handmade urban vinyl mashup toys: idiotcreature_01

For the past few months, I've been buying bits of old toys from car boot sales when I can. The point of all this was so I could create unique toy mashups - cutting off different bits of different toys and recombining them to make new cute stupid creatures.

Anyway I just finished the first one and gave it away for someone's birthday.

unnamed idiotcreature_01


It's made from these two, whom I found for about 20p each in a charity shop near Shadwell.


I cut them to bits with scalpel and painstakingly reassembled them using various glues and putties, then painted it using brush and aerosol. It took about 2 hours work (on and off) to make this one.





I'll try make more soon. I want to do some plush ones too, but need more scraps of material and to learn to sew. I like how when I describe making it, the pronoun goes from "them" to "it" as they get combined.

Powerpoint Karaoke

Powerpoint Karaoke in action, originally uploaded by cubicgarden.

I read about this just now when I was searching for something to do with Powerpoint. There was the first London event on the same night as Anomaly's Wildfire BeerSphere.

Anyway the idea is fantastic - people have to get up and present a random deck (sourced from Google) that they've never seen before, to the amusement of the crowd.

I firmly believe that, other than stand-up comics who've worked in the corporate sector, ad-planners would be the best at this. We should organise training/challenge night sometime. Maybe an addition to the next BeerSphere?

Carlsberg don't do litter...

Carlsberg don't do litter..., originally uploaded by markhassize11feet.

my friend at work Ed told me his brother's boss just found this on Oxford Street! Sweet!

I'm not sure how legal exactly this is, or even whether it's from Carlsberg, but I am sure it's worth writing about, which means it's probably a good idea.

splashmob waterfight, Hyde Park,

My friend at work told me about this today. A spontaneous waterfight, lasting for 10 minutes only, 1pm Saturday 14th July. It was reported in the London Lite, and their article is based on the Facebook entry.

Mr Hamill, 20, a music student from Clapham, said he had suggested the water fight as a good way to celebrate the start of the summer but within 24 hours of mentioning it to friends, word had spread and 5,000 people had signed up to take part.

Today, his page on Facebook - which has become one of the most popular social networking websites in the UK - boasts 75,000 registered "friends".

This sounds totally awesome, and I totally there.

The other bit of news is the identity of the Virginia Tech shooter and his ex, which I read about on the Sun:

Emily was a popular first-year animal sciences student who dreamed of becoming a vet.
On her MySpace page she told in October how she had just met a “wonderful guy”.
Yesterday a memorial page on website Facebook was flooded with tributes from devastated pals.

What struck me is that in both stories, one frivolous and local, and the other a serious global tragedy, the national press's role has basically been to read Facebook and tell us about it.

bike jousting practice

bike jousting practice - ant VS strongbow, originally uploaded by dead insect \ /.

We've had the inaugural training session of the Knights of Strongbow (working title).

Trying to knock a cider can (strongbow) off a traffic cone is surprisingly difficult, and also incredibly adrenalising. If you hit the can nicely, it explodes, covering your face in a death-spray of sweet cider.

human whack-a-mole game

The agency I work for, glue London, did an event where about 40 of us (out of about 100) created works of art, and we then had a boozy gallery exhibition night for us and our clients.

The theme was "what brought us to glue", and there were some truly great pieces. My effort was typically big, stupid and tacky - a human version of the arcade classic, Whack-a-Mole, where creatures pop up from holes and you have to bash them with a hammer.

So here it is. Hammer Creature Battle, being played on the exhibition night, Vinyl Factory, Soho. Watch out for the DandAD flag.




It was a lot of fun, but it paled in comparison to some of the other real art done by other gluers, my favourite being this one from Natalie Dean:



You can see more pictures from the party here.

If you'd like to know more about building Hammer Creature Battle, I put an instructable here.