Hop-tu-naa (my mother’s gone away)

We’ve been having something of a dilemma here at id-iom HQ this morning. We painted this on Saturday in Bromley town centre for their Day of the Dead celebrations. So far so good but this is where the problems start. We painted it on Saturday (28th Oct), the Mexican holiday of the Day of Dead is actually on Thursday (2nd Nov) but Halloween is today (31st Oct). Unfortunately coming from the Isle of Man we don’t even celebrate Halloween. We do Hop-tu-naa instead (pronounced Hop-Chew-Neigh) which also falls on the 31st October but predates Halloween and is the original New Year’s Eve celebration (it is thought to be the oldest unbroken tradition on the Isle of Man, so there).

Anyway after much discussion we decided to put this up today. Painted on some fancy 6ft x 6ft roller boards with fire jugglers beside us (you can the head of one of them in the pic!) we managed to get her done pretty quickly given the impending onslaught of darkness. The fancy skull wallpaper is probably my favourite part but what do i know?

Cheers

id-iom

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Dropping the bomb

How about this for a blast from the past? This is some original old school id-iom graffiti from probably about 1988 or thereabouts and is still going strong. That’s mainly because it’s on the back of a cupboard in the attic at our family home so there’s been little opportunity for anyone else to tag over it. I’m glad our vandalistic tendencies we’re in show even back then though. I’m not sure if it’s subconscious or what but our sometime motto is ‘dropping the bomb with absolute aplomb’ and this early throwup eerily connects with that. Spooky! But then it is almost Hop-tu-naa (or Halloween as other people call it)…

Cheers

id-iom

When life gives you lemons…

When I was mixing up the black ink for printing these I put in more pigment that I thought necessary and it was proper black. At least it looked it. Strangely though once it had been printed it came up grey. I did a couple more just to check I wasn’t going mad and then thought about crying. Screen printing can be pretty frustrating sometimes. Rather than throw a sulk and just chuck everything in the bin I thought I’d make the best of the situation and salvage what I could and these are the result. I like them more than I should probably because I know just how close they came to being binned. It turns out I’d used an old pigment or possibly old base goop and it somehow loses it’s ability to hold decent colour. Everyday is a school day.

Anyway they’re on A2 paper and are made using the magic of screen printing and spray paint. Perhaps I’ll get round to doing them again in black and completing them as per my original vision someday. Who knows? Drop us a line if interested.

Cheers

id-iom

Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping beauty

Whilst the rest of humanity has to deal with the excessive daily troubles of hurricanes, sexual assault, trade negotiations that no one has a clue about or perma-tanned presidents this lovely lady has decided to go to the land of Nod and slumber until some prince or princess has the mettle to wake her up. I’m not entirely sure what type of person that might be but then again I suppose that’s what this sleeping beauty is hoping for, a real hero type. Someone willing to risk it all against the odds and come up smelling of roses. I’m pretty sure she’ll be snoozing for a while but wish her the best of luck.

It’s A5 in size and made using my first ever lino cut

Cheers

id-iom

Gorilla glue #4

Gorilla glue #4

So there I was having a nice quiet drink when someone comes along and offers me some gorilla glue. Being the astute artist type I am I say yes thinking it’s a brand of masking tape. Little did I know it was actually intergalactic grade hyper skunk and feeling beholden to the man I took a few leisurely drags on the zoot. To my dismay the worst possible thing that could happen, did happen. I did my best impression of a ghost and pulled a whitey! Needless to say I didn’t get to finish my drink as I stumbled off home whispering sweet nothing to myself. Eventually though I found myself at my front door feeling pretty good but the question was ‘Do i go back to the pub or do I just go inside to bed?’. Well I answered that by sitting myself down and drawing how I just felt. And I think you can guess what this picture is about…

P.s. I’ve just found out that there actually is a brand of masking tape called ‘Gorilla Glue’, when will i learn!

Cheers

id-iom

Gone for a Burton

There’s little id-iom enjoys more than a roadtrip – especially when it’s to somewhere new – so when we got a call from Smirnoff about jazzing up the smoking area of Society Bar in Burton upon Trent we didn’t have to think too long before agreeing. After a lengthy approvals process we finally got the go ahead so packed up the id-iomobile and hit the road. It’s lucky we started straight away as it turns out that doing loads of stripes is easy when designing on a computer but surprisingly time consuming when doing it with paint. Especially when we had to work with very little access behind the scaffolding poles. Which we would have been able to remove if we brought an adjustable spanner rather than some allen keys. It wasn’t our fault though, for once, as we were told that we’d just need allen keys. Anyway, we just about managed to get it all done and you can see the fruits of our labour yourself if you’re ever in Burton.

Cheers

id-iom

Bonus: We passed through the suburb of Branston on our way out of town and we joked about Branston Pickle being from there. It turns out that it is actually the case. So now you know.

A message from me to you

Some relationships are destined to run smoothly and some are destined to be somewhat fractious. Here’s a good case in point. These girls have known each other for years but rarely see eye to eye. Here we have Harmony attempting to summarise her argument into a cohesive whole. It would seem from the look on her face that Jen is managing to read the subtle undertones in Harmony’s narrative just about correctly. I dread to think what comes next…

This carefree scene has been lasercut on wood at 39 x 27cm and then lovingly hand painted with a drizzle of crystal resin to finish.

 

Cheers

id-iom

Mass forces to the rescue!

We got a call asking if we’d like to do a little live paint as part of a company away day and as we always like a trip to the countryside we readily agreed. Apparently the Mass Forces department has had a tough year (I’m still no wiser as to what the Mass Forces department actually does) and are now bouncing back and they wanted something to reflect that. The word ‘superhero’ was bandied about. After a couple of false starts the iconic ‘Superman pulling his shirt open’ image came to mind and we were off and running with an idea. As relating to our fairly loose brief it’s got it all. Something work related, something superhero related and the words ‘Mass Forces’. On the day the weather was lovely so it all worked out pretty nicely really. We even managed to invisibly cover over the little hole that had been accidentally been put in the canvas (not by us I hasten to add). Win all round.

Cheers

id-iom

Shoulder to shoulder we stand

When we got a call asking if we’d like to come out to the countryside near Elstree and do a bit of a live paint and a graffiti workshop of kinds for a Samsung event we thought ‘why not? that sounds like fun’. Thankfully the weather was glorious as we were painting outside and over the course of the afternoon we had 22 teams come over and they had to produce a bit of artwork (either as a team or as individuals) which we would then judge with the winner taking home an original id-iom canvas. I wish my phone hadn’t run out of power as we had some great entries but the winner was the man who stayed for a good 25 minutes after his team had left in order to complete his entry. That’s dedication to the artistic cause for you.

After that we had to get busy creating the big canvas that they’d take away for their office as a reminder of their day chilling with us. How sweet. Using their ‘shoulder to shoulder’ theme for the day as our inspiration we set to work creating this bad lad. Featuring four guys wearing vests in the colour of their branding for the day, the Samsung ‘S’ as the necklace on one of the guys and the Samsung ‘A’ as the yellow wallpaper background element. Coming in at a sizeable 1.8 x 1.2 m it was fun to create but I dread to think what we would have produced if the weather hadn’t been so agreeable…

Cheers

id-iom