We are id-iom and we like idioms. There, I’ve said it. Sometimes we’re not quite so literal but today we are and there’s not much you can do about it. Here we have ‘Graffiti is a piece of cake’. Now we all know that ‘a piece of cake’ to mean a very easy task or accomplishment and graffiti to be the act of spray painting a wall. What do you get when you combine the two? You get a nice slice of cake. Plus a small stencilled fly.
In all fairness though painting freehand with spray cans is actually rather difficult. So, in a rather contradictory way I’m going to suggest reading to the end of this post and then forgetting you ever read it. It’ll be better that way. Just retain the image of the nice slice of cake. And try to forget about the fly that’s messing with your cherries.
As an addendum to today’s post, my research – which consisted of putting the words ‘Graffiti piece of cake’ into Google – revealed the world of graffiti cakes. They’re a thing. Seriously. Check it out yourself. What kind of world do we live in?
If you’ve wanted an id-iom piece but didn’t have the dollar then worry no further. We’re doing a little edition of A4 hot foil prints for £15 unframed (+ postage)
Recently it was World Bee Day and on this day in 1734 Anton Jansa, the pioneer of beekeeping was born. The purpose of the international day is to acknowledge the role of bees and other pollinators in the ecosystem.
That’s important because a dwindling global bee population can only be bad news for puny humans as the bees pollinate an awful lot of the crops and flowers that we depend on for food. Without them we are somewhat doomed so it’s probably best if we take a bit better care of our little insect cousins and make sure they can continue doing their job.
As a big bonus, they also know how to make honey. Without that we’d be left with wasp gravy and you wouldn’t want that on your morning toast.
Way back in the middle of September we started off doing our little bit of interior decoration at the House of Pain(t) and the image above was the first wall we started painting and also the first image we posted. My wall piece was based around the image below that we had done as a thank you to the developer who had kindly let us move into the basement and use it as our studio for 18 months.
125 Crest print
When we started we thought we only had a week or two to get any work done before the demolition crew were moving in. As time passed and the schedule slipped we realised that we may have enough time to complete the entire house. Given that we got another couple of months out of it gave us just about all the time we needed to get the interior sorted ‘a la id-iom’. Towards the end I realised the 125 Crest wall was looking a little incomplete so I made some additions to give it a more finished feel. I thought it only fitting that our final wall should be an update from where we started…
When we started working upstairs at the House of Pain(t) we invited a couple of friends along to help out. In one of the upstairs rooms Perspicere went to work doing a thread piece that my poor photography skills just don’t do justice to as it’s pretty elaborate and nebulous (it’s the thinner dark thread you can just about make out in the background). He even came back the next week to try and get it completed but then had to leave early due to a small domestic emergency. After doing pretty much all the rest of the house we had his not-quite-completed room to contend with. As there were so many nails in the walls and thread all over the place the only thing we could really do was continue his work to some degree.
So we decided to make it some kind of angel and ‘laser’ protected shrine to a strange canine king that is looking benignly down on a pair of kissing angels. It sounds odd now I’ve written it down but it seemed the only course of action we could reasonably take at that time. You have to use your imagination a little to pretend the red threads are laser beams protecting the shrine but i must stress that the effect is really much better if you see it in person (which you can’t). The angels had been lurking in the basement for some project that never came to pass and they just took up too much space to be transported onwards with us. I hope they’re happy.
We had already done a version of this for a client in New York who contacted us asking for another one as they’d had to give the last one away to pay for an emergency plumber! Apparently when the plumber came round he was smitten by the piece and kept looking at it and rather than ask for any money for sorting out the flooding issue he’d been called in for he asked if he could have the picture as payment. As the flooding was apparently quite severe (and he would have cost an absolute fortune) it was agreed to give him the framed version of this in payment for his services. A call was then put in to us as the piece was sorely missed and we were asked if we could come up with a replacement. A couple of weeks later and we now have the final product ready to ship out. If only all problems were so easily solved.
Anyway, who would have guessed that plumbers were interested in the love lives of hummingbirds?
Whilst nosing around we found a nice little couple of walls to work on so decided to set to work. ‘Jealousy’ is about 8 foot tall and we managed to get it done surprisingly quickly (well, for us anyway!)
Jealousy – stage 1
Jealousy – final
Whilst having a look around the site we found a broken and rusted window frame which i though would look good if hung on a nail with a stencil behind it. Hey presto! A couple of minutes later and this is what we had.
3 legs – framed
Bird behind bars – framed
Whilst I was stood there with a stencil in my hand when i realised what a nice silhouette it made on the wall. After a couple of attempts we got these shots which i like.
Bird silhouette
For this second one i got out the second part to the stencil (which is the body of the bird) and then sprayed that on the wall and then held the other stencil over it to get the silhouette. The thing i like most about this one is that the red stencil will look odd on the wall on it’s own and nobody will be able to work out it’s signifcance…
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