Never forget your roots

Somehow we’ve tumbled into an alternate dimension where id-iom are the only name in the art world and we’ve had to resort to writing inspirational messages to ourselves to try and keep it real. ‘Never forget your roots’ we tell ourselves as we think about dropping the cardboard piece on the streets like we used to do then realise we could make far more with a celebrity auction in LA. 

We’ve all seen it happen to celebrities –  first they start off humble and happy to be on the national stage but slowly they morph into globe-spanning self-facilitating media nodes. Well, despite our dip into another dimension it’s not happening to us. We remember our Manx roots. For now at least…

Cheers

id-iom

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Celebrity Quote – Chris Martin

It’s been a long while since we’ve delved into the murky world of celebrity quotes. Today we’ve got Coldplay front man Chris Martin with, what I think we can all agree, is a pretty odd quote. 

It  both shows his awareness of his popularity with a certain segment of the population whilst simultaneously showing disdain for the other part of the population that would like to shake him by the hand – assumably for bringing his music to the world rather than because they have a taser concealed in their palm. Gloves or helmet? What a modern dilemma. Who knows? If I were you Chris I’d go belt and braces and wear them both…

Love

id-iom

Scarlett

Coming up with a child’s name can be a tricky business. You’ve got to get it right as they’re stuck with it for life. John had been struggling with this process for months whilst his wife insisted, increasingly loudly, that he better come up with something really good if he’s taking this long. One popular method for naming babies in celebrity circles is the ‘Name child after where it was conceived’ method which is really quite self explanatory so John thought he’d head down this path.

After performing the necessary mental arithmetic and referring to the calendar on his phone John worked out it had probably been whilst they had been on a short break to the Isle of Man. There was a particular afternoon picnic which he thinks may have been the culprit. It all escalated a little quickly and could probably have got them arrested but was fun nonetheless.

He was still remininscing when a nurse popped her head into the waiting area and told him to get straight to the delivery room. As he entered the room his daughter was just making an appearance and the name he was searching for jumped straight into his head. ‘Scarlett!’ he shouted. It was lucky she turned out to have red hair…

Cheers

id-iom

Chris, I think I’d recommend the helmet option…

Sometimes, when I’m feeling a little low I play ‘clocks’, ‘the scientist’ and ‘yellow’ all at the same time, on constant repeat and with increasing volume until I feel that I am actually Chris Martin. It’s such an amazing feeling to consciously uncouple from yourself and hitch your trailer to Mr Martin’s consciousness. Truly mind blowing. Only joking. I can’t imagine what kind of tat you’d find floating around inside his bonce. You’d be experiencing some serious cognitive dissonance that’s for sure.

Anyway it’s been a good long while since we’ve done any celebrity quotes and I just couldn’t resist  doing a new one when I saw this quote from Coldplay’s sassy frontman. I think I’d safely recommend the helmet option for him. Probably safer that way. Now I’ve just got to think of somewhere fitting that I can deposit it on the street. Drop us a line if you’ve got a good idea…

Cheers

id-iom

Winehouse

Winehouse

The late Amy Winehouse has sadly gone down in history as one of the 27 club, this picture however was completed some time before her death. The stencil was originally apart of our celebrity head series which we incorporated with quotes from the celebrities themselves, you really can’t believe some of the stupid things that some of them have said…

It is A2 in size and is made using stencils, watercolour and glitter. Signed on reverse.

Here is the ebay link

For further information about us and what we get up to you can visit our flickr (www.flickr.com/id-iom) and twitter (@thisisidiom).

Cheers

id-iom

My favourite celebrity quotes… Part 1

We had a lot of fun doing these last year and getting them out on the street. After i’d come across a couple of fantastically ridiculous celebrity quotes I realised what an untapped goldmine of stupid things have been said by your average C-lister (or, indeed, A-lister!)  Some of them really do come out with the most incredibly ill advised things.

Doing a series of them became so easy it was unavoidable. After we’d created them we waited for a nice day and then went to disperse them around London town.

More to follow at some later date…

Cheers

id-iom

Oliver Reed

On street – Old Blue Last, East End

Elton John

On street – Electricity box, Soho

Marilyn Manson

On street – in Camden. I’m not quite sure where (and also apologise for the low quality photo) as we were a little drunk by this point…

David Beckham (we completely failed to get a shot of this one on the street – although it was somewhere in the East End)

Celebrity Eggs

I realise it’s a little late for Easter but it’s never too late for chocolate… We were asked if we could somehow paint some celebrity heads onto some huge (1kg) dark chocolate eggs. The eggs were for Thorntons and were to be auctioned off for the children’s charity Barnado’s. Other eggs were also be to be designed for the auction including one from fashion designer Henry Holland, celebrity tattooist Louis Molloy (who recreated two of the most popular designs available at his Manchester-based tattoo parlour – swallows and bluebirds) and patissier Eric Lanlard, cake-maker to the stars (who created an egg lavishly decorated with gold leaf and sugar crystal pieces).

The eggs were to remain edible so we had to work out exactly we were going to do this as we obviously couldn’t use our usual choice of paints. After hitting a specialist cake production shop (I didn’t even know that such places existed!) to pick up various edible inks, paints and bits & pieces we set to work. After many, many failed attempts (it was something of a sharp learning curve) we came up with what we thought was a foolproof plan. We would use rolled out marzipan to apply the stencil straight (as it was impossible to attach the stencil directly to the egg due to the shape of the egg) and then apply it to the egg along with some extra decoration. These were then dutifully sent off to be photographed and below is what we came up with:

Unfortunately the client then got back with the fact that they didn’t like them and could we possibly rework them so we were working directly onto the egg. D’oh! Back to the drawing board… With time running very short we got hold of some white eggs (so the black of the faces would work properly) and then had to paint the images directly on. Unfortunately trying to paint with chocolate just wasn’t working and we were running dangerously low of time and white chocolate eggs so we eventually had to resort to using brown acrylic paint (which obviously meant the eggs would not be edible) This whole process resulted in somewhat shoddier images (the Prince Harry one at the back is particularly so) but the client was happy with them once they’d been to the photographer:

The interweb seemed to like them too and before we knew it they were all over the place. If only we could replicate that kind of attention all the time…

Celebrity wordsearch

Game on! Here’s a 1m x 1m piece which also functions as a giant celebrity wordsearch. Can you work out what it says? It’s a little tricky but i think i’ve got there…

Below that is a similar wordsearch on an abandoned wall.

CELEBRITY WORDSEARCH ON CANVAS

CELEBRITY WORDSEARCH ON WALL