Pick Me Up 2016

On Monday we took a very well-earned day off and hopped up to London to visit the 7th annual Pick Me Up Graphic Arts Festival at Somerset House. If you follow us on social media you'll probably know that Pick Me Up is our ultimate favourite thing EVER, we visit every year, it was one of the main catalysts that made us start up hello DODO and that last year we were incredibly lucky to exhibit there (dreams do come true kids). 

So with all those high expectations, it was with a mixture of excitement and trepidation that we entered Somerset House! We need not have worried though as Pick Me Up is always a delight for the eyes. When you first enter you're in the 'Selects' section of the show which is international 'fresh talent' from the graphic art world. Usually the Collectives is our favourite part of the show but this year the Selects really blew us away, every single one of them. Reading that a few of the Selects artists had literally only just graduating made us both wince but also be seriously impressed. 

Boom! As soon as we walked in there was Alice Bowsher's work in all it's black ink glory. We became aware of Alice's work at last year's Pick Me Up where she exhibited with Niles Collective and have seen her go on to do loads of amazing things and it's awesome to see her being recognised in Selects. We love how bold, simple, confident and playful her work is. 

Seriously, I won't keep banging on but I think her work is genius. Go follow her on Instagram!

Another fave from Selects was Dutch artist Aart-Jan Venema whose paintings had so many stories going on and little details to spot we could have stared at them for hours. Sorry for the appalling photos by the way, I'm not sure if it was the poor lighting or my overexcitement. See below for a close up of this piece 'The Gardens'....living in a terraced house we totally identify with this one!

Sooooooooooooo good, right?? 

What I also love about Pick Me Up Selects is you get to have a peek in to the artists working process, like with this sketch and paint palette from Aart-Jan Venema.

Here's an adorable and strange creature from Julian Glander!

We both really loved Jack Sachs work 'Inside Ya Body'. Whilst studying Jack badly injured his drawing hand and so decided to learn how to use 3D animation software. His hand has since recovered and now he combines these two forms of practice. 'Inside Ya Body' is a project which stems from the experience of this injury. Jack was actually our only print purchase from PMU this year (shock horror), we bought his heart print which you can see here.

Aarrgg, again a TERRIBLE photo but I couldn't not include one of these HUGE pieces by Dan Singer...you see that? It's enormous and it's made of Hama beads! I am so so impressed by the planning and patience this body of work would have taken and in the flesh it looks AWESOME. And I've tried making things with Hama beads, it's not that easy!

Here's a Reclining Worm by Carlotte Mei which made me smile :o)

I thought Rachel Lillie's installation was really interesting and beautiful. Based on walks around the outskirts of London, the work featured observational drawings and sculptures made from the wood of fallen trees. 

Again, these photos don't do the work of Camilla Perkins justice. Camilla is inspired by African sub cultures, particularly from a fashion perspective and we loved her use of colours and patterns. So so happy! Plus she's Brighton based, HURRAY!

Here's Camilla painting live in the Selects Booth upstairs where you can watch the artists work and buy their pieces for a crazy bargain-ous £15 a pop. I was gutted because I wanted this particular piece but someone else snapped it up just before I could! It's a good job Alice Bowsher wasn't there or we would have bought everything she created.. It was amazing to see the work being created right in front of you but I do wonder if the artists feel a bit like a zoo animal!

So that's probably the biggest feature I've ever done on Selects! Let's move upstairs... We really enjoyed the Made North room which felt a lot more graphic design than a lot of the rest of the show. Made North represents and promotes northern design and craft and for Pick Me Up they showed their project 'North & South', prints by leading designers showing what the North or South means to them. They also had pieces on British Road Signs which were really interesting!

We loved these illustrated vases by Louise Madzia in the Best room! We also loved Daisy Emerson's hand painted signs in all their pastel pink and glittery glory but all my photos of them were really rubbish! Waaaah. Go follow her on instagram though!

This massive cheery head is from the Beach London installation. For Pick Me Up, gallery and agency Beach are presenting Cuckoo's Nest, a group of artists response to objects from The Museum of British Folklore. Having grown up in a rural village a lot of this resonated with me!

Jam admiring the prints in the Hato Press room.

I was excited to see Clay Collective at Pick Me Up as I'm loving the ceramics craze that seems to be in full swing right now. I really love that Pick Me Up embraces graphic art in all forms, not just the 2D and I think that's what makes it such an inspiring and exciting show. 

If you're visiting PMU and you're interested in clay then check the schedule as Clay Collective are running a series of introductory workshops.

Screens ready to go in the 3rd Rail section, sadly not while we were there though (one of the downfalls of visiting on a quiet Monday).

Lastly, there's a HUGE retrospective exhibition of letterpress legend Alan Kitching's work. This was really cool and spanned his whole career so far, plus the smell of the letterpress ink reminded us of our uni days. On certain dates Alan is doing live demonstrations so if you're interested in his work check those out. 

So there we have it! Have you visited this year or any previous years? Are you planning to? If you visited what did you love? :o)

P.s. If you're interested in my previous Pick Me Up round up posts you can find them here:

2012

2013

2015

hello DODO house part 1

Hello! Happy Friday! (Again) Man that week went quick. Instead of a Friday Faves post this week I thought I'd share a few pics of our home in progress... 

Since buying our house a year ago one of the most asked questions we hear from our friends is "How's it going with the house??" to which we usually pull a bit of a face and reply "Sloooooowly". When we bought our house I don't think either of us really thought about how time consuming, exhausting and expensive it is making your home your own. We didn't exactly buy a wreck, we just bought a house that hadn't been updated for many many years and was full of beige carpets (still got those upstairs), horrific textured and floral wallpaper (still upstairs) and the ugliest gas fire that ever did exist (thankfully long gone). 

Ok, i'm going to have to show you that fireplace so you can truly appreciate how far we've come...

See, I told you. Sometimes I have actual nightmares about it. 

So anyway, back to the story. It wasn't as simple as strip the wallpaper and throw some colours at the walls as we first thought. Firstly, we had to get the whole house rewired. Not much fun but we luckily had wonderful electricians. Secondly, after stripping all the wallpaper in the lounge/diner we quickly realised that re-plastering though not essential, was a really good idea plus it meant bye bye artex ceiling. Neither of us knew that plasters equal carnage...

Note that we told him to use the beige carpet as a dust sheet to force us to rip it up quicker.

So once we were rewired, re-plastered, re-fireplaced it was then time to get the original floorboards restored (lovingly hand sanded by our awesome friend Jay) and THEN we got to throw colours at the walls....or painstakingly paint as neatly as we could anyway. 

And then we had to make a whole lot of holes in those re-plastered walls, naturally...

That's Miffy taking her shoes off down there incase you were wondering. Hanging this gallery wall was terrifying at first but as soon as we committed to the first couple of pieces the rest was easy. Since the above photo was taken there's now a long narrow shelf in the top right gap which is awaiting some cacti to fill it (any excuse to buy more cacti). 

Now the lounge is pretty much there we're turning our attention to finishing off the dining room. Our friend Jay is coming back in soon to build us some floating shelves in two of the alcoves and then we can FINALLY get all our books out of boxes (and reclaim the spare room at the same time!) Now the idea is to finish the studio and work our way around the rest of the house! Except now we can't stop thinking about smashing a few walls down, moving the bathroom upstairs....it's a slippery slope this home improvements malarky! Will update you again soon on our progress :o)

Have you ever done any drastic home improvements?? 

Friday Favourites!

Holla! Happy Friday! Let's just skip RIGHT over the fact that I haven't updated our blog since January because I've been brainstorming blog topics and I'm feeling positive and excited to be blogging again! Yeeeeeeessssssssss.
So let's start off right away with a little Friday Favourites to show off some of the things that we are LOVING right now. Let's go!

The Sky Gardens
I met Skye, the woman behind The Sky Gardens, at the last Brighton Etsy Team meet up having already admired her shop and her gorgeous terrariums online. If you follow us on Instagram you'll know that we're a sucker for a houseplant. In our Brighton flat we didn't get very much light and space was limited so we barely had any plants but since buying a house we've covered most surfaces with various plants! I haven't yet ventured in to air plant or terrarium owning yet but I'm pretty eager too! Skye's shop is very new but she already has a really strong identity, gorgeous photos and really lovely products of course! I'm rather fond of the little light bulb terrariums.
Check out Skye's shop here! https://www.theskygardens.etsy.com

Yelena Bryksenkova
I recently stumbled across the work of Yelena Bryksenkova on Etsy and really loved the details and the stories going on in her paintings. I particularly love this one, it's so sad and beautiful and intriguing. I also really love how simplistic her painting style is whilst still having loads of little details to notice. Yelena sells digital versions of her originals so they're very affordable.
Find Yelena's Etsy shop here! https://www.ybryksenkova.etsy.com

Rock Cakes

I couldn't do a current faves post without including this MEGA awesome new ring from the wonderful Rock Cakes! Sarah is big on the Brighton scene, a fellow Brighton Etsy Team leader and a jewellery genius. We were VERY lucky that she made our wedding rings too! Anyway, back to sharks. This guy is sterling silver with black diamond eyes. You can also purchase the severed hand ring (which I'd say is a must) which fits very pleasingly in sharky's mouth. 

Check out all the wonderful jewellery Sarah makes (not just precious, loads of super affordable things too) https://www.rockcakes.etsy.com

Carll Cneut

I came across the work of Belgian artist Carll Cneut on Pinterest and it made me smile! I love the comical combo of intricate detail paired with the childlike bird bodies (pretty much that bit is how I draw). From reading a bit about his work I discovered Carll has sold over 200,000 children's books. You can read an interview with him here: http://www.worcesternews.co.uk/leisure3/wn_leisure_reviews/wn_reviews_festivals/8489729.In_Conversation_With_Charismatic_Carll_Cneut/

Lazy Oaf

Last up, my favourite clothes brand Lazy Oaf.....I want EVERYTHING in their new collection and can't afford any of it so I just have to keep looking at the pictures instead. They know how to many the shirt-smock-dress-with-sleeves-in-a-loud-pattern of my dreams.

Check out the new collection here: http://www.lazyoaf.com

There ya go! I hope you liked our first Friday Favourites post! Let us know if you did and we might do another next week ;o)

The BIG 2015 Round Up Post!!!

It's that time of year again where I spend a million hours writing a round up of the previous year, swearing at blogger as it moves my photos around at will (blogger, let's be friends, k?) and generally being astounded at how much we've fit in to 365 days. For us 2015 was a BIGGIE so I'll (try to) keep the words short....let's go!

We started off the year by casually buying a house. Ok, so there was nothing casual about it. It was more like "OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL ARE WE DOING WE'RE CHILDREN WE CAN'T DO THIS BUT ALL OUR WILDEST DREAMS ARE COMING TRUE" kinda thing. It had been a bit of a bonkers stressful festive season 2014 whilst viewing houses, having meetings with our broker etc but at the beginning of 2015 we had found our house and were just waiting for the paperwork to go through and to get the keys. We should probably mention too that we were leaving our beloved Brighton (where only millionaires can afford houses these days) and were hopping along the coast to Worthing which is up and coming and basically just wonderful. We were also swapping a teeny tiny one bed flat for a pretty spacious 3 bed house with a garden. For two people who work from home it was a no brainer.

In February I turned 30! I didn't feel any maturer. Lots of celebrating was done, with a night out with the Brighton crew plus Jam took me to London where we stayed by Camden Lock, went to the zoo (I posed with both real and non-real animals) and had a fancy meal in a vegan restaurant in Primrose Hill.

George's fan club on Instagram had decided that 28th of Feb was Day of George! Loads of people posted up photos of themselves wearing their George's using the hashtag - we hope they do the same this year as it was a lot of fun!

Mollie Makes featured us on their "Introducing..." page....we hadn't realised it was going to be such a huge pic!!!

We started #helloDODOdoodles on Instagram just for fun....this is one of my faves! You guys seemed to like these so we promise we'll be revisiting the idea soon...

Not long after moving in to the house I finally did what I'd been planning to do since we first even began thinking about hello DODO 6 years ago....I quit my day job! For the first few months I was utterly terrified, we'd just bought a house and were paying all sorts of tradesmen and on the day to day I often wasn't sure exactly what I was supposed to be doing. Luckily all sorts of fun projects started coming our way and DODO went from strength to strength! I still occasionally have a bit of a freak out but I'm gradually getting used to being a full time DODO!

Talk about getting busy....first up was being part of Pick Me Up Graphic Arts Festival at Somerset House with BEST! I've said it over and over but Pick Me Up is one of the reasons we ever started hello DODO so being involved was a total dream come true. 

We made LOTS of new work for PMU but our Pigeon & Tonic screen print has got to be one of our faves!

Another May, another Great Escape Festival with Toby from I Like Cats & Kieran from Little Mountains! This was our fifth Great Escape! 

After our initial meetings to come up with ideas two years previously (whoops) we finally created a Supermarket Sarah wall with designosaur! We created some really fun collab pieces too, included the ombre dinosaurs, Billy the Bat and designosaur made our Totem Pole in to a necklace! They also made super cool dino lights. You can shop the wall here.

Another exciting project! We were invited to be a part of a special Lucky Dip Club X Folksy box along with a whole bunch of other awesome makers. The theme was Summer and we created this cute limited edition Octopus screen print.

In June we took part in the first ever Ashdown Road Artists Open House - the house of our friends Paulie and Anna (of Anna's Drawing Room fame) which was part of Worthing Art Trail. It was a wonderful mix of diverse work in the house and we got to meet awesome creative couple Ellie and John Bond and Jam taught loads of kids how to make badges. We look forward to being a part of the house again this year!

The 2015 Brighton Etsy Craft Party was even bigger and more wonderful than ever! There were LOADS of awesome workshops going on (we gave a gocco printing one - see above!) and once again we dipped in to our never ending DODO wedding stash of amazing balloons...

We went to the first ever Wildlife Festival at Shoreham Airport with the designosaur funsters! It was amazing!

We won the Mollie Makes Collaboration Award with designosaur for George!!! Here we are collecting our award from the lovely MM editor Lara! It was a wonderful day of photo walks, talks, meeting other nominees and then the scary bit...pitching to a whole massive table of super judges! It was an amazing wonderful shock to win!

More good stuff! We were featured TWICE on the Anorak Magazine "Good Stuff" pages - we seriously love Anorak so this was awesome!!

We were approached by We Built This City to have some of our work in their newly launching Carnaby Street store - which if you haven't visited yet is AMAZING. We went to the launch party and had loads of fun!

We designed the cover for the last ever Inside Magazine! It was summer and almost Pride so we created this fun rainbow windmill. They discontinued the mag to concentrate on their utterly amazing new one - Inside Artists - check it out!

Whenever possible we enjoyed our new home Worthing, mostly be hanging out on the super peaceful beach. We love it when the tide goes out!

Me and our friend Amy had our photo taken with the legend that is Disco Pete! If you're from Brighton you surely know who he is...

We had a BBQ. Toby from I Like Cats put cherry bakewells on it. No-one knows why.

Us, Toby, Kieran, Karli and Jacques all went to Glasgow to visit Keith and Sally (of Hand Over Your Fairy Cakes fame) It was a fun-filled visit of drinking Irn Bru, ceilidh dancing, exploring Glasgow, baby dinosaur skeletons, more tea than I've ever drunk before, CATS, games, trampolining and lots of vegan food (Glasgow, you did surprise me). Photo yoinked from Sally.

We were featured in Italian Vogue Bambini!

To make our house look great we first had to make it look really terrible. The whole place needed a rewire, then we stripped all the revolting wallpaper from downstairs and had it replastered. We let the plasterer use the beige (slightly doggy smelling) carpets as a dust sheet so it forced us to rip them up and get the original boards lovingly reclaimed (they are now our pride and joy!) Don't worry it doesn't look like this now! At the mo we're painting - more progress pics soon!

We launched loads of new cards in 2015 - this one was ours (and yours it would seem) favourite!

We took part in the Etsy Blogger Sleepover at Lick Studios. Basically we set up little studio spaces at Lick and Etsy brought a bunch of well-known bloggers to come and see us working and to do some workshops. We gocco printed this fun version of our Brighton Up Your Day design. Check out this super cute vid Lick made at the event.

We weren't going to have a holiday (we had bought a house and I'd quit my job!) but with the festive season looming we couldn't cope with the idea of not taking a break so we whizzed off to Amsterdam for a fun-filled week of craft beer, galleries, LOTS of walking, zoo animals, and Miffy stalking. You can read two blogposts we wrote about Amsterdam here and here.

Along with fellow Pick Me Up exhibitor and awesome illustrator Carlos Garde-Martin, we hand picked a bunch of our fave eclectic fun-loving graphic artists and HIP! HIP! Collective was born! Currently our other three wonderful members are YUK FUN, Likks and Maria Cruz. We decided to go BIG with our first event...

...by launching at the London Illustration Fair at the OXO Tower Bargehouse! It was a really crazy fun whirlwind experience and we can't wait to do more with these cool kids in the near future! Follow us on instagram and twitter to keep up to date!

Just as the festive season kicked in we launched our colourful organic dinosaur babywear! They were really popular at markets, we're yet to see any adorable pics of babies wearing them though (PPLLEEAASSEEE) We have new designs coming your way soon so watch this space...

In November and December we were frequently told (by everyone) that we were utterly insane for how many events we were doing (a million) but we survived! We returned to Renegade for our 4th year and I think it might've been the most fun yet! We had an awesome posse of Brighton Etsy folks plus friends Keith, Sally (HOYFC) and Sold to hang out with! We also loved being part of BUST Craftacular, Fairy Tale Fair and of course Crafty Fox Market. 

We also helped organise with the Brighton Etsy Team the biggest craziest prettiest craft fair Brighton has ever seen!

We were really excited to also be asked to exhibit in the Studio Loo Christmas Open House! If you haven't visited architect & eco designer Claire Potter's Studio Loo on Portland Road yet you must! It's a wonderful space which was converted from an old public toilet. Make sure you visit during May's AOH and see for yourself!

A wonderful project to finish off the year - we did the design work for Herringbone Art's 'A Winter's Trail' - a magical kids show at Brighton's Theatre Royal. We got to go and see the show which took you on a wonderful adventure through parts of the theatre you wouldn't usually explore and were told a completely magical story. Plus, we learnt the Fairy Detective Agency (FDA) secret handshake, which we still practice every now and then! Check out this blogpost about how we created the graphics. We hope to work with Herringbone Arts and Theatre Royal again in the near future! 

So! That was our 2015! Kinda epic eh?! This isn't even everything! We've worked with some wonderful clients this year and gained some fantastic stockists. We can't wait to see what 2016 has in store for us!!! :o)

p.s. it took hours BUT you were very well behaved blogger! thank you!! Maybe I'll blog more...

A Winter's Trail

You all know us best for our pun-tastic handprinted designs and silly greetings cards, but did you know that we do LOTS of design and branding work through hello DODO also? (we totally forgive you if you didn't realise this, new website coming in the new year!)
Sometimes a project comes a long that is so exciting and inspiring but also pushes us to think differently....and that project for us just recently has been for the wonderful Herringbone Arts and their Theatre Royal Brighton show 'A Winter's Trail'. 
A Winter's Trail is a magical enchanting adventure, a promenade experience for young children and adults to share together. As soon as we saw photos of the puppets and sets being lovingly made by hand for the show we were totally spellbound! We knew that this was something incredibly special, tactile and inspirational and that any graphics we designed would need to try to convey this.
A Winter's Trail is about adventure and making small discoveries, hearing stories unfold and collecting treasures along the way.

We drew jagged wintery branches by hand, cut them out with scissors and created a mysterious and magical layered woodland scene to house one of the gorgeous puppet photographs. We also drew the title by hand as this papery, tactile style just seemed to suit the show so perfectly. Herringbone Arts loved this style so much that they asked us to create them a new logo too!

A Winter's Trail runs at Theatre Royal Brighton from 4th - 24th December - check out the Herringbone Arts website for more details and tickets!