Tesco’s Finest ‘spice’ – in store now!

Tesco’s Finest ‘spice’ Melange – in store now!

Tesco’s Finest ‘spice’ Melange label

If you’ve ever seen David Lynch’s 1984 film Dune (based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name) then you probably already know what Melange ‘spice’ is. In the film it’s a drug that has some particularly useful effects and one big downside. It gives the user a longer life span, greater vitaility, heightened awareness and psychic powers. Which is handy as it makes safe and accurate interstellar travel possible. The downside however is that it is addictive and withdrawal is fatal. All this has conspired to make it the most valuable commodity in the universe.

Never one to miss a trick Tesco’s have made a couple of intergalactic deals and got their hands on some of the good stuff. It’s harvested by hand on the desert planet Arrakis from the excretions of the highly dangerous giant sandworm. Tesco’s then ship it to earth and package it up in their Finest range for just under £100 for 4g. A bargain to be sure. Get it while it lasts…

cheers

id-iom

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Heart 2 Heart

Heart 2 Heart panorama

Heart 2 Heart

Heart 2 Heart

Heart 2 Heart

As Tina Turner famously sang ‘What’s love got to do with it?‘. Quite a lot as it turns out as we’ve got representations of both modern day and prehistoric love in the one room. ‘How do you go about making this room complete?’ I hear you ask. Well, if there’s one thing love can do it’s to bring two previously unconnected hearts together – and that is exactly what we’ve done right here with the use of some red thread, making a tunnel of love if you will. The demolition crew are going to love this one when they finally arrive…

Cheers

id-iom

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…