24 gifts for you!

Over at the website of a secret club we're throwing a little gift your way every day until Christmas eve. Previous days' gifts will not be available, so you best check in 24 times if you want them all.



So far we've given away the crown of King Winter, some delicious gift wrap, a magical landscape and today you'll get a classic collage challenge, unless you read this tomorrow...

On 20. August from 8PM-midnight my work will be displayed alongside that of Xavi Garcias, Masaki Miwa who both took part in the Super Duper Nova project I did with A secret club.

There'll be music, there'll probably be some drink, it'll be in Hackney (More specifically 445 Kingsland Road, E8 4AE)

More info on the event here.

In my previous post and on my flickr you can see a few WIP shots of my piece that was based on the awesome abilities of MacGuyver.

The reason I haven't shown you the finished piece isn't that I want to be overly secretive, it is simply because I forgot to document it...

Help Yourself
A few work in progress pictures from the creating of an A6 piece for an show in London.

It's all about MacGuyver, that thrifty guy with his swiss army knife. I learned a lot from MacGuyver, mainly that it's possible to bodge anything. I really wanted a knife like his, and when I finally was given one for a birthday, I was a happy camper - mostly because my Swiss army knife had the word "Camping" etched into it, I'm sure MacGuyver's didn't have that, but never mind, it did - and continues to do the job. (Although it's currently a bit lost somewhere in the flat.)

I'll show you the outcome another time.

As this deals with Childhood TV Characters, I figured I'd use a technique I hadn't used since childhood and I started making a lino cut version, but this turned out to be the wrong way to go, so in the end, I made a sort of collage with silver and red paper.

the Schhhop is full to the brim
The shop of a secret club, also known as the Schhhop now features most of the amazing collages made for the Super Duper Nova collage challenge show, including my own contribution.



Every penny dropped in the shop will help a secret club produce more creative events, so even if you don' like the art, buy some and be a better person.

There are only about 25 zines left, they're all ready to go to a new home.

Stykker af Stumper - Pieces of Bits

The first Denmark-based workshop for a secret club of the year is a mere week and two days away and I'm very, very proud of this one. We are presenting a miniature programme of films at a cinema to fuel imagination before playing. The programme consists of a surprise short by the Quay Brothers, followed by Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus - links to trailer, tickets and info on a secret club's website.


Image from schhh.org

When the house lights go up, our Automatic Collage Material Vending Machine will be purring like a kitten and ready to provide the punters with everything they need to make a collage of unimaginable beauty and cleverness.

If you're in Aarhus, and want to spend a Sunday morning like it's meant to be spent, buy your tickets here.

This one is more for the grown-ups as the films are, but if any kids want to drop in at around 12.30-1.00PM when the film is over, we're not known to stop you.

Super Duper Zine

The Super Duper Nova zine is now finished and shipping.


The cover


Elkeland


Xavi Garcia


Anna Walsh of Garudio Studiage


You can still pre order to be sure that you get your copy.

Happy Super Duper Nova New Year

This morning I finished my collage for a secret club's upcoming collage show Super Duper Nova using the materials sent to me by Garudio Youth. Garudio Youth is the intern "wing" of Garudio Studiage so what they sent was a collection of Peckham placemats, plasters and plastic coated stuff - all hideous, but good fun to try to turn it around.



The Super Duper Nova show opens on 18th January at the cinema Øst for Paradis in Aarhus, Denmark and runs until 29th January. We got more than 25 artists and designers to send random bits of paper to each other and then create a collage from what they received. For the show we're publishing a limited edition catalogue/zine (32 pages) which can be pre-ordered from the new schhhop of a secret club.

Here's a mock-up preview, not at all final layout:

offline online advent calender

Last year around this time a secret club created a little online experience or activity every day for our advent calender playing with the idea of taking an online activity and method of delivery out of the computer, there were paper kits, collage challenges and so on.



This year, our advent calendar is running on the four Sundays leading up to Christmas - this is major thing in continental Northern Europe and this time, it's even more removed from the internet that hosts it: It's a geographical game (we love geographical games) and by following the instructions posted on the website, you will find a creation of ours in the landscape in and around Aarhus.


This was the first one, now taken offline, so the directions to it are gone, but the little house is still out there for passers by to see.

Shane Brox at Den Gamle By

Let me introduce you to a man that may have turned thousands of kids to scouring the streets for trash - or what other people call trash. His name is Shane Brox and I first came across him a few years back around Christmas when I was visiting my family in Denmark. In Danish TV Mr. Brox had a show where he told stories with an eclectic mix of mismatched toys and sets + characters made using his trusty hot glue gun and found objects.



It's no surprise that I like anyone working with reclaimed materials on national TV, but this guy is good - not just with the glue gun, but with his stories too.



Now I'm living in Denmark and Shane Brox happens to have a show at Den Gamle By in Aarhus.
There are slight critiques of society in this show, little snidey remarks - mostly about paranoia - that add another layer, but also just that kind of weirdness that sits well with my brain.



According to what I've heard, he's been given free access to a huge archive of toys owned by the museum, this might not be the case, but if so, that's a major and interesting step for a museum that usually insists on historical accuracy in it's displays. (Except a few - I don't think a 1864 bakers mostly sold cake for instance.) This kind of stuff is the way to get people interested: Show them wonder, not facts. If it strikes a chord, they will look for/at facts themselves.



If you're anywhere near, I recommend this, it's one of the few little ways to get your mind blown in Aarhus.

designing the other way round



After having created an interactive cover for the printing magazine AGI we had a half-page ad to play around with and decided to use it to promote a secret club, so it seemed interaction was, once again, key as we wanted the ad to be half about us and half us, if that makes sense - we wanted to advertise without stepping out of the creative realm we were advertising, so interaction it was. being pressed for time, we looked to the advent calendar we had made in December for recyclable ideas and we chose to revisit the most minimal of animations: The Thaumatrope.


a minimal bit of planning of format and communication.


Annabelle's sketches for the Thaumatrope.

What would make sense would be to have the illustrator design the image for the 'trope and the the designer do the ad, and that was how we started, but what made this design process interesting was that after initial sketches, we swapped.


Kenn baring his chest to create the thaumatrope.

Not only did we swap roles, we also pretty much swapped the order you usually make these things in, starting a rough layout in Illustrator (of course initial ideas had happened in the sketchbook) before creating the artwork for the ad as a collage, building the ad as an oversized object.


Kenn's initial Illustrator sketch next to Annabelle's finished artwork.

This is obviously a time consuming way to work, but not massively slower and the exercise of swapping thing around benefitted the ad immensely, looking through an issue of the magazine, this will surely stand out, although this is very much an attempt to promote the work we do and ultimately to get more work, we decided not to put our name on the ad. Working under the name a secret club obviously makes that decision easier, but our experience with memory work also suggests that although fewer people who will have looked at the ad will know our name, the ones that have checked out the website following the ad will have a much clearer memory of us - spoon-feeding is not good for your memory, exploration is. Furthermore, this effectively filters out the less passionate and curious members of our target audience, the ones that wouldn't be interested in working with us anyway.



See the finished ad and make the thaumatrope here. (pdf)