If you’ve not been to Crystal Palace Park and seen the dinosaurs then I highly recommend doing so. They’re concrete, life-size and in need of some restoration. By modern standards I guess they’re not that impressive but when you consider they were made 150 years ago – before they even really knew what most of these dinosaurs actually looked like – then I think that makes them all the more impressive. There’s even little information boards showing what we now reckon the animals really looked like and I love they fact they took some pretty dramatic artistic liberties.
The park itself is named after the famed Crystal Palace that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park before being dismantled and reconstructed in South London where it sat from 1854 until it was destroyed by fire in 1936. The area is also famous for it’s TV transmitter which, at 219 metres, is the fourth tallest structure in London. The park also features in ‘The Italian Job’ in the scene filmed at the athletics track in Crystal Palace sports centre where Michael Caine says “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”. So there you have it. An ode to Crystal Palace.
There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun. But that’s not important right now. What is important is the ‘House of Requirements’. It has the ability to produce whatever it is you’re looking for whenever you need it but the key is knowing where to look. Literally anything may be found. The list of potential objects is effectively infinite. All that is required is a rich desire to find said object. In the case of failure it just means you haven’t looked hard enough. A workable solution always presents itself. It’s weird but it’s true. I know because I live there. Sometimes.
All this from some weird desire to produce something to respect the actual building that provided a roof over my head for so many years. And there you have it. It’s odd being an artist sometimes…
‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it’. So spoke the eponymous hero in 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I was in North London on something of a busman’s holiday and decided this was solid advice worth heeding so headed out to do some ‘research’ into Highgate. It somehow yielded this result.
Some interesting facts about Highgate; St Michael’s Church (pictured) is the highest church in London and as you enter the church you are all but level with the cross on the top of St Paul’s Cathedral, there’s literally tons of famous people buried in Highgate Cemetery from Karl Marx and George Michael to Jeremy Beadle and Alexander Litvinchenko, the 18th century farcical oath of ‘Swearing on the Horns’ was traditionally given to visitors at Highgate pubs. If you don’t know about ‘Swearing on the Horns’ you really should check it out…
To celebrate these facts and Highgate in general I’ve produced this image. I think that’s the best explanation I can come up with for its existence. It would be good to have a proper use for it. I should probably get on with some real work…
There I was, minding my own business, whilst perusing the aisles of my local supermarket. I happened to glance at a bottle of Dead Pony Club by Brewdog and realised the supermarket description (‘Pale Ale 3.8% is brewed with a solid malt base’ – blah, blah, blah) did no favours to a drink with such a name. I decided to use my overactive imagination as a guide to remedy this with a description a bit more fitting…
If this was an 80’s film this would now be the montage section where I scan, find fonts, use my computer and finally print out the finished product. We’d then segue back to me walking up the street about to complete my mission with the supermarket insertion of my replacement label. Cue credits.
You know Christmas is on the way when we get a call from events company Elsewhere as they need a little id-iom design pep to complete their party preparations. This year consisted mainly of design for print and laser cutting a load of bespoke Elsewhere Christmas decorations. The Party in a Pear Tree wallpaper design was used both as a wallpaper and as some giftwrap for the fake presents under the tree. It would seem id-iom is the complete design package after all…
Windmills have been around for thousands of years in one form or another but they’re not a particularly common sight nowadays. Brixton however has London’s only working windmill. It’s tucked away near the prison overlooking an estate. Originally it would have milled local flour, been surrounded by fields and been the best place to catch the prevailing wind. I know because I’ve had the guided tour.
To celebrate this hidden little gem and Brixton in general I’ve produced this image. I think that’s the best explanation I can come up with for its existence. It would be good to have a proper use for it. I should probably get on with some real work…
Hmmmmm. Indecision, indecision, indecision. Perhaps you can help… We were asked if we’d like to head up to Nag’s Head Market in Holloway with a view to potentially chucking a bit of paint around. After having a look around and taking some measurements it was then time to try and decide what to do. Our first stop was to design a wallpaper stencil which can be liberally applied wherever we find a spot to tie the whole space together a bit. What we’re left with is this wallpaper design featuring a horse’s head (see what I’ve done there) and a little Love N7 logo in the centre.
My problems arise from the fact that I can’t decide what colour works best. Just about all of the walls are painted a dark green colour and I’ve turned myself around that many times trying to decide which colour works best that I’m now hopelessly confused. Perhaps someone else’s opinion may be of use before I go ordering a paint colour that just doesn’t pop nicely…
Doesn’t everyone enjoy design book covers for their fictional book featuring none other than hard drinking human/goat hybrid biker Glen Fandango? Here’s the only excerpt I’ve actually written from ‘The Wild One’:
In the silence that blossomed you could have heard a pin drop. No one knew quite what to say. It wasn’t so much that they couldn’t comprehend the words more that they were agog at the person who was presenting them. Glen Fandango stood a shade over 7ft tall (including his horns) and was dressed in the leathers of a now defunct biker gang. He glanced round the puzzled faces and repeated his question ‘Can I get a beer please?’ The lady behind the bar was the first to gather her wits and she pivoted towards the beer tap with a glass in her hand without either taking her eyes off him or saying a word.
As he waited for the beer he casually surveyed the other people in the bar before adding ‘I’m also looking for a bit of information. Does anybody here know an Alice Gerhardt?’ With that pronouncement the temperature in the room dropped a further few degrees as it would seem he had struck a nerve. Perfect, that was just what he wanted. Glen smiled. Not that you’d know it though as his goat face was largely inscrutable to the average person. It would seem that he was in the right place after all.
Glen had not had an easy life but it’s not all been his fault. Ever since his ‘father’ rescued him from a government lab in North Korea and escaped across the border to the south with the infant in his arms people have been pointing and whispering. A small measure of fame followed his arrival in Seoul and within a few years they had been invited to the USA to start a new life.
As a young kid, whilst his father continued his work in genetics for the US Department of Defense, he was relentlessly teased until his tormentors learned the hard way that the horns on his head weren’t just for decoration. This, in turn, led to an early involvement with the police. It’s one of the few relationships he’s managed to successfully maintain over the years. By the time his father died he was an angry young man with a chip on his shoulder and the face of a goat. The next decade was an epic spiral of booze, bikes and bad decisions. It was only after hitting rock bottom that he managed to come to terms with himself and emerge, not entirely unscathed, on the other side. Nowadays he’s (more or less) working on the side of the angels and if you can find him and convince him your case is worthy he is, without doubt, the best manhunter on the planet…
And that’s what I’ve got. Along with my carefully designed biker patch for his now defunct biker gang and his likeness sprayed on the side of an abandoned van. You can make the rest up yourself…
In the middle of the Irish Sea is the beautiful Isle of Man. Now, legend has it that the island is protected by an ancient sea god called Mannanan Mac Lir (‘son of the sea’). He’s pretty baddass as he’s got a boat named Scuabtuinne (‘wave sweeper’) which works without sails, a sea-borne chariot drawn by his horse Enbarr (‘water foam’), a sword called Fragarach (‘the answerer’) and it is said that with the sword at their throat no one could move or tell a lie, thus the name Answerer. The sword was also said to place the wind at the user’s command and could cut through any armour or wall and that it inflicted piercing wounds from which no man could recover. He also had a cloak of invisibility (‘feth fiada’) which he could throw over the entire island as an all encompassing mist to hide the island from enemies. Like I said he pretty much had it all going on. Oh, and he had a flaming helmet to top it all off.
If all that isn’t enough in itself to create a design based on Mannanan then the fact that I’m from the Isle of Man myself should probably clinch it. It was originally going to be a wall design but I think it may need adapting somewhat for that to be the case. Perhaps a sticker? The latin text is the manx motto which roughly translated reads ‘however you throw me I shall stand’. So there you go.
Now this is a story all about how Lou’s life got flipped, turned upside down and I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there. I’ll tell you how she became the ghost with white hair. It all began one morning when she was running a little late for work and decided to eat a bit of leftover takeaway for breakfast. This turned out to be a very bad decision. Within 3 hours she was dead. It’s unclear why she has been forced to haunt her old workplace for all eternity but she does it with dignity and grace. That is until she remembers the takeaway and goes into screaming banshee mode. It can certainly put you off your breakfast. That’s for sure. You may wonder why I’m telling you this. All I can say for sure is that questions are often more intriguing than answers.
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