Tobacco Tin Lid Designs.

This is a simple little project; just do silly little bits to decorate the tins you get like Golden Virginia (oops, damn; that wasn’t a plug! Although ‘plug’s’ a bad enough pun in itself!) But anyway; this is just my younger attempts at a bunch of ‘trippy’ stuff. It’s actually really sedate, but with some fun bits.

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Here we go then, and I start with one I designed for a friend, when I was 18. Sorry, I do like to put little annotations in.

And then we get my own; which was simplified. Basically, they’re all ‘pen-and-ink’ (stylographic pen, in short) where the ideas are just rendered in stippling and cross-hatch; but it was fun and I had a little blast for a while, back when life was more carefree.

And then we start to get more bizarre.

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Hopefully no offence to the Chinese; I like the Foo-Dogs.

I don’t know what the rest of the little monster looks like; but you’d wonder how much tobacco could actually fit in there with it. Hope the little bugger isn’t herbivorous, eh?

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(The cross is the four elements; because the fifth element is that which holds the other four in balance – in indirect ways, you understand. The requirements of the life-form hold the other four in equal opposition. It’s just a fad, that’s gone on far too long, sorry.)

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Well, you’ve gotta play with the basics. I’ve been a smoker a long time (not to excess; but enough), and I’ve always liked watching smoke and trying to represent it in 3D design work. Turn the gaseous into a solid directly; after all, nature begins with carbon dioxide gas and ends up with a diamond, which is basically the same principle. Turning the ethereal into the manifest. But it works as a short piece; but as you can now tell, I didn’t spend a lot of time on ALL of them.

I quite liked this as an idea and made a paperweight that I then cast in lead. I still like it, even if you could confuse the cabbage leaf veins with lightning. And they used to make Cabbage Patch Kids (and later Garbage Pail Kids; which were better still). From his eyes, he looks rather cabbaged for other reasons, though.

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Mind you, if the All-Seeing Eye is Egyptian (even if it isn’t the proper Eye of Ra Horus); I suppose this is a representation of part of the Old World. The Key of Soloman (or Star of David) is Semitic; the Eye is of Egyptian descent; but the letters are Greek. A fusion.

I have to apologise to Patrick Woodroffe for this one; it looks very much like our styles collided to make this one. Although it seems to be like a seraphim (six-winged angel); whereas cherubim are four-winged (I think?); I always wondered whether or not the four and six winged angels were actually more like insects (because of the ‘more-than-two-wings’ idea).

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And in this one; the smoke rings form the rudimentary sword and chalice (penis and vagina) expressing the gametes, and the result of the fusion as an embryonic forming; note the deliberate symbolism of the galaxy swirling around in the mind as a basic idea of the limitlessness of imagination. I only put the ‘star-blims’ in there because I didn’t want to just frame it in black; so the galaxy spinning in the mind is mirrored by the stars without.

This one goes back to my liking for the forged-work of blacksmithing; just as a nice frame. The curved scrolls are meant to look like the forty-five degree scrolls we used to make, where instead of just turning the cross-section into something else, the scroll starts to turn forty-five degrees from the flat plane, and the forty-five degree angle is maintained through the whole process, so that when the scroll lies flat on a surface, the smaller inner curve is always in the air on the top; but resting on nothing beneath, while the larger outer edge is on the flat, with no part raised.

Now, the next design is just another silly little whimsy. You get a representation of the sun; and curling around it is the Moebius Strip. The figure of eight that represents the Greek symbol of eternity (the path of light through the sun; a point of life potentials, expressed as the middle of the figure where the twin loops combine; all the potential flows through that point, but the course of some religions believe that the sun is the watchful eye of God, and sees all that is done with the inspired life, as in passing back a report; but I made the two loops into the analogy of Divinity and Demonic personage; like the duality of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.

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This idea goes back to the ‘me-as-a-monopod’ designs (again, inspired by one of Patrick Woodroffe’s illustrations with his own head set atop the coronal furl of octopus tentacles; whereby each different tentacle holds a different tool of the trade; well, I suppose monopods and cephalopods do share a very distant link in terms of their invertebrate body structure.)

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Like I say, the idiots who have their homes built on the cigarette (how long did THAT get left lying around for!?) are burning fires in their homes; so they’re completely oblivious to the catastrophe, as it strikes them (possibly an ecological warning in here somewhere?)

I won’t say that we finally get to something where the subject matter is finally on a par with the purpose, because many of them do; I suppose it goes along the lines of thought that say that, if I’m doing it (smoking); and designing covers for tins which are, in

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themselves, paraphernalia to do with the cause; then it’d be a little stupid to actually not design things that are, in fact, to do with the subject. It would be a little insane to balk at it, when it happens to be the cause and reason of the overall project anyway, wouldn’t it?

Since this is the last design, I decided not to resize it (if only to go so far as to show that when I designed them originally on A5 paper; which means that if you were to cut one of the designs off and stick it on the top of an actual tobacco tin, they are actually the right size). The only reason that the rest of the series was slightly minimised was only to slightly decrease the size of the upload and download file and also, to try to keep these to a small number of pages, since they’re only a part of a little collection at the moment.

As I say, I hope anyone who has a look at this will find something they like here. I enjoyed them, but really, some stuff is meant to be shared, not guarded jealously. If you satisfy yourself with a few things you do; then you might as well be part of the collective and pass the hopeful enjoyment of viewing them around. Bye for now.

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