Katie here has got over 20K followers on Instagram who just love her candid take on whichever European city she’s cavorting in on any given weekend. She’s uploaded over 1,600 photos and videos.
The question is, who owns the photos you upload to Instagram? You, right?? Not so quick my legally inept content creator. It is never quite so simple when dealing with these massive corporations. They use some pretty underhand legalese to make it so they have the right to use it in its promotional activities, but it can also transfer or sub-license those rights to its partners. This means whilst you technically own the picture they can do whatever they want with it. According to the T&Cs of both Facebook and Instagram, any profit that is made as a result of using your content will not be shared with you. .
Just remember kids – nothing is free in this world, Especially when you’re dealing with monolithic tech companies. Thinking about it I’m pretty surprised we aren’t charged per email…
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.
Out of all the pieces of canvas we found this was the most complete with a somewhat creepy face that the other half of id-iom just did not like. After a few minutes of discussion on what we were going to do we decided we were going to go abstract although we had no concrete plans on how we were going to go about achieving this.
We find the easiest way to proceed when you have no plan is to just start and see where it takes you. This can lead to some unfortunate circumstances however…
On the journey to abstraction we had to start somewhere so our first idea was to turn the piece into a half man, half pineapple kind of thing. Luckily this idea didn’t hang around too long before the other half of id-iom decided to become a bit of a can killer and pierce any almost-empty cans we had hanging around the studio.
Whilst, it was fun we had clearly gone too far by this point. So we gave into the inevitable and went back to rescuing some of the face. With a little finesse and a whole lot of luck we set about trying to pull this canvas back from the brink. A square stencil here or there, pulling the face forward and pushing the abstracted area into the background I give you ‘I see faces. Even when trying not to’.
Although Michael had been born in London his somewhat eccentric Nigerian parents would always tell him ‘It began in Africa’. Of course Michael could only ever think of the song by the Chemical Brothers whenever his parents said it but then it would always be accompanied by a weird and wonderful African legend or morality tale.
His parents, it turned out, were truly encyclopaedic on the subject. Over the years he’d heard hundreds of these tales and decided to rate the nations involved on the quality of their storytelling. He had every intention of visiting them all, in the order he’d worked, to find out if he was right. This was going to take a while…
Made on a National Geographic map of Africa using the power of imagination, spray paint, stencils and acrylic. It is 48 x 63 cm in size. Drop us a line or it’ll be on our Big Cartel page soon.
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.
It’s funny what turns up when you’re having a look through old photos. I must have just snapped this in the moment and then completely forgotten about it. It’s the cut out piece from a stencil we used when creating a gift for our cousin’s wedding and I just think the composition of the photo somehow hits the spot. Which is nice for something that is usually just discarded.
I like it enough to have it as the background image on my phone. So there.
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…
Time catches up with us all. This old skull has been feeding the flowers for so long that it’s difficult to know where the flowers end and the skull begins. The skull doesn’t even remember it’s name anymore; it’s been there for so many years. But all is as it should be. The circle of life turns slowly but it does forever turn…
Perhaps weirdly this is all based on a canvas that had been in development hell for a couple of months until eventually we put up as it was and that somehow opened the floodgates so we created an enhanced batch on supersmooth A2 paper featuring a background colour blend, extra bonus flowers, some gold leaf and spiffy rounded edges. Let us know if you need one for your wall…
The main, pertinent and only real question you should be asking yourself right now is ‘is that a googly eye?’ I’ve done my research and can guarantee you it isn’t.
Just yesterday the other half of id-iom asked why I was using a googly eye as a weight to hold down a stencil. I told him I wasn’t but he didn’t believe me until I lifted up the much painted tuppence coin in question and showed him. He still didn’t believe me even after I had put the coin back down. So there you have it. People will believe what they want.
Sometimes the write ups for our pictures suggest themselves. Sometimes the picture is driven by the write up. And sometimes the write up is nowhere to be seen. Today is one of those days. We’ve beaten the bushes and all we’ve come up with is some deleted intros and these perfunctory lines. I fear we may have to go back to write up school…
Anyway, let’s just get back to basics. What we do have is a classy looking lass on a messy (but hopefully pleasing) background. That much is for sure. Why we’ve painted her and what exactly she is doing there is entirely up for discussion. She’s definitely on A2 Bockingford paper with lovely rounded edges and is available to go to a good home. That is all we really definitely know. There’s a suspicion her name may be Eileen.
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