I’ve always said that I can’t draw to save my life, and I really envy people who can draw; they don’t have to worry about sets and locations like the rest of us. I accepted an assignment from the Kwani Trust to illustrate some stories for one of their upcoming publications the other day. The original plan was to make some sort of photo collage thingie – but the stories turned out to be quite abstract; photography wouldn’t cut it (how do you illustrate a story about lovers who like playing chess and having abstract conversations in a bathtub?).

So – with deadlines looming – I borrowed a tablet from Mbithi (who only gave it to me because he’d borrowed a Cintiq from Daniel who was on holiday) and started playing around with it – these are what came out. I’m probably jumping the gun here, blogging about them before the client has actually seen them (hope they’ll approve).

Excitement! Obviously, with my less than abundant drawing skills, I’m cheating a lot – using lots of photographic references. It’s probably not ‘real’ drawing. I’d call it sketch-trace-drawing or something. Mad experiments shall follow – to the drawing board (excuse the lame pun)!

Shooting a catalog sounded like it’d be boring, but Sandra (the model) and I spent an afternoon ooh’ing and aah’ing at a coming-soon new collection by Kepha Maina – it’s all very curvy and sleek, and should be out in a little while – thought I should share.

The STINGO team and I had a very eventful photo shoot (I’m really enjoying the STINGO shoots, by the way) about a month ago – we drove out to Magadi with colorful menswear from Kepha Maina (one of our team-mates) with a grand plan to shoot in the wild with our model – Alwy (who’s awesome). For a start, one of our cars broke down on the way there, and we were towed to the location (not the grand entrance we would have liked – ).

The location looked very different from what we’d imagined, but we recovered and shot. The way back was just as adventurous; we had to keep stopping to re-attach the tow-line (which was a long piece of ‘bladder’), and then darkness fell and the tow-car stalled, and we had to exchange alternators several times.

Anyway, long story short; we did get back (dusty and irritable: see our frantic tweets on STINGO’s Twitter page), and I remember asking if the photos we had were worth the trouble. Here are some of the photos (see the whole set at STINGO) – what do you think?

And here’s some behind the scenes photos:

We really were in the middle of nowhere.

Sunny and Kepha messing around with Alwy.

Kangai “grooms” Alwy (she says when it’s a guy it’s called “grooming”, not makeup).

Despite appearances (on this blog, anyway) I have been working! I’m happy to introduce STINGO; a collaboration between old and new friends like Kangai Mwiti (makeup), Kepha Maina (fashion design) and Lucille Kahara (production); and Sunny Dolat (photographer/stylist/casting director/ball-of-energy).

Stingo is part fashion blog, part photo experiment, part workshop. We’ll make up the rules as we go. We’ll see how it goes…

The good folks at the Goethe-Institut Nairobi asked me to help them design the logo, graphic elements and the event space of the first of the BLNRB-NRBLN concerts in Nairobi. The BLNRB-NRBLN is a project that intends to bring together the electronic music and hip-hop scenes from Berlin and Nairobi respectively.

Find out more at the Goethe-Institut website, or on their Facebook page. Their first concert was held at Club Undecided in Westlands, on Saturday the 27th of March, and it featured performances by Modeselektor, Ukoo Flani, Jahcoozi and Abbas among others.

I stopped doing freelance design work, but this seemed fun – created using stroked lines and lots of displacement mapping in Photoshop, and using projected visualizations, UV blacklight, blue and green lighting for the space (and a healthy dose of panic about the rain’s effect on all the DIY wiring we put up). It turned out OK, in the end.

You may have noticed that I haven’t done many photo shoots in the past few months (long story). In January this year, the people at the We The Change Foundation asked me to photograph a tiny nursery school in Mathare which needed some help to keep going.

I was hesitant about it, because I’ve always felt I’m not very good with documentary photography. Anyhow, I ended up doing it – went to Mathare with just one camera: no lights, no fancy wireless triggers and this is what came of it.

I was going through my archives, and I found the original files I used to create the album cover for Just A Band‘s first album, “Scratch To Reveal”. I still meet people who ask me how the arm was done, so I thought I should post these bits and pieces up.

The arm belonged to my good friend Leni, who’s always game for random shoots, bless him. He’s very skinny, so his arm is worryingly bony. The wrist-band is an old (and very dirty) prop I bought for a shoot I did long ago.

Then I took a couple of photos of cables bunched up together – Firewire, USB, whatever…

Then I chopped the arm photo in the middle, and roughed up the ends using Adobe Photoshop’s Displace filter and lots of dodge/burning to make the ends look like they were ripped apart.

From there, it was a matter of placing the cable photos in the middle section, followed by lots of dodging, burning, cloning and scaling to make the light, shadows and placement look realistic.

Ta-da! Album cover! I’ve since been accused of being morbid, which is only half-true.

Also enjoyed shooting the 32 very nice (and very flexible) kids over at the Africa Yoga Project, run by Paige – the calmest person I know on this planet.

- which stands for Eyes. Lips. Face. I like that name. Anyway, did a quickie shoot for them on Wednesday.

It’s been a long time since I designed anything – I’d been under pressure to make the album cover for Just A Band’s new album – 82, and match the tone of the new music (much lighter, more accessible? You’ll decide). After many ho-hum tries, this is the version that everyone in the band seemed to like at first sight. So, here we go. It’ll be out on the 17th of August (I hear), and the printing is less DIY this time, so it might look better. Fingers crossed. Feedback welcome as always.

More thumbnails follow: