Bad Day Stickers by Emma Calder

The day I started to design the bad day stickers that ended up in Emma Calder's Moody Days sticker book, I was feeling really fed up. Also I was thinking about my father who had died some seven years earlier.

 Bad Day Stickers

This is the piece of writing that triggered the stickers off.

On Bad Days

On bad days I think of the saddest things like the day my father died for instance. (I also think of my own mortality.)

I had been sitting in the hospital for about four hours my father had very bad pneumonia and couldn't breath without an oxygen mask. He hadn't spoken once but, then he said, “I feel so sad.” Those were almost his last words.

Then the nurse came and asked me if I wanted the priest to come. I didn't know what to do, so I said: “Yes” even though we were not religious.

The priest stood by my father and my father opened his eyes and said, “Oh fuck.”

And those really were his last words. I knew then that getting the priest had been wrong.

Two hours later he was dead it was exactly 9.20pm.

Later I slept.

I began to fall

and fall.

Then a dull thud.

He had landed somewhere.

When I woke up, I went out to the shopping centre.

Somehow I did what I did.

But it was odd, my feet didn't touch the ground and my head was up to the roof.

Floating home out of my body.

Then to the hospital to pick up his things.

The grey plastic bag with his shoes, wrist watch and old clothes.

I know it's still down the garage somewhere.

Orginally the bad day stickers were cut up to make a long thin book, that is partly why the woman featured was so long and thin, but it was also to reflect the strange feeling of tallness I felt after my father died.

 Bad Day Woman

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.

Moody One

Emma Calder's Moody Days Sticker Book, is the reason for starting this blog.The blog is dedicated to the book and how it came about.

Crossing the boundaries of art and commercial art in one. The book is about reconstructing narrative and visual threads, in a modern urban environment. It's about fragmented story telling and audience participation.

Emma Calder's Moody Days is a sticker book for anyone. It features four moods. Bad, Fun, Stuck and Love, each section has it's own hand drawn, removable stickers. 

 

The combination of art and ephemera is an interesting mix and appropriate in these days of throw away culture, multi tasking and channel hoping. Drawn and written by myself, an animator which makes the idea of stickers and multiples even more interesting I think.

 

To be honest Moody Days was a bit like an accident that was meant to happen, one day I started it and the next it was finished. Things rarely happen like that, but... compared to animation, books are fast.

I used a range of my previous work as a basis for the book, including writing and letters going back to when I was at college. I also incuded some of my original sticker sheets from my long thin hand made books.

Fingerprints 2004

This is the first of the small sticker sheets that I designed, each sticker is one of my fingerprints. I liked the idea of sticking these little stickers up  and putting my mark on things literally. Although I didn't include them in Moody Days, I did use the print idea for the cover and for the animated trailer.

Tate Modern Toliets 2005 

 

Over the next few weeks I plan to show you some of my sketch books, collages and things that got me started with this whole sticker project, and events leading up to Emma Calder's Moody Days Sticker Book. 

old college note book