Here's something I did a long time ago. Big Tommy Cooper fan and it's a play on his most famous routine, the idea was to turn him into more of a psychopath/serial killer.
From this came the idea for a story, based on the idea of a pub in London called The Hand & Racquet
linkage (which I've been in) that has now been closed down. The pub as you'll see from the link was frequented by Cooper, Sid James and Tony Hancock........ among others.
The pub is now all boarded up and ready for demolition, the story would involve them coming back from the dead to take revenge on those who are behind the Racquet's demise.
Each character would be a slightly more extreme and horrific version of that which we know and love, with Sid James as a Joker type character.
If anyone wants to make this - be it a comic or graphic novel, get in touch and let's make it happen!
Update
Well nobody got in touch about making a graphic novel of my idea and The Hand and Racquet is now no longer with us. In it's place will be a bright new shiny hotel which really makes me sad,
ever since it was closed down and boarded up I'd been past a few times to take a look and still couldn't understand why this historic pub that did no harm to anyone had to go the way of the bulldozers.
The original image I'd done at the top of the screen was digital - I'd drawn Tommy and then altered an image I found online for the background, the two were combined on Photoshop and the wording was also added there.
But for a while I'd been interested making more 'physical' forms of art work and after some less than successful attempts at screen printing which was very time consuming I decided to give spray paint and stenciling a go. Again a few early attempts came and went before the idea to recreate the old Tommy Cooper image this way popped into my head. My techniques in getting the stencils cut were a little unorthodox - with no light box tracing came about by sticking the picture to the window and using daylight to see through to the original and I was kind of making up as I went along really. The main image and wording were stencils and the background acrylic paint on a black spray painted canvas.
The result of this ramshackle process turned out like this......
And there it stayed, until I visited the National Open Art Exhibition at Somerset House. After coming out of the exhibition I picked up a leaflet calling for entries for next year's competition and after a bit of encouragement I entered Tommy for next years show.
Well, that was a year ago and just this last month I found out that my piece had made it through to the next round of judging, I now had to send the painting off for the judges to take a proper look.
Yesterday I dropped it off in Acton, all packaged up and set for a journey on to Pulborough where the judges will be judging some 500 pieces on 1st September.
The the first time though the public get a say and it would please me greatly if you'd give my humble piece your vote. Here
So from a closed down pub, via Tommy Cooper I've entered my very first art competition. Hopefully I'll enter some more and who knows where inspiration will strike next.
Post Script
Something I forgot to mention...in order to make the stencil I had to print out the original digital image I'd created in Photoshop. With the painting now done I had no use for it unless I was planning on making copies (but I could always print it out again). So.......I was just happening to be passing The Hand and Racquet pub one weekend in London and I just so happened to have some already mixed wallpaper paste on me (as you do) well one thing led to another and before I knew it my picture was plastered up on the front of the soon to be gone hostelry. So for a while at least Tommy Cooper was back at his local.
