For the family

For the Family

Now this is our second time at painting on doors and it’s definitely worked out to be trickier than first envisaged… That’s not because I dislike painting doors it’s just that the last two we happened to womble across ended up being the biggest, heaviest and most impractical doors in existence. It’s not like you look inconspicuous walking down the street with an ultra heavy painted door so that’s why I thought i’d take the first shot in the studio and will upload another when i have the necessary manpower to get it out on the street. That said though if i keep watching The World’s Strongest Man on Channel 5 i might just give it a go solo. After a quick chat with someone yesterday we realised we haven’t done anything for Free Art Friday for a while – so this will be out on Friday. Although it will probably take a two man squad to retrieve it!

As to the picture itself it comes from a member of our family who sent through some pictures of his arm so we could design some tattoos for him, needless to say he chose all of our designs and some time early this year will be having a full sleeve tattooed of our designs. I can’t wait for that one i can tell you. Charles we salute you! Watch this space…

Cheers

id-iom

Forged by the Glitter of Gold

Ah, Friday again! Where have you been hiding all week? Fresh off the block today we have the rather large ‘Forged by the Glitter of Gold’ which comes in at an impressive 100 x 70cm. Frankly, being forged by the glitter of anything is pretty good in my book but to be forged by the glitter of gold is surely top shelf all the way.

Forged by the Glitter of Gold – 100 x 70cm

The title comes from an early 20th Century rag time song which i happened to find in a box of stuff from my Grandma. It’s a shame I can’t play the piano as i’d love to have a little rattle on the old ebony and ivories of ‘Forged by the Glitter of Gold’ as with a title like that it has to be a bobby belter of a song. That said i don’t have a piano at home so i’d have to find one in a pub somewhere nearby and give all their customers something that they had never heard before. Maybe something like this. In fact this guy is probably a little to good for me.

Cheers

id-iom

The mirror crack’d

In what i’m hoping will be my last post of the day we have this slightly odd commission. I’m not entirely sure how the mirror came to broken (i.e. I’m not the one with seven years bad luck!) but as soon as it was brought in for us to evaluate exactly I knew there was something just crying out to be put on there. We could not try and hide the crack as it would then look even worse than it did already so we thought the best thing to do was to highlight it’s imperfections.

The line ‘the mirror crack’d’ was floating around in my head and it turns out ‘The mirror crack’d from side to side‘ is the name of an Agatha Christie book starring the unflappable amateur sleuth Miss Marple but she originally got the line from a poem by Lord Tennyson called The Lady of Shallot and it seemed to fit perfectly:

“Out flew the web and floated wide

the mirror crack’d from side to side”

Once we’d found a suitable font, cut a couple of stencils and also got a couple of lightly glittered arrows on there to really put all the attention on the crack we realised that we had job done and to do any more would risk ruining it so we decided it was time to down tools. I’m particularly happy with the result as i managed to restrain myself before adding more and in hindsight it just fits perfectly. One more happy punter taken care of…

For reasons that are hopefully completely apparent it’s pretty tricky to photograph a mirror whilst: a) trying to make the mirror look relatively normal shaped b) trying not to get yourself or any other objects that just attract the eye in shot c) trying to highlight the big crack running across the mirror and the text either side of it. Now whilst i’m certainly not saying that Duffy, Donovan or Bailey couldn’t do better I think I did a pretty reasonable job considering my usual level of skill with a camera.

Cheers

id-iom

detail shot

An Eye for Trouble

We have been busy little beavers here at the Ranch knocking stuff out left, right and centre. An Eye for Trouble is our newest piece and features spraypaint, stencils, acrylic, glitter, paint pen and a googly eye. All top quality ingredients…

Cheers

id-iom

id-iom

Title: An eye for trouble

Media: Stencils, spraypaint, acrylic, googly eye and glitter

Size: A2

Just like Hirst’s…

After Hirst’s bejewelled skull ‘For the love of God’ I thought i’d give an id-iom version a go. After much deliberation i decided to go for the slightly less gaudy approach and have only 15 real ‘jewels’ on there all placed by my own fair hand – as opposed to the 8,601 diamonds that he (well, one of his ‘assistants’) painstakingly attached to the remodelled skull (made of platinum, naturally!) Oh yeah, it glows in the dark a bit too which i’m pretty sure Hirst’s one doesn’t!

Although this piece isn’t yet worth the £50 million that Hirst sold his for i’m sure it will be in time…

Cheers

id-iom

id-iom

Title: Just like Hirst’s…

Media: Handcut stencils, spraypaint, paint pen, uv spraypaint, glitter & diamantes

Size: 40 x 50cm thick edge canvas

Brand New Music

We were asked to do a triptych of 1m x 1m canvases for the launch night for a new company (http://wearebrandnewmusic.co.uk) that was putting on a night of new British talent at the Gramaphone Bar in London’s East End. My main headache was actually putting the canvases up as the wall was curved and was also seemingly constructed of solid rock behind a thin veneer of plaster – and my pound-shop nails would penentrate only as far as the plaster before bending entirely out of shape. Needless to say that when i did have the canvases put up they weren’t as sturdily installed as one would usually hope in this situation…

As it was indoors we couldn’t use spraypaint and when this was combined with the fact that we’d have about an hour on the night to work on the canvases and the fact that it was my birthday the next day (and I would therefore be looking to have a celebratory tipple or two) it seemed like a good idea to leave as little work to do on the night as possible so we got them all finished up apart from the lettering and then finished that on the evening. I can’t exactly remember the end of the night although I do remember having a good time…