You might be wondering if today’s piece has something to do with Mickey Mouse’s preferences when Minnie is out of town and he has the house to himself – but you’d be wrong.
What’s actually going on is Mickey is organising a treasure hunt for Donald Duck’s nephews. The trouble is Mickey has already been at the drinks cabinet and had the better part of a whole bottle of whisky to himself. He now only has one job left, that of the treasure hunt. The trouble is he’s already hidden the prize but can’t remember where…
You know how they say there’s a bullet somewhere with your name on it? In this case it was a giant arrow and it definitely had my name on it. Anyway, there I was minding my own business ambling to the shop when I hear an odd whooshing sound behind me getting swiftly louder. I stop for a second and am just turning around when something flashes behind me and lodges itself in the pavement with a concrete rending crunch. For a second I’m in disbelief. Then I realise that my old nemesis has broken the ceasefire and loosed a first salvo of their house busting giant arrows… THIS. MEANS. WAR!
A throwback to a 2015 street intervention where we got into a little altercation with our old nemesis.Seriously though, what else are you meant to do when you find a bit of street furniture that has been knocked over by a car?
Ladies and Gentlemen. May I present to you our newest debutante, Lady Samara Linoleum. A most mysterious lady indeed. We’ve given you a quick glimpse of this majestic A2 lino cut before she was inked up but we can now reveal her in all her majesty. I absolutely love how she’s come out complete with glitchy printing. Once you get a bit of hand finishing on there we’ve got a glorious little edition of four.
Lady Samara is on A2 Bockingford paper and made using the magic of hand cut lino print, ink, paint pen, watercolour, spray paint and imagination. If you need the esteemed Lady Linoleum for your wall then you can find them in our shop or slide into our DM’s…
As a small aside, we’ve run out of ink so can’t currently do anymore at the minute but that does mean it’s Art Shop Time! Yay! Once we’ve treated ourselves to one of the best places in London we may do a run of just the print without any hand embellishing. But that remains to be seen.
When I originally found this map of Doncaster in a big box of assorted maps underneath my desk I thought ‘This is perfect’, I know a few people from Donny so I’m sure I can come up with something smart and urbane. Then, of course, inspiration deserted me and left me staring at a map of Yorkshire with no grand plan in sight.
After staring at the map for what could have been a week I decided to get in touch with someone from Donny to try and help me find a little inspiration. They gave me the following to work with:
1. Jeremy Clarkson – his mother had the Paddington bear factory
2. Kevin Keegan
3. Lesley Garrett
4. John Parr who did St Elmo’s fire tune, actually comes to our local pub
Very hard Hugo we are just a little mining town up North
And that was enough to get me on my way. First I thought I’d try the route of the Paddington Bear factory but sadly couldn’t come up with anything good enough, so moved on to number two but football is lost on me so I decided to move on to number three which didn’t really give me anything to work with either. This meant I had to try and come up with something using number four and I truly thought this would be the one. Who doesn’t like a catchy 80’s hit for inspiration? Again, however, I came up empty. I was just about to lose all hope of finding inspiration until I read the last line back to myself again and there it was…Just a little mining town up North.
We’re easily sidetracked, it appears. One half of id-iom had ventured out into the cold to scrape and blank out our previous wall as the weather was just about sunny enough. After an hour or so out there I head out to see how he’s getting on and rather than paint over the previous wall he’d decided to adapt it into something else entirely. Then I got involved. Then it got dark and we had to come back the next day to finish what we were doing. And it’s still not ready to be painted on again. Like I said, easily sidetracked.
Anyway, if at first glance you thought this was 90’s cartoon legend Johnny Bravo then you’d be very much mistaken. For this is his second cousin twice removed Johnny Omicron. He’s twice as chatty but half as much fun. Now he’s got to go. The wall will be blanked out…
As bad boy urban artists there’s not much that stands in our way, especially not some passive aggressive sign trying to tell us what not to do. No loitering, no smoking or sitting on the steps. No one tells us what not to do. Take THAT sign.
We make those kinds of rules up ourselves. And then break them anyway. That’s just the id-iom way.
With the end of lockdown now in sight, we can now start to start thinking about the future and that’s exactly what Margery here intended to do. Before she fell asleep all she could think of was holidays to far flung parts of the globe where she would be invited to urbane parties with exclusive guest lists where she was the guest of honour. She wasn’t yet sure why she was the guest of honour but that’s what she hoped to find out over the next night’s sleep.
Sadly that wasn’t the case. Instead of dreams of living the high life with the world’s elite, she had dreams that left her more exhausted than anything else. She found herself traipsing through clouds like the Care Bears but instead of frolicking in the sun she was chasing ducks but didn’t know why. It was all very confusing for her. On top of that, her teeth kept falling out and growing back every time the ducks would quack at her.
This seemed to go on for hours until at one point when she was within a couple of inches from grabbing a duck when her foot started to sink into the cloud she was walking on. Suddenly she fell through the cloud and was hurtling through the air towards the ever nearing earth. Just as she was about to hit the ground she woke up with a start, knocking the glass of water on her bedside table all over herself and her cat which proceeded to dash from the room clawing her leg viciously as it scarpered for safety. After looking at herself in the mirror and assessing the bags under her eyes and the damage done from the cat she wasn’t particularly looking forward to going back to sleep anytime soon…
Well, well, well. Look who’s shown their face after all this time. Storm Bird is back and is angrier than ever. You may recognise the feisty little redbreast from short films such as Storm Bird (Dave’s remix).
With the very recent reintroduction of sunshine, I decided to do a bit of gardening to try and alleviate the relentless monotony induced by having to stay indoors all the time. Gardening has never been my strong suit and Storm Bird was more than happy to point out every single one of my glaring mistakes.
First, the worms weren’t fat enough and that was my fault for not feeding them sufficiently. Then the caterpillar turned out to be poisonous and how dare I try and get the mighty Storm Bird to eat tainted food? The list of my errors went on and on and on.
For 5 hours straight whilst I was toiling away in the garden I had Storm Bird continuously berate me for a myriad of different things including (but not limited to): being too slow, being too fast, not admiring his golden red plumage enough, staring at him too much, not listening, making too many cups of tea, interacting with the neighbours and pretty much a constant barrage of insults regarding my hairstyle. Really quite uncalled for if I say so myself.
She’s A2 in size and on high quality Bockingford paper and made using the magic of imagination, acrylic, spray paint, paint pen and watercolour. That’s about all I can give you on this one…
Not to take anything away from this artist’s work but Duh. I can’t remember where I took this photo probably on one of my mandated daily sanity walks. At least he had the wherewithal to bring a pen on his said daily sanity walks and to share his thoughts with us.
I must remember to bring a pen myself next time so we can start a conversation
Cheers
id-iom
P.s. I actually went back with a pen to start a conversation but sadly someone had already repainted the wall.
Dave (or ‘Panther’ to his friends) had never been accused of making good decisions. In fact his chequered past was littered with questionable decisions. But none quite so foolish as today’s rash move.
He’d decided to buy a jet ski and go and see his girlfriend, which, on the face of it, sounds pretty romantic. Love will find a way and all that. He lived in Scotland however whilst his heart’s desire lived on the Isle of Man. If you throw in the fact that the Irish Sea in winter time is not the most charitable place to be combined with the fact it’s 40km from Scotland and the fact that he’d never ridden a jet ski before you can begin to see the poor decisions branching off into infinity. Oh, and I forgot to say it’s the middle of a pandemic and the Isle of Man is sealed off, covid free and lusting to throw lawbreakers in prison – so Dave’s decision is looking poorer by the second.
Somehow he made it despite the journey taking almost 4 hours longer than he predicted and, assumably, him almost freezing to death. You’d think perhaps lying low at his girlfriend’s might be a good idea but no, it’s out clubbing for Dave and his betrothed. Perhaps predictably this was his face on being told he faced a prison sentence after the long arm of the law reached out for him the following day…
It is A3 in size and made using the magic of acrylic, pastel, paint pen and imagination. Drop us a line if you need Dave in your life…
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