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Posts Tagged ‘Rubbish Pictures’

A Wise way to recycle: Make a rubbish owl or two

31 March 2011

I’ve been making Rubbish Pictures on a larger scale recently and so needed to get my head back into smaller scale pieces.

I had the fortune, like all Christmas’s coming at once, of being donated an entire carrier bag full of old postage stamps recently and these will be featuring heavily across my pictures in the coming weeks. They add an amazing texture and the details on them are just beautiful.

This then, was the first attempt of a new range of Rubbish Pictures, featuring characters I’ve not tried before. The wise Owl will be the first in a series of woodland creatures. Needless to say, it’s good to be back knee deep in rubbish :-)

Eco Street. A green Directory.

04 November 2010

Today I added my Rubbish Pictures information to a green thinking web directory I stumbled across, called Eco Street. I liked that in their blurb they say:

‘We’re shouting the green consciousness message from the PV-clad rooftops.Can you hear us?’

Well, yes I can. So I’m going to give them a whirl, listing my artwork and see what happens.

Churning out more rubbish…

03 August 2010

I’ve been quiet on the Rubbish Pictures front recently and my Folksy shop, it has to be said, is looking a little bare with only 2 pictures currently for sale… so it’s been nice to have been recently asked to contribute some ‘Rubbish Art’ for a new UK Crafts / Gallery  style shop which will be opening this September in York. Besides giving me a good incentive to crack on and create some more pictures out of completely recycled discarded household materials, this has been a good opportunity for me to research ideal subjects and likely target audiences… For the first time I’ll be targeting tourists and so I’m going to have some fun with some ‘Great Britain’ cliche’s and see what happens…. Watch this space for more info as the series of pictures which will be winging their way up to York next month, progress’s…

Liberty Open Call. ‘Best of British’

07 February 2010

Yesterday saw the latest Open Call for Designers at Liberty’s in London.
Entitled the ‘Best of British’ the day was an opportunity for artists & designers in all fields to showcase their ideas and designs to an expert panel of designers and buyers from the Liberty store and gain an insight into how to progress and market their wares. There was obviously also the very real opportunity to impress the buyers and for some the glimmer of hope that maybe one of their products might get noticed and snapped up.

Liberty, unfortunately isn’t the most ideal market place for my own particular line of work, so I was not expecting too much. A rare opportunity for constructive advice from such experts for redirecting my Wallop Design work was just too good to miss though so I gathered up a selection of my Rubbish Pictures and a portfolio of my children’s book mock ups using those same pictures and with a little trepidation set off to Regent Street.

The doors did not open until 10.00am but the grapevine whispered that queues would be long. It was right. As I arrived at 7.30am, at least 20 people were stood in the freezing cold already and the queue just grew and grew from that point on. The Starbucks opposite must have made a roaring trade from people clutching lattes just to keep their hands warm.

Queue time wasn’t wasted time though. I was fortunate enough to be stood chatting with a fantastically talented pair of textile designers from Glasgow, PringleMurray who I have a feeling, will most definitely be featuring strongly on the Liberty shelves in the future, plus a couple of jewelry designers with a very beautiful and I’d say unique product for ladies, named ’shy’ which I can definitely say had a certain buzz about it ;-)

We finally moved inside to the lovely union jack bunting bedecked upper gallery area of the store itself, where row upon row of gold chairs awaited, for a further (seated at least – phew) queue before we met our designated panel of experts.

After the somewhat nerve wracking wait, the actual designated presentation time went in a flash. The feedback I was given however, was very positive, the advice of which direction to head in next for optimum market appeal, just what I needed to hear and all in all – I left feeling very positive and encouraged.

Had I not been concentrating hard on lugging a ruddy great peacock against the tide on Oxford Street on a Saturday lunchtime, I may even have had a small skip in my step….

I believe Liberty hold Open Calls annually, for more information on the next one keep an eye on their blog http://blog.liberty.co.uk/

The day will also be featured on ‘The buying Game’ by Maverick TV, due to air on BBC2 this Autumn following the rise of the various designers who Liberty took on. I’ll be watching, fascinated, to see how everybody gets on.

Spring views…

22 April 2009


Another day, another Rubbish picture. Todays is inspired by Spring and the view out of my window…. the leaves are finally on the trees, the sky is blue and as my apprentice loves to point out, the bunnies are so happy they just can’t stop cuddling each other…

Running dogs

21 April 2009


I have a very dull dog. Don’t get me wrong he’s beautiful, he’s friendly, he’s quiet, he’s great with kids and is very low maintenance. I love him to bits and in most ways, he is the perfect pet in fact. But in the interest stakes…. he’d rate pretty low.
He sleeps a lot does our Ned. You give him a ball, he might raise one eyebrow at you briefly, you give him a chewy, he’ll bury it for later….when he’s less tired.
My dog does….nothing. Official. He sleeps for approximately 23.5 hours of the day.
So why is it I wonder that Ned has his very own fan club of adoring friends and neighbours? Why do complete strangers chat to me every single morning whilst we’re out on a daily walk (The 0.5 hour of the day not accounted for above)
It’s because Ned is a whippet that’s why. People, I have discovered, just love whippets (or maybe people actually love greyhounds and a whippet is just a mini me greyhound so it kind of counts). These dogs have something about them that makes folk go ‘awwwww’.

Testament to that is the new range of Rubbish Pictures I am making up at the moment to restock my Folksy shop. Folksy allows you to manage your items. Once you have added an item you can see how many hits it has had. Within minutes of this latest rubbish picture entitled ‘running whippet’, Seven people had checked it out and one had even been so kind as to make it one of their favourite items. More than one per minute?! How very lovely and it proves my theory , you just gotta love a whippet.
The first few of the new series of pictures will focus on the running variety as that is when they’re at their most impressive, but I think I may have to add at least one or two at some point, of their natural state which is illustrated by Ned right now. Spark out. With a big doggy smile on his chops.

Beach Huts

11 April 2009


Hooray – I sold a Rubbish Chicken this week! Which left a little hole in my Folksy shop, just big enough for this latest Rubbish Picture of beach huts. My stash of blue rubbish bits has now been replenished, since the dog bit through the kids paddling pool. It’s a nice translucent blue plastic and will be very handy in seaside scenes. Sorry kids. Your loss my gain!

Not just me and the Wombles…

06 April 2009


I used to think it was just me and the Wombles who made stuff out of rubbish, but I went to see Mark Watson doing a show the other night. He’s a very amusing fella so I brought his book and lo and behold, it turns out he’s not only very amusing but also may well also be a link to a whole load of other womble-esque characters out there in the big wide world.
Mark Watson is crap at the environment. Official.

He even runs ‘CATE’. The project started with the intention of ’saving the world, despite not being very good at it‘. It aims to promote amateur environmentalism. I thought Rubbish Pictures was a pretty obscure way of being eco friendly but it seems there are a few more of us out there than first thought, trying to do our bit in our own little, slightly odd, way…. CATE encourages ordinary folk to small challenges, little things to change in your everyday life that will result in some environmental benefit. So if you want to know how to pimp your plant pot or create a bubble wrap dress – or just want to nose at slightly odd people doing amazing things in the name of saving the world. Go check out CATE.

A house on a hill

30 March 2009


Spring is here. The sun is shining. My ‘proper’ work project is very nearly complete and I have 5 entire days left until school holidays and chaos reigns…
The glue is out, the stacks of old papers have been sorted into colour piles and the food cupboards have been raided for all their colourful and oooooh so unneccessary wrappings. Rubbish Pictures are GO. again.
I have been neglecting my little shop over at Folksy of late and so the first few pictures will be appearing there and I shall do my utmost to actually getting around to doing a little bit of marketing this time, rather than just leaving them to stagnate.
Heres the first:http://www.folksy.com/shops/wallop. It’s made entirely out of bits of food packaging and a leaflet thrust into my hand on the way out of the local swimming pool, that would have been thrust straight back again, had it not been a rather nice shade of ’sky blue’……. ;-)

A ‘Rubbish’ Photo shoot

14 March 2009


It’s a busy time for Wallop. Rubbish Pictures are taking off and the Wallop website is growing and going through a thorough redesign, to incorporate this blog for starters, expanding the ‘oodles of doodles’ section and bringing everything together in one place, now that I seem to have my fingers in so many pies… it seems timely.

Todays job was the fun bit though – the marketing photographs for Rubbish Pictures which will also be featuring on the front page of the new site, now that I have purchased the domain name, www.rubbishpictures.co.uk (coming soon!)

We had a glorious afternoon leaping about in a lovely Hampshire field and I’m chuffed to bits with the results…
Thanks have to go out to our lovely friends Flair and Martin, who not only allowed us to leap about in their field, but didn’t question the fact that we wanted to. Or why we turned up with a giant peacock picture.
Thanks guys. You know you’ve got good friends when they’ll spend their afternoon off sat in Sheeps poo for you….

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