Matthew Osborne, CD, 2004

Cover.

I first met Matt in the mid-90s at one of his gigs where some musician friends of mine were also playing (I don't remember anything more specific than that) and I was impressed by his voice and guitar playing, but even moreso that one guy with an acoustic guitar could produce such a full sound. Matt liked my own work, too, and I was extremely happy to have him play at a bunch of my art openings around Toronto in the following years, and I provided the layout & design and cover illustration for his "Man Versus Concrete" CD in 2001.

He died in his sleep in April 2004, but he had finished recording this CD. I don't know what title Matt had intended for it, but his supportive and generous friends and family, who were determined to make sure it was completed and made available to the public, decided to simply name it "Matthew Osborne" (initially "All the Rest"). Everyone rallied and worked hard to complete this CD as it was our way of paying tribute and giving thanks to Matt. I hope he would have liked what we did...

Goodbye, Matt Osborne

A Community Mourns One of its Brightest Artists
by Brent Hagerman

Read more memories here.

Opened cover showing full painting
(which I flipped for the CD; the original is below)

Osborne's Fine Music

22" x 30", watercolour, 2004, private collection

The concept of package design was that, somewhere, a shop existed for decades where Matthew Osborne sold great music.

Matt was a perfectionist and I'm sure it would have bugged him (the way it bugs me) that the text on the cover is shifted to the left like it is. That's my fault: my initial digital files were aligned perfectly, but they got shifted over by the time they went to print due to some digital instability or incompatibility or whatever. I should have made a PDF to lock in everything. At least everything else (sort of; see below) and all of the liner notes and lyrics pages turned out well.

I've employed the idea of the full painting (or some aspect) being fully revealed on Squirm's "Cold" and Uncle Seth's "Lame Suburban Poetry" CDs. My watercolour painting (of a shop in Unionville, Ontario) was quite large, but I can't remember the exact dimensions.

The vintage store sign with wear and tear was drawn in ink, then coloured digitally.
The cartoon of Matt is by Rik Emmett of Triumph.

The CD itself.

This design was meant to evoke vinyl records of old (but note that it's digital hi-fi) and also sports wear and tear.

A couple of inside references here: "Underwater Records" (barely legible, just below the black circle) isn't real, but does take its name from Matt's 1998 CD. And underneath that, Matt's hometown of Kitchener-Waterloo.

The image above is from my digital file, but when it was finally printed on the discs, they used some weird metallic ink or paint for the green which makes it excessively shiny and difficult to look at. It also makes it look very modern (despite the intentional scratches) and not retro as I intended.

The CD tray illustration.

We went with clear plastic for the tray, so I drew an old-style cash register (in ink, then coloured digitally) to continue the music shop theme. "62.19" is the total running time of the CD, which directly ties in to the "receipt" on the back of the package (see below).

Back of the tray card.

The photo on the left was taken by a colleague, Wanda Walasinski, who shot it on Queen Street in Toronto. A stretch of street was dressed accordingly for a period film being shot there. This photo was absolutely perfect and I'm glad she allowed its use for the CD. I matched the colour of the shop in my painting to the teal in this pic.

The receipt contains a number of inside references (as well as actual, useful information about the CD): the "Check" number is an inside joke between me and a friend (Hi, Attila! Welcome to my blog!); "Station 004" is either a reference to this being Matt's fourth CD or the year 2004 (or both); the date is my birthday (in 2004) and the time is a Rush reference (2112); followed, obviously, by the track list with their respective running times, and then the total running time of the CD.

Axel Foley's Chevy Nova (1/25 scale model)

Multiple tributes, here. I remember first seeing Beverly Hills Cop on video at my friend Chris K's house, 'cause his family had a VCR and we'd watch tons of movies (and record music videos) together. The summer of 1984 was a special time for us (having created a strong bond in school since Grade 6 a few years before), going on biking adventures around the 'burbs and into the city, etc., and home video played an important role from then until I moved to the opposite end of Scarborough just before we started high school. We liked the movie a lot, both of us fans of Eddie Murphy from his Saturday Night Live days. I don't think I'd seen the movie since then (it would have been 1985, probably summer, since the movie came out in late 1984) and I became curious to see if it still held up. It did. It does. I found Murphy as charming as ever and the comedy (and even the action) holds up very well and its very re-watchable and very entertaining. Beverly Hi...

Small Pond Arts Puppet Wagon (1/24 scale model)

I dreamed up the Small Pond Shipyard for my fanciful scratch-built sci-fi airship creations (which still only exist in sketch/Photoshop mock-up form (and boxes in my closet) for now), but more and more ideas kept coming ( this wind turbine , for example, will be part of a rather elaborate diorama I'll be working on this winter). But the Puppet Wagon was a sleeper surprise, to be sure. [Really, though, I don't know why I was so eager to build this right away since I was planning to slowly develop my modelling skills with simpler builds first and the work my way up to more complicated projects.] Not all parts were used/needed. Most of these ideas have come from watching modelling videos online, and when I saw a review of this sweet little Japanese "Ramen Shop" food truck by Aoshima (right-side drive!), my brain started making jokes about customizing it to the weird food truck ideas I'd been posting on Facebook. But the more I thought about what the co...

U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-D (1/1400 scale model)

Seven decades after Kirk. I'd been hooked on Star Trek since I was a wee lad in the 1970s, watching reruns of the original series from the '60s, and I enjoyed the movies that came out afterward. When a new series was announced to debut in 1987, I was excited and interested, even though I felt the subtitle "The Next Generation" was cheesy. Nearly 30 years later, I've definitely gotten used to it (but "TNG" is easier to say and type), but I still find it kinda bland. Anyway, the show had fresh new technology and a spanking new design for its main ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise , NCC-1701-D, now the flagship of the Federation. Andrew Probert 's design took some getting used to for me; it had the same basic elements of the original Enterprise (saucer, neck, cylinder, and two cylindrical engines on pylons), but the shapes and volumes were distributed differently, weirdly. Everything looked squished and soft. The organic look of this new ship had me ...

The Naked Silo

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