Thumb In My Brain

     I don't even know what is going on here! This thing is so silly. I was into making artist trading cards at the time and this is an offshoot of some of the other cards I was making, though those were not cards either. So this was some years ago and I made about ten of them.

     Under neath the fingerprint layer is red satin that you can just barely see through the slit. I guess the idea of having just cut yourself and licking up the blood. For another product, I can just imagine having a soft candy finger with red liquid candy inside. The candy package comes with a pin or a little blade (could be plastic) that you would poke or slice into the candy finger and suck out the blood. I guess this is not too far removed from my next item we have here today... ZOMBIE POPS.  These do not exist three dimensionally.... only in your mind. Squishy black cherry eyeball with cherry licorice muscle. Mmmmm  

        

Keep Foil Wrapper

Eat-Less - 2010 - silkscreened and formed - 10 x 2.7 x .8 in - edition of 12

     This is an empty calorie bar. On the back it says that there is absolutely nothing in this package, and there isn't! So often I make stuff with such valuable and choice material inside, but nobody wants to open the package for fear of missing out on its collectable value, like leaving a toy or action figure in the mint package. So in this case, as much as I actually wanted to have a comic book inside, I thought, why bother... the wrapper is enough. That's all there is. The visual gag is long lasting and it does actually go deeper than that. 

     These, I've been making since 1999 and is one of my earliest novelty items. It also happens to be number 23 of an ongoing series of books that I have called the Acid Man Society.

     At this time I was thinking about different ways of disguising a book and different ways of packaging my art. I was wondering , "where are some unlikely types of packaging where you may find a book inside but at the some time keeping the form of the package in line with a book format". Through previous issues of Acid Man I was already familiar with making tiny books and because the cost of making them had always been an issue, if I was able to make a book with with one 8.5 x 11 in sheet of paper, then all the better.  I also wanted to have a book in color which costs even more. I was thinking about gum wrappers ( I have a collection) I was looking at my "breath" doodles (I have a collection) - they were already small and narrow, plus they had the added hint of freshening your visual breath.   Oh wow, a Visual Chew! 

   

     These are the size of an actual stick of gum and to top it all off there is a white powder that gets all over you! Just like the real stuff.  On the edge of the wrapper is says: Keep foil wrapper to ensure collectable value. I really wanted people to open them up, not expecting them to put it all back together over and over again after showing people, but to keep all the components safe and sound and then at one point it can be reassembled carefully for it's collectable value. I've given some to people not even knowing there is a book inside and they just save them, thinking its just an old stick of gum. But I have that in another product of mine.  Later.

     Oh, You can go to Doodle Babel to get a taste of what these breath drawings are like or you can go to the Nakfactorium store online to order yours today! 

Pollicks™ ACTION Candy

Counter display with Pops - 2010

One of a first set of three prototypes - 2008 - acrylic on wood block pop & ink jet wrapper 

FINE ART YOU CAN TRUST

     I try to make art that has a bit of  twist to it. Even though it is possible to make real lollipops, they just don't last. Sure they are yummy for a while, but these little sculptural novelties will never go sour.

     The image way at top is how they ended up for my Visual Chew show in 2010.  I made a batch of 17 acrylic pops on wood. The wrappers are silk screened with a cut out plastic window and the boxes were silk screened as well. The blue images above is one of a set 3 of the first prototypes that I made.

     On the back of those wrappers I had a little bio I wrote of Jackson Pollock. I thought that not everyone would know who he is and hence not totally get the concept and slight play on the name. He is one of my favorite artists and this is what I wrote: Jackson Pollock(1912-1956) He was an American expressionist painter who had a controlled and systematic method to his dribbling and splattering of paint onto huge canvases laid on the floor. These paintings broke the mold of representational art and in his use of new techniques, demonstrated the artist's physical involvement with the work.

     For the silk screened wrappers I had to forgo the write up thinking that the type would be pretty tiny and I was unsure of my silk screening skills. ( Yes I printed these!)

 

     Below are some of the wrapper design ideas I was toying with after those prototypes and after I decided that I wanted to silk screen them. With the earlier prototype wrapper I had printed them off my ink let. I was not about to try and reproduce all those colors and shading.

 

     I knew that I always wanted to use the old popsicle wrapper design for these Pollicks™ and they would not have been complete without the collectable wrappers to trade in for exciting prizes. My screen for printing could only hold 4 wrappers so I only designed 4 backs.

 

 

     The idea for Pollicks goes back to 2006 and you can see how my original conception of the lettering has remained pretty much in tact. The first wrapper idea in the sketch is fully realized below. I really do miss the multi-colored lettering in the design. 

Display from Visual Chew show at Martha Street, 2010. Photo by RonD.

     This past summer my friend Ken Gregory was into making candy for a project of his and he offered up his help in realizing an edible multi-flavored PoP!  Thanks Ken.  The middle though, is a hard candy like the outside dribbled part. One day I will figure out how to make a nice Nougat for these little canvases and to fully realize what I envisioned this edible version to be.    

Chew Chew Train of Thoughts

     It was a bit odd to find this box car train with a Chiclets logo on it, but I could not pass it up considering...

     I grew up chewing Chiclets gum and as a package it had always intrigued me. I loved the plastic window and opening the little perforated door to let out a chiclet at a time. In my novelty end of producing art and looking at packages, this idea came came to me and seemed so rediculous I had to figure out a way to make it work.

     I realized that I could get 26 - 16 page books from one sheet of 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. As always if I can print from my printer I usually will and this is my maximum size. My friend Ron White liked the idea and hopped on board to make up some books. It took us a few years to design all the 26 books. The registration is so tight for aligning the front and back side of the sheet that my printer or Xeroxing was not working. So we went to a 4-color offset press. Then there was the whole procedure of getting all these little suckers bound together in their candy covered shell - really just clay coat card stock- but it mimics the the candy coated gum and shell perfectly.

     As to the matter of the box as shown above, at first I tried to just have color xerox cpies on heavy stock. I didn't like the shade of yellow really, but then also having to hand cut over 100 boxes and score the fold lines, was going to be stupid. I did 10 this way and then thought no way. So we got the boxes printed as well with 3 spot colors and I designed a die to get them punched out. Ahhh, nice. There is an image of the box flat below. The image above is from one of the first 10 made the hard way. We ended up with an edition of 125 boxes. 

Ron White's ICON Booklet

Robert Pasternak's  Our Favorite Scenes Poster Catalogue Booklet

PoP display for Pasternak's Visual Chew show at Martha Street in Winnipeg, 2010

Display in the Rock Paper Scissors group show of Bookworks at

the Irvine Fine Arts Center in Irvine California, 2010

3-color offset printed and die-cut box flat. The ingredients list is the titles of all the books.

A FEW CHICLET ITEMS I FOUND

Kamels

     I love caramels so much that I started to make my own. But of course this was only an excuse to make a candy wrapper for them. At first I was going to call them Nakamels.  I devised a flat long wrapper design to house a single 2 x 4 x 3/16th of an inch piece of caramel. I wrapped a few this way, but then I started to think more upscale and cryptic, ancient and Egyptian. I had already had the Kamels lettering on this first design for no particular reason except that I always come up with options while designing something and even with this first design I obviously did not decide which name to use or I just wanted to misspell caramel so that I could use the letter K from my Nak name.

     So with the name Kamels came a whole rethinking of the package. They would be individual squares of caramel which is equivelent to 2 regular pieces that you would get with Reisens or Wherthiers. I weighed a number of these squares and on average they happened to weigh about 13 grams each - a nice cryptic number. 

     Of course with the word Kamel you get the association of a camel (I'm imagining some commercials already) and also the association of the middle east or Egypt, hence the pyramid. Now this is interesting, in Egyptian metaphysics, KA is the spirit. If you look at the ingredients on my wrapper, you will see that the last ingredient is........ 

But then I often  will get the reaction, "Ewww......what is Ka?". 

    

     It's a lot of work hand cutting the caramel, the wax paper, and tin foil to size and wrapping all the pieces. Oh but the joy, the joy of giving these away to friends is immense. And they are awsome caramels or should I say Kamels™

This is a wrapper that would house 4 individual squares.

Aero Evolution

From Here To There

Wow, what a big change from this top left wrapper of 1987 to the top right wrapper 0f 2010. It seems like night and day, but if you look at all the changes that took place in between it mostly seems like a natural evolution and a  comment on the times in design. As well,  we will see the continual one-up-man-ship and how the effect of steroids in cows milk that affect the young designers today as if they are on acid. (just kidding) Read on. 

   

UPC bar codes began widespread use in the beginning 1980's.

52-50-066 This is an Aero Chocolate Bar wrapper from around 1987. This same design had been used since the 1960's with virtually no changes. Aero was originally made by Rowntree (since 1935) but merged with Mackintosh in 1969. The bars were previously 36 grams.

L5-50-115  In 1987 Rowntree Macintosh went public and in 1988 was bought by Nestle with an offering value at 4.55 billion dollars.  We now see the Nestle logo up front on the wrapper. In the following wrappers watch how the logo changes. 

If you look at the top of the wrapper there is a 7 digit number. The last three numbers seem to change with every slight change in design or alteration of the printed wrapper. I have a Caramilk wrapper where there is a single increment number difference and the only foreseable difference was a switch in the order that a couple of the ingredients appeared in.  So since the time of the wrapper shown above this one, there has been 49 changes to the wrapper. I am only showing a sampling of major changes in the design appearance of the wrapper.

Oh yeah, the Aero lettering design had finally changed after all those years and Nestle cut a gram of chocolate out.

Is there a difference between Milk Chocolate and Pure Milk Chocolate? Look above at the four wrappers shown together.

L5-50-129  Here we go with the Bubbles in the phrase Pure Bubbly Milk Chocolate.

L5-50-177  Oooo, splashly , wow, really in the big design mode now, what could be better than this? Can you sense sarcasm here. Why could'nt they just go on to the next wrapper? It seems that in product design one could only make little tiny adjustments to the design for fear of loosing customer familiarity or making it seem too much like a different product all together. So, I guess it's bubble steps....um, I mean, baby steps.

Notice the newer Nestle logo which has been continually evolving as well, and..... Aero is Big on Bubbles.

L5-50-242   I just love how the bubbles have now exploded throughout the design. I absolutely love this one. Why the pause after Big........? Again a new Nestle logo.

L5-50-242  (Why is this number the same as previous wrapper?) There are many changes again. The bubble slogan has changed and the Nestle logo has changed again! This wrapper from March 2010

Huge overhaul of Aero lettering style. (April 2010) I was not a fan at first, but it's growing on me. The number at the top is a whole new ball game. The slogan 'Have you felt the bubbles melt' has been shoved to the sidelines. Will it be totally gone next time around?