Infected Piano no.2

Back in January, I was given the opportunity to Infect another piano.  This time, for a friend of a friend of a friend! The owner had seen Chris Martin's painted piano online and with that in mind, along with a list of bands and artwork to go off, asked me to paint his upright piano. 

I worked on it in my usual way, making it up as I went along, but with band logos and artwork for inspiration.  Like with the last upright I painted, some of the curvier areas were harder to paint with my trusty Posca pens and some areas, myself and the owner agreed, were best left alone. 

I had fun with the project though, recreating some of my own favourite bands' artwork, like Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' and The Beatles' 'Yellow Submarine'.

It took me a week to complete the job and the owner and his family (who are very friendly people) love what I did with it.  Not long after I finished, they posted photos of the piano up on the internet, which now has over 780,000 hits and a few hundred comments.

Not all of which are complimentary! I'll leave you with the link to that site below so you can read some of them for yourselves.

  I've recently met up with the owner again to do some design work with him and we are looking into getting some more pianos, doing them up and painting them, then trying to sell them. Watch this space for more on that......

Go to the link below and click the 'Just had my piano painted' link. 

http://www.reddit.com/search?q=painted+piano

Brandalism. Advertise THIS!

"With great power, comes great responsibility".  Wise words. (Thanks Stan Lee!) 

The 'power' i'm talking about, is the power of design.  The ability to create a  striking image or piece of typography that makes people stop and think. 

   I was asked to call upon this power recently and use it to take part in the Brandalism project along with 25 other artists. 

   If you live in either Manchester, Bristol, London, Leeds or Birmingham, you may have seen some of our work up on billboards in the last couple of weeks?  The Independent Online ran an article about it the other day.  I'll leave you with links to the Brandalism site and the Independent article underneath this post so you can see for yourself what went into the project and it's effect on the public and the government, but first, here's what I wrote to accompany the piece.....

Television.  Sucking you in since day one.  Endless days of people sat gazing at its sickly facade, destroying braincells and turning  millions of people into zombies.  

Adverts. Television’s own personal weapons grade ammunition.

Fired at us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in billions of homes across the world.  They tell us what to eat, what to wear, how to  LIVE.......?!  Robots! That’s what it’s creating.  

  Individuality fights to break free in the strong willed and creative minds, but in a world controlled through the media, a huge percent of the population are affected by what they tune into day in, day out.

  My image for the project may well be a little obvious,but I believe  the message to be clear. I wanted to create something a lot simpler than my usual Infections and I’ve been using Lego a lot recently, both in my personal design work and building things with the children at my job with Aspired Futures.

  It was indeed an honour to be asked to take part in the project with so  many great artists on board.  I hope the end results inspire something in the people who see them. 

http://brandalism.org.uk/

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/brandalism-street-artists-hijack-billboards-for-subvertising-campaign-7953151.html?origin=internalSearch

Lego Infector

Lego is without a doubt one of the greatest inventions of all time! It's an absolute classic children's toy, but also highly collectable and I'd say as popular today, if not more, than it has ever been.  I myself collect the Lego Mini Figures and despite them being foil wrapped and their contents hidden from sight, I've become quite a dab hand at finding the ones I want! I play with lego quite a lot with the children at my job with Aspired Futures Ltd and am about to start a project with them to make giant lego figures from wood, so I've been drawing quite a lot of Lego men of late! 

I had loads of fun Infecting one of my favourite things of all time and incorporating different elements of my life into it, like the Future League piece.  Watch this space for more on 'The League', it's going to be MASSIVE. 

The Thundercats piece is one I did a while ago for my cousin Liann (nicknamed 'Lion' due to the spelling of her name) 

I'm also pretty good at building things with Lego, like the Herbal Sessions Soundsystem party I made a while back, which includes a Lego version of the Herbal Sessions rig, a hand painted backdrop, a OneFiveEight Live art wall, including a tiny homage to the original wall mural in the OneFiveEight house and a cammo covered marquis! The decks in the dj booth spin and the needles also move up and down! Details! 

I had great fun building this, as you can imagine! Massive thanks to Chris Shaw for lending me two huge containers full of lego to aid in the completion of the project and to lil Sally for taking me out into the woods and to the beach to take photos of the piece.

I wanted to take some shots that made it look more like a real party.  (In the back of my mind, I had the idea of doing a mock magazine review style piece for the OneFiveEight magazine, something I have not yet got round to)

The scene above, depicting a little two and fro between the dj and the guy with the paddle, is a nod to one of my best friends Mike, AKA Dj Howonearth.  

"Grab your paddles!" is a shout from 'Off The Kuff', a mix cd he did featuring me on the mic and produced by the masterful Raikes Parade. 

  You can listen to the mix on Mixcloud here

-http://www.mixcloud.com/HerbalSessions/howonearth-off-the-kuff-nov-2010/

I've kept the sound system and dj booth with backdrop intact and it sits proudly on my shelf at home along with my growing collection of Lego Mini Figures! 

I'm just a big kid really! It's the art of seeing through the third eye of your inner child (if you haven't already closed it by growing up!)  

  This way of being is influential to my artwork, as I am not influenced by what is around me, just what comes from my own imagination. 

I want to do a little project customising Lego men.  I painted the Dirty Dozen when I was younger! Some of them you might be able to spot in the photos above. 

Hybrid Infection

As followers of my work will know, I only really 'go digital' in small amounts.  A bit of live trace here, a bit of solid colour there.  But recently, I've been playing around a lot more with Illustrator and Photoshop and producing work of a different style.  Any artists out there fully savvy in the Adobe ways, will see that some of these 'new Infections' are simply made from playing with filters and colour saturations, or by separating the fills from the strokes of an original drawing.  Nothing mind blowing really, I'm still a learner! But I'll keep playing and hopefully you enjoy looking at them! Feel free to leave comments under any work you like. Be nice to get some feedback on here.

I'm baaaaack!

Forgive me fadder, for I have sinned. It has been nearly 4 months since my last blog post! 

  When I realised this the other day, I was a bit pissed at myself.  The whole reason for creating this thing was to get my work seen and I've been working on some great projects the last few months, none of which are available to look at! I think I've let my Infected nature and idiosyncrasies hold me back again slightly. I had it in my head I needed to post my work up in some kind of order in which it was created, since there is already so much chaos in my head, my life and my surroundings! I have projects I did way back at the beginning of the year I want to post up, but some of them need the images editing and I've been super busy I just haven't found the time.  For anyone reading this who enjoys looking at my work, I promise I will be a more frequent blogger! 

   Anyway, I'm rambling now! To put an end to all this order, here's a piece of work I literally just finished 5 minutes ago! Simply hand drawn with a fine liner, scanned in and live traced in Illustrator  with a wee bit o' colour thrown in for a background to set it off! Haaaa! It's just a doodle! 

(I've called it Dog Faced Moon)