Nonsensical Spam Project: Bravo

Bonjour! Another nonsensical spam illustration for your perusal and satisfaction. Aha. This one is for the rather wonderfully stupid comment, "Bravo, this brilliant phrase is necessary just by the way". What brilliant phrase? Bravo for what exactly? and why just? Nonsense, I hear you cry. Well it is.

I wanted to do a type-y illustration this time, with lots of fun whimsy lettering. I haven't used victorian etching illustrations (copyright free! ching!) for aaages, not since my recipe book, a la look here, and I forgot how much fun they are! I wasn't entirely sure what the imagery would be for this but the grammar of the sentence just lent itself to upper-class, victorian type speaking, don't you think? So I dug out some very random, very nonsensical etchings and I think it's turned out quite well. I started with just the camel being weighed on the scales and a gramophone, then thought the gramophone speaker thing could look tres random as a ram's horns. Yes. Nonsense abounds! I think I might sneak the odd victorian strangeness into more of my work, I have a couple of books stacked full of these things that I can scan in and use. Hooray amazon.

I wasn't entirely sure of the background, I knew I needed a bit of texture but then it also looked good just plain white. I'm still not sure. I always do more. Maybe I should start doing less is more. But I like more, in general, of stuff. More stuff.

So I've just published the original comment (I keep em locked away until I actually use them).
The original comment was posted for this post right here. Which is a massive coincidence, I've just realised it's the same post I just linked to, with the victorian etchings. I didn't notice until just now. It must be fate! How weird.

You can see the other illustrations in the Nonsensical Spam Project here.

Nonsensical Spam Project: Let's take our chance together...

One of the very first nonsensical spam comments I got was this one. 'Let's take our chance together to get rid of nastiness of the life'. Strangely sad, I thought. Sort of lonely. So here's the illustration I came up with to accompany it. It made me think of one side of a conversation, like you hear when people are on the phone. The grammatical error just made it all the more sad, kind of childlike actually. I almost went on a more naive style for this, but I'm really happy how this came out. Haven't done anything collagey/scribbly like this since my Seven Sins project.

It feels great to have some new work done. Soo great. Photoshop, how I have missed thee.

Still thinking of a better project title =/ Read about the beginnings of the project here.

Green Eggs and Spam

I've been getting a ton of spam comments to my blog for a while now:

As you can see, it's mainly in Chinese. Which is annoying. Well, spam is just annoying in general. And, strangely, it never used to be like this. I never used to get any spam comments. (I never used to get any comments at all...) but all of a sudden, a few certain posts are getting attacked by this randomness. Sigh. Good job I approve all my comments first though =/

However, some comments are not so unintelligible. Sometimes I get an actual sentence, either string together by somebody in a foreign country using an internet translator so it comes across as near nonsense, or by some crazy spam bot, I don't know. But I love them! Really strange, prophetic almost, phrases that seem to mean nothing and yet kind of fascinate me. I'm not entirely sure why, they're just crap really, but it gets a chuckle out of me.

And then I had a little inspiration moment and thought, I could make some great illustrations from these. So this is my new project.

I've got about 5 comments sitting there that could be vaguely useful, so I'm starting there. After I've done an illustration for each one, I'll just wait until I get another good bit of spam, and so on. So there'll be no schedule to this project; if and when I get a good nonsensical sentence, I'll do a new image. Should be interesting, if nothing else :)

I'm working on the first one right now. Still need a good title for the project though, can't just call it 'Spam Project'. Hmmm. I'll get back to you on that.

I'm definitely not the first person to do something like this, other awesome spam related projects out there are:

Linzie Hunter's Spam Project -

Elliott Burford: Spam -

I'll probably come across a few more on my travels. Nice stuff :)