What was the first thing you remember making?
Ali: When I was a
kid I went to Rainbows, Brownies AND Girl Guides (we lived in a village..) and
so most of my early memories of making include lots of paper weaving, wreaths
made from pine cones, polystyrene Easter chicks etc etc! My Mum still has many
pieces of my ‘early work’ which come out every Christmas, including a little
Santa climbing out of a toilet roll chimney!
Jam: The first
thing I remember making was a New York Yankees pop up card in school. Which
still baffles me as I’ve never watched baseball in my life! I remember being a
bit addicted to trying all the different fiddly techniques. I settled on a 3
tier pop up with New York skyline, stadium and baseball player. I also remember
in a science lesson I spotted a photo of some fireworks in a text book which I
cut out and stuck in the background of the card! I felt a little bit bad but it
made my card so much better!
How did you find your
creative side?
Ali: I struggled
for quite a long time with my creative side as I was rubbish at drawing and
couldn’t sew a button but I was full of so many ideas! I was good at English so
for a long time I just focused my creativity into writing but I wanted to be a
visual person. At college I discovered photography which became my passion and
later at uni when I met Jam I realised that I also loved graphic design and
wanted to become a printmaker.
Jam: I’m sort of
the opposite to Ali, I’ve always been a bit rubbish with words, be it writing,
reading or sometimes even saying them! Instead I would tend to look at how cool
each letter looked before I read the word. I guess this is how I stumbled
across my love of creating graphics and typography.
Our favourite make has got to be our Nice Lion screenprint!
It’s one of our early designs and will probably always be our most popular. As
a design it pretty much sums up hello DODO…it’s bright and fun, VERY silly but
also clever at the same time. We really love a good animal pun and our Nice
Lion ALWAYS gets the biggest reaction at fairs. We want to create work which
makes people smile and he always does!
We try to visit lots of exhibitions but quite often most of
our inspiration comes from everyday life or our favourite animals. We’re very
lucky to live by the sea in Brighton which is HUGELY inspiring and we’re
leaders in the Brighton Etsy Team, so we’re surrounded by incredible creative
folk all the time.
Ooh that’s a tricky one! Our staple favourites are fellow
Brighton Etsy makers designosaur (for the most AMAZING lasercut jewellery), I like Cats (for all things lovely and cat-shaped), Anna’s Drawing Room (for gorgeous
handprinted homewares and bird and bug prints) and Rock Cakes who makes the
most beautiful precious jewellery and who happened to make our wedding rings!
Hmm…well it WAS a badge maker but we have one of those now!
(and it’s AMAZING!) Ok, it sounds a bit boring but a heat curer would be
INCREDIBLE! Currently all our t-shirts and tote bags are dry ironed for 5
minutes each to ensure that the ink is cured and washable. A heat curer would
save us sooooo many hours of our time! We’ll feel like we’ve hit the big time
when we finally get one…
We don’t have very many days off as there’s always
screenprinting to be done, orders to pack or new designs to work on! In summer
we spend a lot of time on the beach though, having BBQs with friends and sipping
Pimms. We’re about to move into our first house (complete with separate studio
room!) though so all of our spare time from now on will be filled with DIY and
decorating!
We have LOTS of exciting things coming up! We’re launching
some brand new products which we’re keeping under our hat for now…but over the
years they’ve been requested MANY times! We have a whole new collection of
designs coming out also…LOTS more animals and puns! (yep, we haven’t run out of
those yet). We’re also going to be exhibiting at Pick Me Up (the graphic arts
festival at Somerset House) with Best in April. This is ALL of our DODO dreams
coming true as the first ever Pick Me Up was one of the main catalysts which
made us learn how to screenprint and start hello DODO in the first place. It’s
going to be an exciting year!
So much going on for hello DODO and everytime H sees that Lion Print, its difficult to leave it behind. Maybe at the next show! ha, ha. What do you think to hello DODO's work? We are super fans as you can tell.H & Sammy
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