Brixton Village

It's good to get ones work in shops locally and so I thought I let you know that Emma Calder's Moody Day Sticker Book, plus some of my small sticker books and my new childrens book Paper Angels are all selling in Circus, in Brixton Village. London.

Circus sells a mixture of vintage and artist driven products. It was their attractive decor that brought me into the shop and made me think that they could sell my stuff.

Brixton Village is in the old Granville Arcade, which recently had lots of empty shops transformed by artists and performers in an attempt to regenerate the market area. In fact I suggested this idea on some consultation form from Lambeth and they did it, but I am sure lots of people must have said the same thing. The artists all had a rent free period although not many could stay on after it was over. New cafes and shops have opened now. so it's still quite buzzy. It's a pity they couldn't have let the artists stay longer. But the vintage shops and Cafes are doing OK. Luckily for the Arcade it has recently been listed which is a relief, as we thought they were going to turn it into flats.

Emma Calder's Sticker Books at Other Criteria

I thought I let you know that my original hand made, Long Thin Sticker Books are now back in stock at Other Criteria in London's Marylebone. Several of the designs in the shop are not in Emma Calder's Moody Days Sticker Book, so if you want to collect more here's your chance, It's a lovely shop too, if you are in the area. 

Emma Calder's Hand

These books are great for going out and sticking up stickers and this one of the reasons I designed them this shape. Here is a picture of me just before a sticker outing.

One of the Other Criteria's favourites are my XXXmas Stickers which are getting very seasonal again. Here are a couple of Photos from a sticker outing last year.

XXXmas Sticker's Brixton 2009

Emma Calder's Santa Sticker Oxford Street 2009

Photos are welcome of my stickers, stuck up, if you find any in interesting places.

Funday Stickers from Moody Days

When Jamie Camplin managing Director of Thames and Hudson, publisher of Emma Calder's Moody Days Sticker Book first discussed the book with me. He tentatively enquired if I could add another section to the themes I had already planned, one just a tiny bit more up beat, a set of happy stickers and illustrations.

He was by no means forceful, it was just a suggestion. I liked the idea, it seemed a real challenge. I had already done the Bad Day Stickers, Stuck and Love and all were a reflection of difficult times. It seemed a good idea for the balance of the book to cover a more optimistic frame of mind.

 The Funday title was a photograph of art on a balloon by Oliver aged six

But Happy......? Actually, I ended up calling the section Funday, well that was hard for me to get my head around. Mainly because, my personal work exists partly to cheer myself up through the process of writing, drawing, exploring all the thoughts and feelings that make me and others I know feel bad. So the end result is often tinged with sadness.

Maybe it's just me, maybe I am a very negative person most of my childhood memories in particular reflect this. Just because unfortunate things have happened, it doesn't mean that everything need always be bad. That is the great thing about having the confidence in oneself as a creative being. Because in that world you can make anything happen.

So taking Jamie's suggestion on board I racked my brain for moments of happiness. All my happy memories of recent years have been with my own children and partner, ironically.

Luckily, for one of the illustrations for the book, I found the perfect collage already done, on a page in one of my current sketchbooks.

So for the accompanying writing I wrote down the true story that had inspired me to do the collage in the first place. For those of you who haven't seen the book here it is. 

The first lollies Oli ever had, he carried
around with him all day unopened. He'd never
had a lolly before, because his mum was very
strict, usually. But today she had relented,
when the shop keeper offered them, for free.

He held them tight all day, not once asking
if he could open them, his mum was surprised.

When his big sister came home from
school, he went and sat down next to her on
the sofa. He told her quietly that he had
something for her and he gave her one of the
lollies. She helped him unwrap his, before she
unwrapped hers and then they sucked them
silently and happily together.


 As silently as it was possible to suck a lolly.

 

Also included in this blog is the photo of Oliver trying to touch stickers that I had just stuck up in the street and holding the very same lollies mentioned in the text. 

Oliver Elephant and Castle 2004

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

 

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.

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.

Stickers

This is the second week of my blog and today was quite a good one, as I just got the preview copy of Emma Calder's Moody Days. It looks just as I planned and the printing is pretty good. I was so lucky, to be able to design and draw every single element of my book including the type faces and the bar code. (Except I did steal one or two drawings from my children and popped them in here and there). It is rare these days to have the creative say on things, without the money people stepping in and trying to interfere. I have to thank all the people I was involved with at Thames and Hudson, for being so good to work with and professional. 

Apart from being excited, I am also a bit scared, as soon the book will be out there, exposed and ready to be taken home. But, back to the events and work leading up to Moody Days.

After I had my second child and both my parents had died, I became very ill and unable to work for a while. Having spent years making short animated films for people like the BBC and Channel Four and yet still struggling to get funding. I found myself in an impossible position, no time, no money to make films but, tons of ideas. I was deeply frustrated. I wanted my work out there, being seen, making a difference.

Southwark Street London 2005

One morning on the way to work, I was overcome by one idea, it just popped into my brain. “STICKERS”.
  
I was suddenly over come with all the possibilities.

Emma and Ged 1994. Photographs by Richard Keith Wolff

When I got to my old studio in Sly St, East London, I found some old address labels and I got started immediately. This was the studio that I used to share with fellow animator and co Pearly Oyster Productions founder Ged Haney.

These were the first sticker sheets that I did before I had really worked out what I was doing or why I was doing it. They used some of the button/sewing stuff pictures, that I had been making after my mothers best friend died and I'd inherited her button collection. 

Button Pictures 2004

Initially I had made the button pictures because, I had wanted to use up all the buttons, to dispose of them in an artistic fashion, but then I just started buying more and more lovely buttons. So that plan failed along with the film idea, which I never completed. 

These button pictures are not in Moody Days, but I did end up using three of my original pictures in the book. I won't show you those now as I don't want to spoil the surprize.

This little picture was made as a present for my partner, from an old regency buckle I bought on Bermondsey Market. It's a terrible joke!


More next week.