In love as in death

Skull with lillies, acrylic paint on A3 paper, available on Big Cartel

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Flutter

Flutter

As you can probably tell by the fact she has a kingfisher nestled on her shoulder and two lovely little hummingbirds racing to taste the nectar of the blossoming lily she’s leaning in to sniff this lady is at one with nature. She has communed with her environment and found that she is now so in tune with her biorhythms and the natural cycle of life that she can talk with the animals just like Dr Doolittle. I’m only joking. She took some pretty strong acid about an hour ago and now thinks exclusively in smells and colours and can, as far as she’s concerned, converse with the imaginary birds and flowers that are crowding round her. Also, she thinks she’s leaning in to sniff the flower like Michael Jackson with his anti-gravity lean in the Smooth Criminal video.  That’s just how muddled she is. I guess the moral of the story is that things aren’t always what they seem. Or something like that.

She’s was made using the magic of acrylic paint, paint pen, stickers and charcoal on a large (A1 size) bit of coloured paper. She will surely look magnificent when framed up. If you’re interested drop us a line…

Cheers

id-iom

Title: Flutter
Materials: Paint pen, acrylic, stickers and charcoal
Size: A1

Liliana

Liliana

We were asked if we could produce something that was to be a gift for a baby. As it’s notoriously tricky getting any sense from a baby we had rely on the basic information that we had access to.

Ultimately I was trying to make something she’d be happy with as she was growing up and that her parents would like. The end result is a combination of digital print, stencil and screenprint.

It’s now been framed up and is (hopefully) adorning her bedroom wall. Only time will tell if she likes it when she’s older. At least her parents seemed to approve…

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…