After digging round in the attic at our family home I came across a box containing some items that belonged to our long lost Uncle Lou. Apparently he was something of a womaniser and a card-sharp and would ever be in search of the next loose woman and dodgy card table. He mysteriously disappeared on a trip to the local butchers one day and all they ever found of him was his rusty sheriff’s badge (which he always wore). He left behind a box of mementos and this is a little something from one of his jaunts around Europe in the late 60’s and looks to be an annotated map of his adventures. It appears it involved lots of women, drink and skiing…
I’ve never actually been to Switzerland myself but I have plenty of friends who have and they all seem to really enjoy the place. I’m pretty sure I would enjoy the skiing and cheese aspect of a visit there but it’s been many years since I wore a timepiece and I’m not a massive fan of chocolate so they couldn’t really impress me on that front. Anyhow I’d still give it a go as apparently ‘It’s more fun in Switzerland!’ and I’d be willing to see if it lives up to the claim.
Working on maps is really rather enjoyable and this piece has been lovingly created on a large vintage motoring map of the region. She features at least 12+ different screen print levels (including our id-iom seal of approval), hand-done red hand-stitching around the Swiss border, many stencils and a load of hand annotation in paint pen (not done by me as my writing isn’t neat enough!) If that wasn’t enough it also features the Transformer Soundwave about to steal a load of ‘energon’ from the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss border. Naughty Transformer!
For further information about us and what we get up to you can visit our flickr page and we’re also on twitter (@thisisidiom).
After our previous visit to Sclater Street the piece we completed lasted for a week before some razor sharp wit decided to modify it and add the word ‘ANUS’ nice and large right over the middle of our picture (as seen below). Noboby likes a large anus on their picture so we thought we’d do our best to replace it with something a little more fitting.
Painted Sparrow (before)
A little research led to the discovery that Sclater Street used to be famous for having a thriving bird market so our new piece would be a little nod to the streets’ history. As we were painting it an old guy came round with his grandson and told me that he used to live nearby and the market was still there when he was a kid. He also informed me that they’d sell you a painted sparrow as soon as sell you an actual budgerigar or the like. I’m not sure if he was pulling my leg or not but I liked the idea.
Once we’d got the background sorted and the bird and hand up I had to get our little bit of sculptural graffiti put up and fix the ’2 and sixpence’ price tag right to the top of the wall. Which involved going right to the top of the ladder. Which is always a nervous moment on a blustery day. I gave it a good bit of duct tape as I didn’t want to be going up again so hopefully it’ll last a few weeks at least…
Now if you’ve ever been taken along whilst your girlfriend or wife is shopping you’ll understand this picture straight away and if you haven’t i think you get the idea…
It is A2 in size and is made using the magic of hand cut stencils and spray paint. Signed on reverse.
Who can resist such a plaintive cry for assistance? And such a cute looking pigeon to boot. I certainly couldn’t resist and if I found Percy I would definitely be straight on to aburimar777@gmail.com to let him know exactly where his lost pet could be found.
We’ve delighted in a bit of ‘artistic scam baiting‘ before but are taking the use of the scammer’s email address to new heights. We have crafted a poster for his lost ‘pigeon’ in the hopes that someone will help out in the search for Percy. There’s a lot of pigeons in London but this one is quite distinctive as pigeons go as i’m sure you can tell. If you have any leads at all I’m sure he’d appreciate if you get in touch. It may brighten up his otherwise tedious day of sending countless emails trying to con strangers out of their hard earned money…
The fruits of today’s labour consists of a couple of newly commissioned prints which will shortly be ready to grace the walls at their new residence.
The Call of Duty
If you’ve ever played Call of Duty online and you’re about as good as I am (which isn’t to say i’m rubbish but I’m definitely a casual player as opposed to a hardcore 6-hours-a-day dedicated type) then you will undoubtedly have come up against an opponent much like the commissioner of this picture.
He works exclusively with a sniper rifle and will take you out before you’ve even seen him. Then take out the rest of your team too. To reflect this highly annoying level of skill we created a Call of Duty themed print that I’m pretty sure will hit the spot. Featuring all the deadly weaponry you can think of and his gamer tag I can only hope it’s an inspiration on the rare occasions when things aren’t going his way…
Storm Bird (pretty in pink)
Our next piece was commissioned for a young lady – hence the very fetching pink colour. It’s a one-off special of our Storm Bird print which was originally created as thank you for the good folks who helped us out with the creation of our video. And if you haven’t seen the video then you can turn the sound up and sit back for a couple of minutes of graffiti based oddness (featuring the god-like being of Tom Selleck – what more could you want?):
I was sat on the computer the other day when my kitten came up and was sitting staring out of the window at some birds on the rooftop opposite and it started making this unusual clicking noise:
I was thinking ‘surely my kitten can’t be broken already! It’s only a few months old!’. Well after a little research on the good ‘ol interwebs I found that this wasn’t a case of my kitten being faulty but is something that cats often do (although i’d never heard it before) when there is some prey or something they want to chase/attack but they can’t get to it so they do it out of frustration.
Now i’m sure this is really not surprising to people who have owned cats before as they are always enthusiastic in their willingness to attack small creatures but it led me to making an addition to a picture we did last week (bemoaning my ability to get the hang of tweeting) which I think captures the cuteness of kittens combined with what they are actually thinking…
Hmmmm. How to explain Stormbird. I’m not really sure if any explanation I can give can adequately describe our thought processes when creating this stop-motion epic. The ‘storyline’ just kind of suggested itself. It’s probably easier to explain it’s conception than how we developed such a monster. It came about when we had id-iom’s good friend Dave over from LA for a while. He’s known for doing a bit of video production/editing so after consumption of a few beers down at the studio we (stupidly) decided that a short stop-motion video might be a good idea. It wasn’t. After over 2600 shots over the best part of a week in the freezing cold basement making just one tiny adjustment after another we were close to death by exposure but were finally able to call it a wrap.
There is plenty of footage which ended up on the cutting room floor that will hopefully never see the light of day as it’s more than a little weird and would probably emotionally scar any viewer for life. And all that took long hours of standing around in the cold that i’ll never get back. I bet the Aardman animation studios are all cosy and warm. If i’m ever to attempt anything like this again I’ll be making sure it’s warm outside or we have such mod cons as central heating…
Anyway, once principal photography was finished we realised we needed some musical accompaniment befitting of such a creation so we put out the call and came up with 3 very different soundtracks. The first version will probably not play in certain countries on youtube as The Man probably has certain copyright issues as it features tracks that are already out there but that’s where our other versions come in as both feature an original score which should play internationally no problem. The other video’s will follow this in short order and we’d really love some feedback on which one people prefer (so watch this space)…
What else can we say about the video apart from the fact that it features anthropomorphic spray cans, the Graffiti Removal Squad (first featured here), sharks (one of which is gay but we had a hard time portraying that!), Tom Selleck (although I like to think he’s in his Thomas Magnum persona), a fireball (from Streetfigher 2 obviously) and, of course, the plucky little robin a.k.a the storm bird in Norse mythology.
Finally, whilst I like to think our video has a certain naive rustic charm there are those who treat the subject with a little more professionalism. So for those who haven’t seen it here’s a little link to a much more polished creation featuring light stencils by our good man Pahnl.
We’ve only been on Twitter for a little while now (as we thought it better to turn up late to the party) but i’m still not sure i’ve got the hang of this whole tweeting malarky…
We’ve somehow come to gather 162 followers (at the time of writing) but I think we need to be a bit more prolific and probably a little more amusing if we want to hit the magic 1 million followers. We’ll get there – one tweet at at time.
There we were painting the corridor downstairs at Seven @ Brixton when the owners of the imminently opening little boutique upstairs called ‘Fortune‘ asked us if we could paint a little something for them as well to brighten up their small-but-perfectly-formed shop. We didn’t have much time (less than 24 hours!) but as we have come to learn we work pretty well under pressure so of course we said ‘yes!’ and jumped right at it.
Fortune is a contemporary and vintage ladies boutique so the design needed to have that feminine touch. As the shop isn’t open full time they decided to put a peep-hole in the door so you could have a peek in whilst they were closed. We loved the idea of that so donned our thinking caps and decided that a pair of oversized lady’s legs reaching from floor to ceiling would look great through the peep-hole. We also put some stencils on the outside of the door to encourage people to look in and brightened up the wall they have most of their product on with some colour and a few freshly cut stencils. Finally we thought we’d best get some lucky black cats in there too. Just to make sure. After some feverish work and a little swearing it was ‘job done’ just in time for them to get their stuff back up on the walls and have their opening!
Ah, the sweet sounds of a songbird. Or in our case a raven proclaiming it’s raucous shriek to all and sundry. That will be our Twitter feed. To celebrate id-iom’s arrival on Twitter (probably just as everyone else is about to leave to use the newest up-and-coming social networking app) we thought we’d put a little blog post up to see if we couldn’t wrangle a few more followers than the paltry 17 we currently have (but big thanks to the 17 that have already signed up. I love you guys!)
So, if you fancy hearing our every thought and love the idea of a constant stream of tweets to interrupt your oh-so-busy day then all you have to do is follow this link and sign yourself up. Sorted. A million followers here we come!
