Upfest 2012 Collaberation Nation

Over the Jubilee weekend of 2nd June - 4th June Bristol, North Street BS3 to be precise, was host to Upfest.
I had hoped to take part in the painting that happened up and down North Street, Bedminster however myself and many others were not fortunate enough to get a place on the line up.
I would like to point out that I am not bitter in anyway what so ever and fully intend to apply again and again without getting bitter. When one is organising an event with 250+ spaces for artist and many many more applications you just can't please everyone.

And yet to a large degree that is exactly what the organisers at Upfest managed to do. I attended the event anyway with the intention of joining Collaberation Nation in the Tobacco Factory, the main (and original) venue of the festival for some drawing goodness. During my entire time at the event self titled as 'Europe’s largest urban art festival' all I saw were people enjoying themselves. Whether it was those who were painting, or those who were there to just enjoy a day out, there was not one face in the crowd that was not happy and smiling.

I've attended several large outdoor events over my years and this one stands out for several reasons. The first big glaring one for me is the lack of a police presence; Don't get me wrong the event was not a complete anarchic free for all. There were several stewards and attendants scattered throughout the various sites and roaming between all weekend. However all of these were volunteers helping to raise money for the events selected charity nacoa (National association for children of alcoholics). Pretty much every other event of a similar or even smaller scale has had a heavy police presence. In fact the only police I saw throughout the weekend were checking tax discs on cars; A fact I found highly amusing considering the amount of 'vandals' there were working around them at the time.

The other things I noticed were possibly an explanation of the lack of police. The sheer friendliness and politeness of all those around. I stopped to talk and chat with several people painting boards/shutters and walls, and all were happy to chat not one was rude or brusk despite time constraints. At one point I dropped my wallet and a complete stranger chased me down the street to make sure I got it back. Something I'm ashamed to say would not happen in an event in my home town. These are just small examples I know, but they were repeated time and time again for many that I talked to.

For me it was a refreshing and wonderful experience to see something that I have long loved, and that has been long demonised, given such a wonderful opportunity to shine. And shine it did, I shall be writing some follow up blogs with many more pictures. However it is getting very late for myself and I'm going to wrap up for now here with the pictures of the work myself and my fellow collabers did in the top floor dance studio at the Tobacco Factory.

To follow Upfest on Twitter
And the official Upfest Flickr group

Daily deviation & Winner

So on Friday something a bit wonderful happened. The original colour scheme of my Cruci-fiction piece was awarded a daily deviation on deviantArt.com. For those not in the know here is dA's description of a daily deviation;

"The Daily Deviation is a daily feature chosen from the galleries here on deviantART.
A small assortment of submissions are chosen each day by a select group of staff/volunteer members who wish to showcase an image which they found impressive or otherwise interesting enough to deserve being brought to the attention of the community-at-large."

It is also displayed at the bottom of the page which understandably gives the piece a great amount of exposure. This exposure has now led to a lot of Christians attacking my work with lots of rhetoric and outrage. Which is fantastic! You really cannot get better publicity than pissed off religious nuts. So yay for the crazies!!!

This was my first DD and it has already led to me getting lots of new watchers and so many faves that if I try thanking everyone it accuse me of spamming people. I look forward to stepping up and providing more pieces of work worthy of DD's.

The other piece of news I have for this blog is that a winner has been chosen for the Easter give-away. And the winners is.........

Asura Asurski with "I did not attend Easter communion because.... The Devil had a special on."

His choice of design was the green colour scheme and it will be shipped out to him as soon as I can get it safely parcelled up. I have oreded some new paint with my latest paycheck and you can expect a flood of new canvases and street shots of stickers as the weather gets warmer.

Till next time...

Easter Give-away; Deadline extended.

That's right the deadline for Easter give-away has been extended to 12 midnight GMT on 26th April 2012.

For the chance to win one of the paintings featured in the video below all you have to do is complete the sentence;
"I did not attend Easter communion because...."

Some of the best answers so far are listed below;

I went to a baseball game my friend won free tickets from Subway for and wrote papers for my classes.

I am a hindu and my kids were busy picking up bunny laid eyes and thanking the easter bunny instead of mommy and daddy for all the money and work. :(

because celebrating the natural Springtime part of the cycle of nature has nothing to do with their made up god.

I was more concerned with all the chocolate!

The Devil had a special on.

There are only a few days left to get in on the free art action so get commenting.

Easter Giveaway

So Easter is nearly completely over.
The kids are all feeling ill from the chocolate overload yesterday.
And the adults are all desperately relaxing in an attempt to make the most of time off of work.

I am giving away some art work; The artwork from this...



Nice simple competition; Finish the sentence and I shall choose the best one (in my opinion) to receive one of the paintings in the video.

"I did not attend Easter communion because...."

Answer can be left as a comment here, or as a tweet to this account @kiwipdd.
Competition closes at 12 midnight GMT on 16th April 2012.
Competition closes at 12 midnight GMT on 26th April 2012. (Deadline extended due to lack of internet access).
Good luck to all.

Slight update

So it's been a bit of a while;

Since my last post I have been working two jobs which has eaten up a fair bit of my time. That's right two jobs. I got a text from the boss at my old job saying that he knew I'd got a new job but asking if I was still interested in working for them. I of course said yes, I've enjoyed some of the work at my cashier job but the hours are not very great (7 hours a week contract plus what ever overtime I can grab hold off). So I have gone back to working on the production side of a flavour company. The job mostly involves mixing up batches of flavours and drinks compounds. Not as difficult as it sounds to be honest; I get given a list of chemicals and amounts and then I mix, sample and pack it off. The hardest part is to remember which order to mix them in.

So with working two jobs I have been doing 6 day weeks (at least until I get a solid contract from the new/old job). And last week I had no day off to relax on account of attending a craft fair as a stall holder. The craft fair was at New Brighton Fort with the lovely people at Memory Lane Fairs. Below are some of the pictures of the stall space I was given. Alas I sold... Nothing. Not the fault of the guys running the fair just a mix of bad weather and last minute planning on my part. I did however get plenty of interest and handed out plenty of business cards. I will however be attending the next one on April 29th.

I have also been offered another art retail opportunity, from the fantastically talented people at collaberation nation. In the month of April they will be opening a pop-up shop in the lovely city of Bristol (home to most of the founding artists of collaberation nation). So in the next few weeks in an effort to maximise my retail potential, I will be looking into getting postcard sized prints of select works available as well as badges and a few other little bits. I will also be looking into getting them as professionally packaged as possible on my limited budget. More on this as and when it happens.

More to come....
Oh and a sneak peak of some upcoming projects;

Easter stencil project: Further updates.

So as per my second to last blog I arrayed a grand total of 21 different cans of spraypaint and got ready to paint. As per my last blog, it rained. A lot.
So I painted other things and waited for the rain to part. After striking a bargain with the great and mighty Thor for a bit of leniency on the weather front I got down to some serious stencil work. It took a couple of days to get through the last 8 layers using four different colour schemes; Below are the progress shots with a brief description of the colour choice for each.

Original colour scheme

The title of these one pretty much covers it. It is the original colour palette used when developing the stencils for the painting. The grey for the screens was achieved by converting all the individual images into greyscale images before compiling and filtering them. I choose to use red for the obey in the background simply for the impact value and the connotations with warnings. The original crucifixion painting used for the foreground image on the screens was from a painting by Francisco de Zurbarán; The choice of browns I selected was the best fit for the paintings original colours.

Blue colour scheme

I originally decided to create a limited edition of four colour schemes with only two of them having the greyscale background of screens. Now anybody who has studied the colour schemes around them, done a bit of colour theory or isn't colour blind knows; Blue and grey go well together. Now with this I could have left the 'Obey' on the screens as red for extra shock on the eyes and to create a contrasting bridge between the blues and the greys. However I went with a pale lilac instead for a complimentary bridge between the colours. I think I made the right decision and that it compliments the image very well.

Green colour scheme

For the other two colour schemes I went with a brown (as close as I could get to sepia toned gradient) scheme for the background image of the screens. For the first one of these I wanted to capture more of the old fashioned feel for the paintings. So racking my old memories of computer screens (meaning my first memories of those good old BBC basic computers) with green screens I went with a green colour scheme. For the Obey this time I used Yellow for pretty much the same reason as in the original colour scheme; Both visually striking and associated with warnings. Oh and if you aren't old enough to remember the BBC basic then just don't ask, it won't make any sense to the iPod generation anyway.

Rainbow colour scheme

For the forth and final colour scheme I went for rainbow; With Red being lightest all the way to Purple as the darkest. This colour scheme has a nice little double significance namely; The false colour imaging that is derived from infra-red and also the national flag of gay people everywhere. The first one ties in with the Orwellian vibe going on with whole series of paintings. The second is simple a nice way of pointing out that if there is any group of people other than atheists that Christianity has it in for then it is the homosexuals of the world.

That is all the updates for now. The next stage is to compile all these process shots together and hand them over to my video editor with some banging tunes. Also to have the paintings scanned at hi-res and find a good printers to other limited edition prints of them.

Till next time.