Fun in the sun

I helped raise £800 for the Cultural Art Canvas Programme Thailand in Brixton, London on Saturday, by painting 'live' at the invitation of our long-term partner in crime Solo One.

I screwed the lids off crispy acrylics and got men to crank open jars of crusty glitter paints to create my golden Thai headpiece-wearing lady, 4ft x 8ft high, alongside Inkfetish, Shucks, Tizer, Rabodiga and other art notables. 'Dollface' prints were sold at the auction afterwards, and we took a very un-graffiti picnic of home-made bread and chocolate cakes.
Turning up with just a notebook of sketches and a rough idea (and flying by the seat of my pants) was brilliant fun, and reminded me I can still draw even when surgically removed from my desk!
And I had the sun on my face for five hours - lovely.

Finished piece.

Inks Fetish and Mole

Tools of the trade

Glass Monsters

Check my new beasts, these incredible life-size glass insects by DM Beard Glass in Devon.

My Hercules Beetle is just under 2 inches long, and the awesome Bird Eating Spider is a handsome 5" diameter. Just look at the tiny details! With everything perfect in every way, it's hard to believe these are made of glass.

Spider's poison sac glows amber in the sunlight and her iridescent black legs glitter darkly next to Beetle's breathtakingly tiny feet. And the shadows are something else. But the thing is ... they have weight. Hold the spider in your hand (her legs dangling over), and you get a sense of how the real insect must feel.

Bought from the Broadfield House Glass Museum, Dudley.

51st New York Society of Illustrators Show, New York City, March 6th 2009

- My friend Ed attended the opening of the Advertising show at this year's 51st New York Society of Illustrators Show in New York, in which I had two pieces for the first time ever. Ed had a vested interest in seeing the show, as he wrote the words for 'Sky High', one of the chosen illustrations, he also wrote the story inside this years Christmas cards.

Here is his report:

It was bright and hot in there at 6. As the two floors filled up and we milled around it became obvious that all the entries were extremely good. The soundtrack for the first hour went between dub and Bob Marley via some rowdy tunes skipped soon after they started by whoever was controlling the player, possibly so no-one started bouncing. The food, in a word, was Jesus. The bar, in a word, was free. Relaxed happy folk murmured and mingled until 7 when the gallery director introduced John Cuneo to the podium. John had appeared at the events for the other 2 categories earlier in the year and started with the line "I'm gonna say the same stuff I said last time only faster." He then babbled and blurted and stumbled and stuttered until everybody's ice was broken. We learned he was asked to do the Call For Entires posters only after R.Crumb refused. We learned his mother hasn't liked his stuff since he stopped drawing people with big feet. His people with big heads are just not enough for her. He told us how extraordinary a thing it is to be selected for the show, especially as the Advertising and Uncomissioned category was the largest this year. The jurors had stayed up until midnight deadline day deciding what made the selection and what didn't. It was, apparently, "a gruelling process".

The medals were then accepted by the artists with charming degrees of happiness, nerves and bemusement. Some didn't realise they had to speak. Some expressed relief at finally being able to crawl from their caves and meet their fellow illustrators. Sometimes the desk is a lonely place. Takahisa Hashimoto got the biggest laugh of the night by starting his speech with "Hello New York!".
After all the awards had been received and everyone had applauded everyone else, the mingle-chatter was louder and technical talk floated around on clouds of mutual respect. Eyeballs went up close to pictures. More drinks went down. The bar staff were great. And just before it was time to leave we were served trays of creamy apple crepes. Next year there should be a medal for the food. And maybe a medal for Best Entry featuring a Fictional Creature, which this year was certainly Michael Wandelmaier's "Harpooning The Wooly Whale". I'm not an illustrator but I'll be back there next year. I hope.


- Me too Ed. Thanks for going!

Michael Wandelmaier - Harpooning The Wooly Whale - Best Entry featuring a Fictional Creature medal

Rene Milot - Screaming Rabbit

Richard A. Goldberg - Bon Voyage

Routes

Recognise anything here?

(Click the image to play)

My 'Flamenco' illustration has been used as a poster in the set for Rachel's Bedroom, in Channel 4's online 'alternate reality game' called Routes. The poster was hurriedly emailed off to my friend Kim at Oil Productions, who designed and built the game, to be printed in a matter of minutes before filming began.

Routes is played online via spaces like YouTube and the Routes website, and is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, involving multiple media and game elements to tell a story that's affected by participants' ideas or actions.

It's all very clever, and if you want to read more, here's more on Alternate Reality. Something tells me this is the future of gaming...or should that be storytelling?

I've got a Flickr, how about you?

Click to Flick!


Clickety-click to flickety-flick...

The Factory Shop

Working in Factory Road, where factory sales with stacks of ripped boxes of tights, socks and legwarmers are a regular occurrence, we thought it only right to open up the forecourt ourselves and get our merch out on sale.

Who's the 'we'? Well, I've had a shop for a long time, on my exhibition site writeofftheworld.net, but this is a proper stand-alone store which will eventually be reachable from the new inkymole.com site and my other site, factoryroad.net, which I run with my partner in crime.

It's not quite 'bring a binliner and fill it for a fiver', like the tights warehouse across the street, but there are lovely things to be had, with more to come.

Try it out! I'd appreciate your feedback, and reports of any glitches, before it gets properly hooked into the national grid and the queues at the tills are massive.

click: The Factory Shop

50 new Nikko G nibs!

This is my new batch of 50 Nikko G nibs direct from Japan, which I got this morning. Our friend Warren, who lives in Tokyo, went to a gargantuan art shop to get them for me. This little lot should last me for several years; although I should change my nibs more often than I do, I get through about 12 of these per year and stocks were running low, so this delivery is a real life-saver!

Sharp and very, very fine, these ultra-bendy steel nibs are made in Japan and are capable of a seriously impressive range of stroke widths - from hairline (almost invisible) to absolutely vulgar girth. They are, apparently, the favoured choice of the Manga artist, and although Manga is not to my taste, a lot of the work you see on my sites over the last twelve months (including my Snowtrees Christmas print) will have been done with these nibs. They were first bought for me as a pressie exactly a year ago by my friend Dick Hogg who'd picked them up on his travels, along with a fish-cake shaped rubber! Cheers Warren, cheers Dick - it's great having international chums!

I got up for work at 3.30am this morning to gird my loins for a full-on first day back at the coalface. Strangely excited, I had been trying to convince Leigh I could hear snow falling in the night. On leaping out of bed (I leap into, but never out of bed, so something was up) I saw this. All that remained to was write in it and my first-day-back-at-school-blues were gently blown away at a silent, fluffy zero degrees, one flake at a time.

Grandma's Tree

This is Grandma's tree, which always comes out of the loft fully-decorated and ready to rock, with decorations dating back to the sixties combined with modern full-on tat - which she loved. I owe many of my creative genes to Blonde Grandma.

I've shown this one rather than my own tree, as Grandma died a few days ago, and I will miss this little over-decorated beast this year, and the next, probably.

Irene Richardson 1915-2008 x

That's the spirit!

Some eagle-eyed chums have already spotted that Inkymole has done the Co-op’s ‘That’s The Spirit!’ Christmas Campaign.

With a TV ad campaign by RSA Films, accompanied by a jaunty Christmas song by Gabriela Cilmi, the campaign includes a charming website which counts down to Christmas one week at a time, and copious amounts of my wonky little stars in-store on shelf edges, wobblers, posters and even sparkling signs. The work was commissioned by Kate Collings at TBWA/Manchester.

I do love Christmas, so seeing my glowing scribbles all over my favourite supermarket (well actually, my ONLY supermarket - I gave up supermarket shopping some years ago) gives me a warm feeling like brandy butter and a too-hot mince pie.

Visit the Co-op Christmas site to see their countdown, or, if you can’t get enough of that Christmas song in the ads, visit the RSA site and watch the lot!

And remember, it's only..

'Snowtrees' Winter Pin Badges

A lot of people have asked if they can get separately the 'Snowtrees' winter pin badges that I'm giving away with each print. Of course you can! I made plenty. They look like this, and have a 10mm genuine Swarovski crystal in the centre of each.

If you want one email me! A quid, including P+P inside the UK, quid fifty outside the UK. Just go to Paypal and do a 'Send Money' to my email address, sarah@inkymole.com. Or if you're stuck, or are too exhausted from the last-week-before-Christmas work frenzy, email me and I'll sort out the necessaries.

I do love making badges!

Inkymole's first print!

Finally I've done a limited edition screenprint! I've been asked about doing this for ages, and specifically about making this illustration available as a print. Well, finally I've taken the plunge and have 150 hand-finished prints (well actually down to about 130 already) for sale.

They're 12" square (actual print area 8") with a deckle edge on the bottom, and are printed on 250gsm Somerset Radiant White stock, signed and numbered.

They're at a special 'Goodwill To All Men' price of £27 inc. P+P for the UK, and $37 inc. P+P for US buyers (but make sure you order before 10th December if you're in the US), and are delivered in a sturdy tube. I'm throwing in one of my new Christmas Snowflake badges (resplendant with 10mm Swarovski crystal) with every pre-Christmas order.

They do look lovely, and I'm really excited about them!

To order one, email dollprints@inkymole.com

Hand-finishing in progress.

Close-up showing lovely textured paper.

The finished product.

'A Cure For Sore Eyes'

I've won second place in the Altpick Awards (USA) for my
"Old-Fashioned Service" images in the 'Ad Campaign' category.

This series of six ads was created for Rita and Ilinca at AIA Advertising in London, for the the Sainsbury's supermarket chain's Pharmacy department.
The copywriting was brilliant and made it very easy to create funny and appropriate illustrations for each ad - a sarcastic slug, a crying baby, gammy eyeball, diseased foot and so on. It's all about miracle cures and old wives tales...or are they?

The same series has just been chosen for the Images 33 'Best of British Illustration' book and touring exhibition, out next summer.

Please click on the link to see the whole collection here: Sainsbury's pharmacy ads

Shirley Hughes

This evening I went to the Egmont Authors and Illustrators' Party at the London Transport Museum, Covent Garden. I walked back to the Tube Station with Shirley Hughes, who I'd spent the last hour plucking up the courage to speak to, but she was surrounded by people most of the time. She was collecting her amazing bright pink coat and dapper hat from the cloak room at the same time as me, and we walked to Covent Garden tube together. She told me about a talk her daughter once gave about her new Christmas story - to a class full of Jewish schoolchildren! - and I told her she was one of the reasons I ended up being an illustrator; her books filled the house through all three of our childhoods. I did get a bit starstruck. She's 81. I hope I look and sound as good as her - and am still drawing - when I'm her age!

Plus Type Festival

Earlier this month I did a talk for the Plus Type Festival in Birmingham. I was chuffed to be on the same bill as Steve Bell from the Guardian, Jonathan Barnbrook, Jamie Wieck from Airside, and Ollie Leggett from ie Design, who was there to talk about his magnificent job management tool called Periscope.

The festival is organized by designers and aimed at creative professionals, focussing on typography. Agencies, freelancers, professional organizations and universities can all exhibit, and speakers come from all fields of visual communication - typography, type design, illustration, web, motion - who amalgamate type into their work. This year's theme was 'Hybrid', a label I can legitimately give myself in both a creative and business context. The word also reflects the current status of Birmingham, where the festival is held.

There were few photos of my actual 'speaking' (I have no idea what word I was ever so carefully enunciating in the photo below) but the room was jam-packed to satisfying/nerve-tweaking levels. There are photos of the event on Smile's website and here.