Paint It Cool

Firstly, thanks for the warm welcome to the 'Spill blog; I'm thoroughly enjoying reading it! By way of saying hello, I thought I'd post this up, it being my one and only moment of Guardian-related "notoriety" and therefore what better place to share it? This appeared in The Guide last year, as a result of some friends and I on our Last Rites message board messing about with MS Paint and posting up the resulting attempts at drawing famous album covers for the others to guess. In fairness, some of them were alarmingly professional, but when it got picked up by Wendy at the Guardian, she quite rightly appreciated that the joy was to be found in the paucity of some of the efforts, thus gaining me the dubious "honour" of three entries! The feature didn't appear online, so the above image is actually my own mock-up of the two page Guide article, done in InDesign - a cover of our covers, appropriately enough. Hope you enjoy it and maybe it'll inspire you to post your own works of art!

The text, which is hard to make out above, reads as follows:

"If you were after wonky fan art in the golden olden days, you'd just head staright for the Smash Hits letters pages. With a postbag flooded by shoddy simulcra of George Michael, they were testament to pop fans' obsessive tendancies. Those aiming for photographic realism would simply cheat, nicking grease-proof paper from their mum's baking drawer to trace over a poster. But that was to miss the point. The best ones were always the shonkiest ones.So it's heartening to see that crap pop art is alive and well. And a neat little game has emerged, utilising rubbish software MS Paint. Dating back to Windows 1.0, it has an almost magical ability to turn even the best illustrator into a dribbling toddler with afat, chipped Crayola. Which makes playing Guess The Album Cover all the more amusing. Head over to Last Rites Flickr photo stream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/25371672@N02/) to view an impressive selection of these fair works. And we really ought to make special mention of Amelia Shaw aged eight - artist and Durannie. Sterling work, Amelia."

Yep, the best one's by my friend Jules' eight year-old daughter! Over to you...