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

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