Ricky Trickartt is a graphic artist who can barely contain his creativity. Over the past 15 years, he has developed and delivered hundreds of unique record covers and packaging designs. Ricky has created artwork for clients like BBC Radio 1 and Red Bull, and directs the visual output of the renowned independent electronic music label Hospital Records.
To find out a little more about his work, we asked Ricky the following questions:
What inspires your work?
I love making things, and am constantly dreaming up new ideas. Alley Cat Rally was partially inspired by a running appreciation I have of washing machines. They are basically robots, and they have replaced an insane amount of human labour, but they get very little credit for doing so. I often put washing machines into my artwork, whether they’re hidden or overt, and this led me to discovering a group of people on the internet pooling photos of their cats sitting in washers, which one of the cats I grew up with totally used to do as well!
The idea was kind of a subversion of that, intertwined with my own interest in making things. I’d like the book to inspire kids to think ‘yes, I could make it!’, regardless of their background, or how unconventional the idea is, cos it could be a great one, and great ideas move the world forward.
Tell us a bit about your writing/illustration process.
Considering I’ve made a career of sorts out of art, I find it really hard! The process of getting an image from one’s mind’s eye out onto a surface, but having to make it pass down your brain stem, through your arm and eventually out through your hands to get there seems completely dotty if you think about it too much. Everything is always a mystery gauntlet of whether the result will look anything like I imagined, and it’s always a hope rather than expectation that it will meet (or exceed) what I had imagined.
Even though I try to pick a creative approach to suit the project, most ideas start on post-it notes. I love drawing on post-it notes as they’re so small and unintimidating that they can be thrown away and started again if it all goes terribly. I’ve been keeping my post-it notes in books since 2006 and have published a daily drawing on a post-it note on my social media every single day since 2014.
