Custom avatar design

The ‘bods have outgrown their page on the main Début website, and, although it’s taken us a while to get around to it, they’ve finally got their own space; www.thingybod.com – offering custom character design and personalised avatars (that’s personalized for all you with a USA spellchecker).

The story so far…

The name ‘bods’ sprung up way back when I produced characters for Wolverhampton City Council’s Free School Meals publicity; a boy, a girl and a worried looking carrot. I think it may have been the client who coined the name ‘bods, I’m not sure, but it suited them and stuck and sometimes these things are out of your hands.

The school meals characters had been around for a while when I was approached to produce an invitation to a fancy dress party (as a favour for a colleague), and a friend suggested I create some more ‘bods but this time in fancy dress. The 21st birthday girl was dressed as Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill. The invitation was well received, and so I dropped it in my portfolio, where it caught Glen’s eye…

Glen had the idea of using characters of ourselves for our publicity material for Début. Again, this was easy, I’m pretty plain and Steve’s known for having a head like an alien (only more so). We dropped them on the business card with the tiniest amount of spot UV and everybody loved them, including Calloway Green…

…this was my first commission, in exchange for some coding. It was interesting to say the least; Andy, one of the directors, looks like Horatio from CSI, one of their guys was wearing a pair of Spiderman PJ’s and another carried an axe.

And that’s how it started, pretty much, and before I knew it I was creating ‘bods for people I’d never met. I thought Steve came up with the name ‘thingybod’, but it turns out I misheard him; more happy accident than stroke of genius.

And so now we’re offering custom avatars alongside our design and marketing communication services.

I really do love what I do. I like looking at people’s faces. Working out what makes them, you know… them. And everybody’s beautiful. I thought I’d become cynical in my old age, but it seems that I can tap into some dormant, subconscious, perhaps naïve insistence that there’s beauty in everyone. And I don’t mind that so much.

Afternoon sunlight

We grew up in the garden, burying things, I forget what. Our childhood was bean poles and rhubarb, the yard brush, sawdust, shafts of dusty afternoon sunlight, sitting cross-legged on the floor, oily bicycle chains, splintered paint on old wood, digging with a spoon and unearthing bits of broken blue and white china from between the rows of vegetables, the rusted lip and brown spills of an aged creosote can, the latch on the outhouse door and the faded blue rainwater barrel.

This is for my brother.

Birmingham Printmakers

Today I attended a one day Silk Screen Printing course at Birmingham Printmakers and held by Victoria Linehan. It was hands-on throughout the screen printing process, guided stage by stage from oiling photocopies of our artwork to produce transparencies, to the darkroom and coating the screen with light sensitive emulsion, then using a UV lightbox to develop the image before washing the excess solution out of the mesh. Once the screens had dried we set up the beds, taping, tightening and aligning before the moving on to the printing process itself. Finally we used caustic chemicals and a fair amount of caution to clean the screens.

We were talked through technical aspects such as light units and varying the length of exposure depending on the tonal quality of the image, and how to achieve accurate registration. We explored aesthetic considerations such as layering and masking, colour combinations and composition.

There’s a moment, just after you’ve remembered to run the squeegee back up to flood the screen, and just before you lift the screen to bring the paper out, when you don’t know what you’re going to get. And there’s a moment, when you’re knackered and drinking your coffee and you look across to the drying racks where your prints are laid out in a row, and satisfaction washes over you.

Feelings you don’t get loading tray 4 with 100gsm A3 and hitting ⌘P.

Marie’s mug

Strong, quite milky with sugar, ta. No… second thoughts… pencils. Just pencils for me thanks.

Bods site thingybod.com coming soon.

For art’s sake

Scissors & butterfly (work in progress)

Working to a brief gives direction, but it also sets boundaries. In order to develop as an artist I’ve realised that I need to work without a client brief, and away from the screen. This challenges me, as it’s a complete reversal from my usual working practice.

So I’m planning a project. I’ve been gathering material for a while now, snippets of overheard conversations, things I’ve misheard and things I thought I saw but didn’t. The project aims are to ‘challenge the authority of the typeset word’, but my main motivation is to revisit the skills I left behind when I joined the rat race.

I’m starting with scissors.

Unstuck

I thought they were paper planes in a blue sky, but I was mistaken, and sometimes I would rather it be that way.

There wasn’t a blue sky, just sheets of blue paper lining an empty billboard. And there were no paper planes; just light and shadow where the corners had come unstuck and peeled forward. And for a moment I wasn’t being sold anything.

I went back a little while later with a camera, but it had gone. It was a billboard after all and it had been papered over. Again, selling me something, I can’t remember what. Whatever it was, I didn’t buy it.

Bad dream

Sleep isn’t worth sleeping unless it is restful. The night before last I had a dream that has stayed with me. In this dream was a tree with these delicate paper lanterns that hung down from it’s branches, illuminated and the colour of fuschias, each one about the size of a small fist. I made my way down the embankment to pick up some of the lanterns that had fallen, to take back to my daughters, but on the way down a dragon fly flew into my mouth. I pulled at her legs, but they came away from her body, and her body stayed in my mouth. I couldn’t put my fingers in my mouth because my hands were dirty from when I’d scrambled up the embankment to get a closer look at the tree.

I don’t know whether I woke him or whether he woke me, but my husband brought me a glass of water all the same, to rinse away what remained of the dragon fly, so that I could sleep again.

Some strange creatures

My daughters are like some strange creatures, who, when I come downstairs in the morning have already eaten breakfast.

Charlotte is my eldest and looks most like me, so much so that our reflections can catch us offguard. Gabrielle’s eclectic, expressive, wears her heart on her sleeve and I can’t remember her natural hair colour. Then there’s Rachel, my step-daughter, wickedly funny and usually found with her nose in a book. And Jude, forever the baby, seeing things differently, saying things the world’s too young to understand.

Another Place

Anthony Gormley’s Another Place, Crosby Beach, Liverpool.

Another Place was everything I had imagined it to be. We walked almost the length of the beach from one figure to the next and stood on the shore line to look at the figures that stood only head and shoulders above the waves.

I found it strange that the face recognition on my camera picked out and drew a box around the rusted features, and yet dogs, with their heightened senses, saw only markers on a beach to sniff and pee up. Another Place is about more than how we, as individuals, experience art – it’s about how we inflict ourselves upon art. Many of the sculptures have been defaced. There was a game of beach football where one sculpture stood in as a goal post, and another sculpture had my daughters, one by one, sit on his shoulders.

To me the artwork represented not 100 iron bodyforms, but just one man in time. Someone with a meditative quality, a stillness. And he’s not staring out to sea, he has his eyes closed.

It’s always ourselves

Maggie and Milly and Molly and May

Maggie and Milly and Molly and May
Went down to the beach (to play one day)
And Maggie discovered a shell that sang
So sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles, and

Milly befriended a stranded star
Whose rays five languid fingers were;

And Molly was chased by a horrible thing
Which raced sideways while blowing bubbles; and

May came home with a smooth round stone
As small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
It’s always ourselves we find in the sea.

E.E. Cummings