Ladies and Gentlemen. May I present to you our newest debutante, Lady Samara Linoleum. A most mysterious lady indeed. We’ve given you a quick glimpse of this majestic A2 lino cut before she was inked up but we can now reveal her in all her majesty. I absolutely love how she’s come out complete with glitchy printing. Once you get a bit of hand finishing on there we’ve got a glorious little edition of four.
Lady Samara is on A2 Bockingford paper and made using the magic of hand cut lino print, ink, paint pen, watercolour, spray paint and imagination. If you need the esteemed Lady Linoleum for your wall then you can find them in our shop or slide into our DM’s…
As a small aside, we’ve run out of ink so can’t currently do anymore at the minute but that does mean it’s Art Shop Time! Yay! Once we’ve treated ourselves to one of the best places in London we may do a run of just the print without any hand embellishing. But that remains to be seen.
For our next foray into lino we’ve decided to go big. Now I have to admit I’m not really one to cut stencils and usually leave that up to the other half of id-iom but recently whilst tidying up in the studio I found an unopened package. It turns out it was some A2 size bits of lino. This was perfect as we’d just done some small lino cuts a couple of weeks ago.
Unlike cutting stencils I have managed to smash this one out without a single complaint about my sore fingers. Saying all that it does take a while though and am not quite finished yet. How we go about making the actual print at that size is currently still a mystery. When it’s all done you’ll be the first to know…
When I originally found this map of Doncaster in a big box of assorted maps underneath my desk I thought ‘This is perfect’, I know a few people from Donny so I’m sure I can come up with something smart and urbane. Then, of course, inspiration deserted me and left me staring at a map of Yorkshire with no grand plan in sight.
After staring at the map for what could have been a week I decided to get in touch with someone from Donny to try and help me find a little inspiration. They gave me the following to work with:
1. Jeremy Clarkson – his mother had the Paddington bear factory
2. Kevin Keegan
3. Lesley Garrett
4. John Parr who did St Elmo’s fire tune, actually comes to our local pub
Very hard Hugo we are just a little mining town up North
And that was enough to get me on my way. First I thought I’d try the route of the Paddington Bear factory but sadly couldn’t come up with anything good enough, so moved on to number two but football is lost on me so I decided to move on to number three which didn’t really give me anything to work with either. This meant I had to try and come up with something using number four and I truly thought this would be the one. Who doesn’t like a catchy 80’s hit for inspiration? Again, however, I came up empty. I was just about to lose all hope of finding inspiration until I read the last line back to myself again and there it was…Just a little mining town up North.
It’s funny what turns up when you’re having a look through old photos. I must have just snapped this in the moment and then completely forgotten about it. It’s the cut out piece from a stencil we used when creating a gift for our cousin’s wedding and I just think the composition of the photo somehow hits the spot. Which is nice for something that is usually just discarded.
I like it enough to have it as the background image on my phone. So there.
Time catches up with us all. This old skull has been feeding the flowers for so long that it’s difficult to know where the flowers end and the skull begins. The skull doesn’t even remember it’s name anymore; it’s been there for so many years. But all is as it should be. The circle of life turns slowly but it does forever turn…
Perhaps weirdly this is all based on a canvas that had been in development hell for a couple of months until eventually we put up as it was and that somehow opened the floodgates so we created an enhanced batch on supersmooth A2 paper featuring a background colour blend, extra bonus flowers, some gold leaf and spiffy rounded edges. Let us know if you need one for your wall…
The main, pertinent and only real question you should be asking yourself right now is ‘is that a googly eye?’ I’ve done my research and can guarantee you it isn’t.
Just yesterday the other half of id-iom asked why I was using a googly eye as a weight to hold down a stencil. I told him I wasn’t but he didn’t believe me until I lifted up the much painted tuppence coin in question and showed him. He still didn’t believe me even after I had put the coin back down. So there you have it. People will believe what they want.
We’ve all seen The Matrix when Neo has to decide between the red pill and the blue pill? Round here we just have the one item with a beautifully blended paint job. But I wouldn’t recommend swallowing it…
I was painting yesterday when I needed a weight to hold down a stencil I was using. Being the resourceful set of intrepid artists that we are, we already have a tub of 2p pieces in the studio for just such an occasion. After finding the box I was about to get back to work when I pulled this beauty out of it. It must have been in the box for a few years because it now had the extra weight of layers upon layers of spray paint on it and a fetching pink and blue blended paint job. I felt duty bound to record this bad lad for posterity for no better reason than I can and it’s nice to find the beauty in small things sometimes…
If there’s one thing the pandemic has taught me it’s to drink responsibly, like a grown adult. As far I can tell that means regularly and with gusto. So we’re embracing that with a limited edition motivational mini-print. Sometimes it’s all you need to get you out of the door to the pub…
Made using the power of alcohol, spray paint, stencils, paint pens and classy rag edged paper. They’re an edition of 5, they’re £20 (including postage) each and they’re a nifty 21 x 22 cm in size. So, easy does it.
It’s time to check up on an old piece and see how it’s getting on. The first time we saw black sphere 004 he was shiny and new and this is what we said:
Today’s sphere is out living life in the real world. It’s watched one too many episodes of Rick and Morty and has decided to go on an inter-dimensional trip of its own. It has chosen our world. Quite why it is examining a moss covered wall is anyone’s guess. What Black Sphere 004 will make of it would also be well beyond our range of reckoning. Perhaps it will declare war. Perhaps it will stop for a picnic. Only time will tell…
Now though we can see that time hasn’t been kind to black sphere 004. He obviously decided he liked what he saw and stayed a while, a little too long maybe. Maybe this is what happens to sphere’s when they decide to hang around on earth…
Just the other day we showed you our first commission wall in 18 months, well, when we were done they then requested we do a second wall in order to, sort of, explain the first. It consisted of a legend so that people could see the actual drug logos and names for the abstracted logos we used on the original wall. Now I haven’t done any precise stencil work for a while, instead preferring the ‘get it in the edit’ philosophy of painting, but for this we only had one shot and it needed to be as neat as possible. I have to admit we did pretty well if I don’t say so myself. After completing this one they then asked about a possible third wall. Watch this space…
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