook is that if you're not on it, there's something wrong with you. People who aren't on Facebook are usually too old for technology and that's fair enough, but the majority of people who aren't on Facebook are (from my experience) more likely to be intelligent. Most people assume it's weird to be different as it is, not having a Facebook applies too. You assume individuals are weird axe murderers or trying to hide something if they don't have an online profile showcasing drunken photos and Farmville.
I like to compare this to Plato's allegory/Neo's awakening in The Matrix - it's that moment of self realisation that you've been watching the shadows on the wall and have been quite content with this - this is what drives people away from Facebook and quite frankly that's a very valid reason.

In many ways blogging isn't dead, it's just evolved. As technology evolves with the times, iPhone's getting bigger etc, blogging takes a new shape too. If you consider blogging is defined as a website that is regularly updated and written with an informal and conservational style - that's exactly what a lot of websites and social networks are like these days. Blogging has been absorbed like a blob into other elements. Blobbing.

A very good friend of mine once described the difference between science/technology and the arts. It's to do with their 'end goals'. Imagine science/technology shaped like a pyramid - it's striving to one point, a cure, better efficiency, an answer etc. That's the top of the pyramid, the end goal.
Now, the arts is similar but its an upside down shaped pyramid instead. The answers and ideas expand the higher you go and branch out further. An answer leads to another question. It's not to say that science doesn't expand in answers the deeper you get, but their end goal is clearly a lot more black and white. So in theory, has the internet become more of a technological business model than a creative one? Or both? Or the other way round?

The point I'm drilling home is we all need to stop being so dependant on social media (He says, as he's about to post this on Facebook - oh you hypocrite Jamie!). If you keep looking at a screen all day you miss the mystery of life. Go and get lost, you may find yourself.

TTFN

Sleep.