Man at work

I was just looking for something else on my computer when I come across this rare image of the younger half of id-iom actually doing some work! I know because I took the shot. Any pics that you may have previously seen showing him doing something that looks like work will undoubtedly have been staged or digitally generated using Photoshop. What’s more incredible is that he’s also up a small pair of steps (which are just out of shot) so that makes the whole thing doubly rare. He doesn’t like using ladders at the best of times. Even small ones. If only I could remember what had driven him to such extremes. Perhaps I was suffering from whooping cough or the more dangerous man flu at the time. Who knows?

Cheers

id-iom

God save the Queen

For this commission the only instruction I was given was ‘bees’. Now that is the kind of commission I like. And this is what you get. A dwindling global bee population can only be bad news for puny humans as the bees pollinate an awful lot of the crops and flowers that we depend on for food. Without them we are somewhat doomed so it’s probably best if we take a bit better care of our little insect cousins and make sure they can continue doing their job. And, as a big bonus, they also know how to make honey (which the crystal resin on the picture is meant to represent). Without that we’d be left with wasp gravy and you wouldn’t want that on your morning toast.

Cheers

id-iom

Other Peoples Graffiti (Food for Thought update)

Whilst making our way through sunny Streatham we chanced upon the boards we painted for the Streatham Food Festival last year that were still in place. There’s a couple of minor tags and what seems to be a lot of white paint that has been thrown at it. On closer inspection it would seem that the main culprit in defacing our picture is, in fact, the pigeons that live on the guttering above and have deposited their thoughts on the piece from on high. It would indeed seem that everyone is a critic.

Cheers

id-iom

id-iom vs The Mere Scribbler

id-iom vs The Mere Scribbler

There’s nothing id-iom likes more than a good pub so when we got the call from an imminently opening pub in Streatham called The Mere Scribbler and were asked to do a portrait in their beer garden of Frances Burney – after whom the pub is named – we jumped at the chance. Frances ‘Fanny’ Burney was a 18th century novelist, diarist and playwright who progressed her career in the area. Given the limited number of pictures of Fanny that are available we didn’t have all that much to work with other than a handful of severe looking portraits from the time. After a bit of toing and froing however we finally had an agreed design. There’s no detail in her hair as they are going to get some ivy on the wall which will, in time, hopefully become her hair so the plain yellow is a bit of a stopgap til then. If ever there’s a decent excuse needed to go to the pub then I guess that’s it…

Cheers

id-iom

id-iom vs Rosa’s Thai Cafe

When we got a call from Rosa’s Thai Cafe about painting a mural at their imminently opening new branch in Brixton we jumped at the chance. Amongst other things it’s nice working close to home for a change. After a couple of meetings and a bit of R&D banter with them and their architects/interior designers it was decided that a shutter wall would be constructed to give it that grimy urban look and we’d paint directly onto that. After batting round a few designs we finally had a winner – the slightly bemused looking lady with a custom designed ambigram wallpaper style background.

Given that we’ve done this enough times to know that the wallpaper stencil would be slightly lost on the shutters due to their curvature we decided to go belt & braces with it and laser cut some wooden cutouts of the wallpaper design so there would still be some clarity to the design if you cared to look that closely. After a busy day’s painting whilst the workmen were still at work on the interior we managed to get it all completed. Given that it’s the launch party this evening it looks like the install went just fine from there. Time for us to dig out some glad rags for later…

Cheers

id-iom

Lasercat

According to the first website I looked at cats have been domesticated for 10,000 years. The modern domestic cat is apparently descended from a wild ancestor called Felis silvestris lybica and all 600 million housecats in the world can be traced back to five females of this species. Now I’m not sure how accurate this information is so don’t go quoting me especially when I wouldn’t even consider cats to be domesticated. They surely allow us to cohabit with them in return for food and shelter. It sounds a bit more like they’ve domesticated us. Anyway, today’s laser cut was produced as a little memento for a friend. Hand painting these suckers is surprisingly tricky but I got there in the end. And I even got a decent shot of it to boot.

Cheers

id-iom

Keef

So, it turns out that if you give a man (well, me specifically) access to a laser cutter this is the kind of magical little trinket you can expect him to produce with his first run of successful cutting. I’m a little smitten with this device at the moment. It may become obvious. If I’d ever paid attention as to how to use vector based graphics programmes it probably wouldn’t have been quite so much of an achievement – but I haven’t so it was. I’ve had this sketch of the eponymous Keef pulling some complicated hand signs on my computer for quite a while now so it was nice to finally get to use it for something. I just hope he thinks the same when he gets his new keyring…

Cheers

id-iom