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the online home of Ewen Stenhouse
A pair of new prints that i can finally set free! LOST and FOUND are released through Pop Up Projects and are available as a very limited run of just 15 each. Printed on 225g Velvet matte art textured paper and measure 420mm wide x 594mm high {A2}. Each print features a host of weird characters and objects and even the loosest of loose narratives strung through them which probably only makes sense to me. And i'm not even sure of that. Fun to look at tho! They're hanging out over here. More pictures below:
The awesome Montreal based blog BLDGWLF {Building a Wolf} asked if i'd like to contribute a wallpaper to their desktop wallpaper project. I did. It's a reworking of an illustration i did earlier in the year but with some extra elements added and seemed appropriate for the blog. And it's now your's for the taking right here. Check out the rest of their blog while your at it for more visual goodness. Thanks Frederic!
Had a bit of time to spare and fancied giving the Estings competition a bash this year. Roughed in Flash, cleaned up in Pshop and comped in AfterFX.
So here it is! My first foray into strictly live action. Not an animation in sight...unless you count the displays {which i don't}. I've been wanting to film something for ages but it wasn't till my good friend Zol asked if i'd like to do a film based on a new tee for his label The Affair that i figured i'd give it a shot. With each of their t-shirts being based on a literary novel there was already a wealth of information to feed off so finding inspiration for it was fairly easy. And the novel in this case was Brave New World, which i hadn't read up to this point but always meant to. Around the same time i'd been working my way through lots of behind-the-scenes documentaries on classic sci-fi films from my youth. Films like Alien, THX1138 and Total Recall and was reminded why i like these films so much. It's the craftmanship and detail thats gone into every shot and set. And that fact that you know that everything filmed existed in real life. Handmade by a skilled set builder, matte painter or prop designer. Well, what does this have to do with anything? Well stupidly i decided that for this film i'd try and make it without relying on any digital effects but based on a similar aethetic to these films. However with no budget my options were pretty limited. One of the most important lessons i took away from this shoot: with some paper, carboard and gaffer tape the world is your {flammable} oyster. With many trips to the local artshop and minus about £100 later i locked myself away in the basement studio at Th1ng in soho and made what you can see in the pictures below.
For something that was meant to be minimal yet hi-tech and futuristic, this is about as budget as it gets without resorting to tinfoil. One wall made up of carboard, glass and window tubing {held together with gaffer tape} to act as the wall with the consoles, which consisted of one ipad, and two iphones {also held together with gaffer tape}, and a backlit paper wall with a long stip cut out of it to act as the other rear wall. The shoot took one veeeery long day and consisted of me and my brother {he's the 'actor'} who's not an actor and his girlfriend who kindly did his makeup and brought us much needed food. The key to pulling of the illusion of this being more than just bits of carboard in a small room was always going to be in the lighting, and i ended up using just about every single light in the studio to get the desired look, constantly referring to THX1138 as i went. There were many more ridiculous chalenges and anecdotes along the way but essentially it was great fun to do. All the internal cutaway shots were made by hand and filmed seperately the next day. Also fun. Once all that was done and dusted tho the hardest part tho by far was finding someone to create some music for it....with no budget. And it took another 3 months of searching until the awesome Katherine Gillham jumped on board. A recent Royal Acadamy of Music graduate no less and friend of my other brother. She tapped into the same aethetic of the film and pulled out an amazing score that hardly changed from first draft to last. I also owe a lot to Danny at Th1ng for adding a highly professional grade to the film free of charge. And now here it is. There's so much more i'd like to have done with more time/money but as an homage to retro sci-fi films and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World i think it stands up pretty well as it is. And hopefully i'll get to do some more sometime soon.
{film is currently submitted to Virgin Media Shorts, Onedotzero and ASVOFF. check back in september to see if it makes the cut for any of them}
Commissioned by Wired magazine to do a nice little illustration for an article entitled "How to become an authentic CIA agent". Quick turnaround and good fun to do. Keep an eye out in the August edition out soon.
A few months back i asked The Fox is Black's Bobby Solomon if he'd kindly let me contribute somthing to his rad Desktop Wallpaper Project and this is the result. Not really sure how it came about.....just started drawing and this is what happened. 80s cartoons and films ruled and i can't escape the fact that they're still a constant source of inspiration for me. There'll be more of this somewhere down the line. Thanks to Bobby for the post and definately go check out The Fox is Black for a ton of inspiring art bidnizz. Download the wallpaper for free HERE.
Thinking about releasing these as a series of limited prints at some point in the near[ish] future. On second thoughts, turned them into iPhone wallpapers which you can download for free in the downloads section.
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