We haven’t seen one of the spheres out and about in a while. This one seems to have taken an intense interest in this young lady’s rainbow coloured hair and has been following her around for days now. Quite what it’s doing is entirely unknown.
Whilst most people may be a little concerned that a ominous orb has been shadowing their every move Emilia here doesn’t mind so much as it looks great as a mysterious background for her Instagram pictures. She’s been gaining followers at quite a rate but she has been having some rather odd thoughts of late…
She’s on a 40cm wide circular canvas board and was made using the magic of acrylic paint pouring, a touch of manual dexterity, some imagination, stencils and spray paint. She’s available to be rehomed so drop us a line if you’d like her to live with you…
Karen has always had a squiffy eye and doctors have told her that she can have surgery to have it corrected if she wants but she’s never wanted to have it done and never will. She likes the fact that people find it off-putting and when talking to her just don’t know which way to look. Karen also has a knack to roll her bad eye into the back of her head to really hit it home.
Through the years people have called her many names due to her affliction but one that has stuck because Karen liked it herself was ‘Ambly’. Karen also has a skill which is a direct cause of her wonky eye: she can tell if anything is squiffy even by the slightest degree with just a quick glance. Due to this many business sectors hold Karen in great demand for her unusual abilities. From the scientists at CERN to the builders of the worlds largest skyscrapers, to Tony from down Karen’s local pub who always asks her to see if he’s squiffy but Karen is always to polite to give him an answer. In all fairness everyone at the pub already knows the answer to that one…
So how do we start a write up about lady Cheltenham? Maybe its best to explain our monumental balls up that started it all.
There we were during the week looking at the weather forecast and lo and behold it forecast rain for the Saturday. This year our design consisted of quite a bit of emulsion so we thought it best to get an early start so that it wouldn’t run in the rain. So with as much preparation as we could muster we headed down on Friday to get an early start which we did with an ease that id-iom is known for.
When we got to the Frog and Fiddle is when the problems started. The wall that looked like the one we were painting hadn’t been painted white like the rest and it seemed a little wider than what we were expecting, so we asked the bar staff who pointed at another wall which we took for consent to paint. In hindsight this was probably not the best idea.
Lets move forward to Saturday lunchtime when we finally dragged ourselves out of bed after a few too many drinks the night before we set off back to the frog and fiddle to finish our piece but i think you can already guess we had painted the wrong wall. With a few expletives thrown about for our stupidity we set about trying to get the new wall finished before either the rain stopped play or the after party started.
Anyway what we have for our troubles is Lady Chelts
Thanks to Andy and Angela for once again putting on a wonderful festival. Onwards and upwards guys!!
Sunbathing has a bit of a bad rap these days. Nowadays people are more likely to use fake tan than actually sunbathe. This could probably be put down to the scientific evidence that prolonged exposure to UV rays and sunshine can cause skin cancer which absolutely no one wants at all. Tamara here however was never one to worry about such things and revels in the sun’s glorious rays.
‘Scorching’ is painted on a found table top that I came home with after wombling my way back from the pub late one night. Given the weight of it I’m still not sure how I managed it back home with it all by myself but somehow I clearly did. After painting the portrait I felt it needed a little more so after a quick ferret around in the miscellaneous art supplies box I came up with a chisel of sorts and some lighter fluid. A little hard work and some flambe action and the burned lettering was done. Then it was onto the question of how to stick some real sand to it…
One minute it was over, then suddenly under, then seemingly normal and all in the space of a 2 minute window. Smoky just didn’t know what to do. For a start he couldn’t think straight and even if he could he wouldn’t know what to do either. The only nugget of information that popped in to his dim head was ‘Stop, Drop and Roll!’ and with nothing else to check him he did just that.
He banged his head against the white padded wall and had a sudden moment of clarity before another rapid loss of function. Ol’ Smoky never was the same after he came across that bale of African Gunji 65 back in the day. Some say that if you look real close you can still see the smoke swirling around behind his eyes…
Created using the magic of smoke, pencils and paint pen after I’d seen a Youtube video showing a guy doing something similar. I quite like the way he turned out in the end.
I was staring blankly out to sea whilst on holiday recently letting my thoughts drift aimlessly like the waves crashing on the beach in front of me. I must have been at it for quite a while as another beachgoer came over and asked ‘What’s wrong? You look so sad!’ So I preceded to tell them my woes, my current hopes and dreams and my thoughts on Brexit and the state of the music industry.
This must of taken a fair while because eventually they went in to their beach bag coming out with an A4 sketch pad and said they thought it would be best if i got it all out via the process of sketch. To try and fight the demons I decided to try and draw how I felt about it all but in the end all I got was this. I’m not going to try that again…
Heed my warning!! Ignore the polka dots in the background!
They are there to try to induce some sort of cognitive dissonance in the viewer so that they are sick all over themselves whilst look at this guys face – which he says is about to slide off his skull! I’m not entirely sure if that’s really the case as the only time I’ve ever heard this happen is when you either have to much plastic surgery on any given weekend or when you open the Ark of the Covenant. Either way he sure does have an odd head.
Imagine the scene with me in the back garden in my speedos trying to grab a few of those sun’s precious rays. Of course as you can imagine i was mildly minding my own business but i have to admit it was incredibly difficult with what can be only described as a extremely loud wailing noise coming from the next garden. At first i thought it might be a pole cat and a mongoose making sweet sweet inter species love, then i thought it could be a jet engine starting up but i just didn’t think the neighbours were that proficient at engineering, then i thought it could be a cartload of howlwer monkeys having a business meeting but that just didn’t ring true either. So putting on my neighbourhood watch waistcoat i decided to investigate. Peeking over the fence i noticed a lone lady sat on a sun lounger crying all by herself. How could such a thing make such an incredible noise i thought to myself whilst trying to get her attention. Eventually i did manage to grab her attention but that was only after i had thrown a bit of my beer at her. Startled she looked around at me but just kept on crying. I tried to console her from over the garden fence but to no avail so i did the only thing i could do, i went and grabbed my watercolours and set about painting her. After i had finished i threw the picture to her side of the garden where she didn’t even look at it but just carried on weeping to herself. Anyway after that i got bored, left the house and went down the pub. She was still wailing when i left and i’m still not sure why.
The lady in this picture is what most people would call stand-offish or aloof and that is because she is. She just loves to look down on everyone and not just in a figurative sense but a literal sense as well.
When talking to her she looks down at you from a high angle due to her Amazonian height (and heels) but more importantly the sharp angle at which she keeps her head in relation to whoever she is talking to. She likes to think it creates the illusion of looking down at a miniature model just like in tilt shift photography.
To get the angle I wanted for this portrait I had to use every trick in my arsenal and resorted to painting her whilst balancing precariously at the top of the tallest ladder I could lay my hands on…
We here at id-iom seem to like Ramesses II or Ozymandias as the Greeks called him as this is our second picture based on one of the greatest pharaohs of the Egyptian Empire. This time I feel I should use the now famous words of Percy Shelley to describe the king of kings:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
As a side note he lived till around the age of 90/91, most men don’t live that long nowadays and this was 1213 BC. Maybe there is hope for me then…
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