The day after the night before

Dave (or ‘Panther’ to his friends) had never been accused of making good decisions. In fact his chequered past was littered with questionable decisions. But none quite so foolish as today’s rash move. 

He’d decided to buy a jet ski and go and see his girlfriend, which, on the face of it, sounds pretty romantic. Love will find a way and all that. He lived in Scotland however whilst his heart’s desire lived on the Isle of Man. If you throw in the fact that the Irish Sea in winter time is not the most charitable place to be combined with the fact it’s 40km from Scotland and the fact that he’d never ridden a jet ski before you can begin to see the poor decisions branching off into infinity. Oh, and I forgot to say it’s the middle of a pandemic and the Isle of Man is sealed off, covid free and lusting to throw lawbreakers in prison – so Dave’s decision is looking poorer by the second.

Somehow he made it despite the journey taking almost 4 hours longer than he predicted and, assumably, him almost freezing to death. You’d think perhaps lying low at his girlfriend’s might be a good idea but no, it’s out clubbing for Dave and his betrothed. Perhaps predictably this was his face on being told he faced a prison sentence after the long arm of the law reached out for him the following day…

It is A3 in size and made using the magic of acrylic, pastel, paint pen and imagination. Drop us a line if you need Dave in your life…

Cheers

id-iom

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Monopoly – Brixton stylee!

“Featuring some of Brixton’s more notable addresses – such as Billa’s 24hour booze, Happy Shopper and The Sultan – this is an exciting game that will bring long, tedious hours of ‘fun’ for all the family. Brought to you by id-iom and Parker Brothers”

We’ve just finished up our 1m x 1m Brixton Monopoly commission and are pretty pleased with the final result – especially considering how long this one managed to take. After a load of emails back and forth we came up with a finished design which incorporated elements from various international editions of Monopoly, some invented elements and a load of place names from around Brixton which had significance to the client. As they live near to us all the locations (including Billa’s 24hr booze and Pizza Man) are somewhat familiar to me too…

Despite the fact they are known to me many spaces on the board are undoubtedly unfamiliar to just about everyone else. If, however, you do happen to be know all the place names and are particularly eagle-eyed you may even notice that we even arranged the squares so that they are grouped together logically (i.e by location and/or function) and the board follows a circuit from locations at the bottom of Brixton up to the top of Brixton Hill.

By far the biggest problem was how to go about doing the small lettering for the place names so that it was the correct size and font whilst still being clearly legible. Using stencils was out as they would have been problematic and time-consuming to cut and wouldn’t have guaranteed the level of clarity which I felt was necessary. So we then had to experiment in order to come up with something that would work to our satisfaction. After a bit of research and some failed attempts en route we came upon the world of gel medium transfers which, once you’ve got the hang of it, gives a nice clean transfer – albeit with a little residue from the gel medium left on the canvas but I felt this was an adequate compromise given some of the other methods tried…

Once all the lettering was on it was largely downhill from there although it was relatively slow work due to the fact that any mistakes would be highly visible – so I had to be careful to make none. Thankfully it all passed with hardly a hitch although I was conscious that doing the line work last would only lead to higher stress levels until it was all safely completed as one small slip would have probably set me back a fair bit.

Below are a few in progress shots for those that like that kind of thing.

Cheers

id-iom

Title: Monopoly (Brixton edition)

Media: Spraypaint, stencils, paint pen, gel medium and varnish

Size: 1m x 1m deep edge canvas