Emma Calder's Moody Days Sticker Book Launch

Two weeks has past since the launch of Emma Calder's Moody Days Sticker Book. 

 Emma Calder signing books

 

The evening went really well, all a bit of a whirl and it was great that so many old friends turned up.

For the event at Beaconsfield, I put a lot of effort into framing up some of the original artwork from the book and a selection of work that started me off on the whole sticker thing. 
 

Some of the work on display at the launch

One person has offered to swop an original Banksy for one of my pictures, of course I said, “depends which one”, my daughter said “you are joking, didn't you think, swop yours and sell the Banksy,” of course not, that hadn't occurred to me, Oh well, that's why we have children.

 Collage made from stuff I dug out of our back garden

As I said in an earlier blog, it was doing the button pictures, that began it all and then trying to find a vehicle to somehow show the world what I had done. The stickers were my mini gallery and luckily for me, it came off as a way of getting my work seen. Resulting in Thames and Hudson asking me to do a book, which I never expected.

 One of the long thin sticker books on display at Beaconsfield

Having ones work in shops all over the world means, that plan A worked (The work is out there), the outcome of plan B is yet unknown, will any one actually buy it, or take it down from the shelf! 

 Emma Calder proudly holding book at launch, photo needed a little help

 

In the Shops

My book is finally out in the shops and I am sorry that I have neglected this blog for a few weeks but, I have been busy finishing off a children's book. Paper Angels for Bloomsberry which will be published on October 4th 2010. 

Also I have been writing a proposal for a film submission, which I so hope to get funded, but I have to keep that numb feeling going in my head when it comes to expectations and concentrate again on Emma Calder's Moody Days Sticker book. As this Friday 19th March 6.30 - 8.00pm is my London book launch and signing at Beaconsfield art space in Vauxhall. If you are interested in attending please email Maudie Gunzi at Thames & Hudson to be put on the RSVP list.

Moody Days is dedicated To all the friends I never see any more...

And today, one of them rang me up from Australia, because he had just been walking down the street in Melbourne and in the window of a trendy little bookshop was my book. He was very impressed, went inside the shop and asked to see the book. It was shrinked wrapped, so as he is a very shy person he didn't dare ask the shop to unwrap it and as he hasn't sufficient funds at present to buy the book, he was unable to look inside and see that the book is actually dedicated to him. I was so pleased to chat to him on the phone, I forgot to tell him.

And here is the illustration that ironically inspired me to to do the dedication, which just goes to show how different days and different moods can transform ones attitude totally.

I know I was feeling very bad about one old friend the day I did this.

The lost generation

Today I woke up and my daughter came into my bedroom and exclaimed. “You know most of my friends can't even sew a button on!”

And I thought of this button picture that I did back in 2005. It just made me think of her friends. The lost generation (at least when it comes to buttons), the result of their parents success. 

 

At least my daughter can sew buttons on really well. And mine too.

another button picture from 2005

What is it with people, too lazy to cook, or even sew, or mend stuff. The throw away culture. 


Two stickers from my 2008 XXXmas Sticker Book. On the theme of toooo to much.

 

 

Here is an illustration that nearly made Emma Calder's Moody Days Sticker Book, but didn't.

Don't forget it's valentines day next week. As if you could. 

Emma Calder's Collages

Carrying on from the last Emma Calder's Moody Days Blog on the subject of collages. Here is one I did for Moody Days.

Now back to the history bit, on how the style has developed and changed over the years. 

And one from about 1968.

I set up my first studio with college friends in November 1983, in an old de-lousing centre at the Elephant and Castle. I can remember the first week sitting in the freezing cold studio with no commercial work and we had to think of ideas for projects to do. 

 

Emma Calder and Ged Haney South London Press September 14th 1984

As we really didn't know where to start, another studio member suggested that Ged Haney and I start making a picture library for the studio. We brought in hundreds of old Sunday supplements, started to cut out all the pictures and filing them. After a few days I'd had enough of this activity full time, so I started making lots and lots of little collages out of the remaining pictures in the magazines. I wasn't exactly sure where the pictures would lead but, as I was planning to get work as an illustrator, I used the collages to build a new portfolio.

Detail of scrap/recycled letterhead the other side had a collage on it

One character produced in those first few weeks was a fish lady, it ended up being used for our company Pearly Oyster's logo, six years later and I still use it today. Don't know what happened to her friend though.

Some of the other collages I produced in those first weeks, were these hoover women, which triggered the idea for my animated film Springfield. 

 

Matt Forest a pop video director from “Big Features”, had seen some of my line tests for Springfield and he asked me to put her in a pop video for the Art of noise, “Close to the Edit” that he was doing. I didn't want to use Springfield for a commercial job, so I suggested that he let me do a sequence based on some of my collage illustrations. 

 Still from Springfield 1986

 

 Still from Springfield 1986

Luckily for me I was the first animator to have their stuff ready to shoot and Matt told me to begin filming immediately, do as much as I could and what ever I fancied. Those were the days, I did cut out animation (moving paper cut-outs under a rostrum camera) and all I had to do was make sure that what ever I did, fitted with the soundtrack. As you can see my bit used knives, forks and spoons, but why? I can't remember now.

 Close to The Edit Pop Promo. Band The Art of Noise. Sequence by Emma Calder

It was a really well paid footage rate and they used twenty five seconds of my stuff and I shot it all in about six hours, I was very pleased, as I orginally had been only asked to do ten seconds. It was a excellent pop video, lots of talented designers and animators worked on it and it had a cinema release too. You can watch it on you tube. Everyone else was pissed off though, as they all worked solidily for two weeks night and day and most ended up getting paid less than me. I think the money was running out towards the end and not everybody's work got used. Something like that.

Emma Calder's Different Art forms

Collage is the medium for Emma Calder's Moody Days Sticker Book. The illustrations are a mixture of small stickers stuck on, or bits of pencil drawing, watercolour, photographs, scanned images, rubber stamp printing etc...

Like this image for the Stuck section of Moody Days, which was made with rubber stamps and drawings on tiny stickers.  

And this one from the title page. (Every sticker is a different face but it didn't take long too do, just mad sticker frenzy!)

When I was searching through old portfollios for this blog, I came across this drawing I did at five or six years old and I thought it was strickingly similar to the Spots above. Even though I hadn't seen it for over thirty years.

Over my career I have used many different artforms for my animation, instillations and graphic work, from motorised sculptures to jewellery design but, my favourite has always been collage. 

 Grandma's knitted tie and hangman earrings 1978

So for this week and the next few weeks blog, I am going to show you some of my old collage illustrations from the days before Photoshop was invented. These designs show partly the evolution of the sticker style in Moody Days.

One example of my student montage work is this poster for the Royal College of Art M.A Degree show in 1983. 

 

Each character included in the poster was a collage of different students work, from different departments in the college. 

 

I was quite naughty because, before checking with anyone, I found the technician who was printing up photographs of student work for the degree show catalogue, asked him for all the reject prints and also got others out of the bin. 
 

Back in the graphics studio, I cut them up, drew into them, photocopied and then coloured them. 

 Emma Calder in the Graphics Studio at the R.C.A 1983.

 

After I had done the artwork, I tracked down students whose work I had used and got their permission. I accidentally forgot to tell one person and when he saw the printed poster he got very annoyed. I had used a piece of his product design, for the head of one of my characters. He did forgive me luckily. Trouble is, if I had asked everyone in advance, people might  have said no, or grumbled if their work was not included. You have to take chances in life sometimes.

 Emma Calder with Paul Javis and Stuart Jane in the Graphics Studio at the R.C.A 1983

Love Stickers

After I had made the first two of my small sticker sheets, into The Long Thin Sticker Books and was selling them in various shops, I started to think about my audience more, what they would like, rather than anything that just popped into my head. 

 

I decided in January 2006 that I would do some love stickers for Valentines day, but not the usual soppy stuff, more of a mixture of feelings. Unrequited love and desperate desire. The result was some quite attractive if slightly unnerving stickers. 

These sticker's did end up in Emma Calder's Moody Day's and became the centre piece of the Love Day section. These stickers differ from the first two sets, as they were not designed to be stuck up in the street, but, were conceived as embellishments, for letters between lovers, for people to stick in their diaries, or on the back of their mobile phones. They were also designed to work in the long thin book format and have a more narrative feel.

The artwork for the Love stickers was mainly created with a rubber stamp heart, that I stole from my son, then scanned into Photoshop, where I drew into the printed and collaged artwork. The various bits of text were sourced from miserable note book entries, from my personal collection of letters and poems never posted. I just took lines out of the poems and put them with the pictures. I also was reading a library book on hip hop at the time and I wrote down the odd word/phase that seemed apt from that. Like “broken windows”, although I can't remember what the book was called now.

For the love section in Moody Days I did actually include one short poem, it is incorporated into the main illustration for the chapter so you can read that when you get to see the book.

The letter never sent, that some of the love stickers were based on was written in 1993. I didn't include it in the book but, I do here. It's now seventeen years later again, talk about being STUCK:

Greedy hungry dying

Hot Hot Hot

Tanned Golden alone

Do you remember how we kissed?

Have you forgotten?

Do you remember the summer of '76

That hot hot summer almost 17 years ago.

Do you remember me?

Just 17.

Tanned, golden, alone.

Do you remember that night?

Do you remember how

I stole thought the fence

Uninvited?

Do you remember you?

On the grass cross legged.

Playing your guitar?

Do you remember how I came and sat with you?

How we disappeared into your parents garden.

How we kissed

Do you?

Memory is very selective and funny sometimes. When I wrote Hot Hot Hot, I could clearly remember the steel band at the party, playing a song by the same name. But according to Wikipedia, it wasn't recorded until 1982, although the man that wrote it Alphonsus Celestine Edmund Cassell (Arrow) could, have written it, before it was officially recorded.  Or maybe, it was his band playing that night at this trendy Notting Hill communal garden party. Who knows, it might be my mind playing tricks, it was a hot night and a great steel band.

By turning the internal fantasy into something that others can share in the form of stickers, is turning the dream of passion, into a tiny aesthetic sticker experience.

That is what lies at the heart of Emma Calder's Moody days. Making fun, attractive work, from quite tricky feelings and ideas.

Stuck Stickers

When I started making and designing stickers after my second child was born, I wasn't working as much as I had formally and I found it quite hard to concentrate on developing film ideas.

The second small sheet of stickers that I designed and a set that did end up in “Emma Calder's Moody Days” was a sheet based on the idea of being stuck and was a silly little pun too. 

 

I remember sticking all these stickers all over the page and scribbling and rubber stamping quite aggressively. I did most of the sheet at home with my baby on my lap, while his sister worked on a sticker sheet for herself.

Sticker Art became an after school activity. Soon I had done several sheets and before long, I was out sticking them up and photographing them. But, I was quite shy and felt a bit funny sticking them all over the place myself. So I decided to make them into these little long thin hand made books and sell them, so other people could take over the process. 

Sticker books in their purpose built racks

Later the Tate Modern Shop bought them to go on sale along side their street art exhibition and then kept ordering them. But making them up by hand and sticking different stickers on each of the covers was time consuming and getting very tedious, so my agent showed them to Thames and Hudson, in the hope that we could do a more mass market version. The last of the current long thin books are still selling, now in Damien Hirst's shop, Other Criteria. 

 

Sticker books on display in Other Criteria

I did a total of around 800 of the books in six different designs. Every book has a different hand stuck cover and so soon complete books will become a rarity.

For Emma Calder's Moody Days Sticker Book I also created wrap around illustrations, these were mainly taken from notes and drawings in my sketch books that I have kept since I was a teenager. 

My Biba 1974 Diary age 14

Although these sketch books and diary's  were created when I was very young, I liked the spindly hand writing, written with a Rotring pen, so I based the hand writing style font, that I designed for the book on this kind of script.  

Note book 1979-1980

 

Some of the stuff from my old books is quite personal but, I remembered people queuing up at my degree show to read my sketch books. So I lifted quite a bit from this source. As I thought people do like that sort of heart wrenching stuff, because it reminds them of things they think and feel themselves.

Small part of a Moody days illustration page. Font is Emma Hand