Newcastle Pride 2014

When we returned to our native North East, We found out that the first weekend back would be Northern Pride Weekend.

We had met one of the people that run the weekend and we said we would love to do something to help out.

We agreed to come up with a piece that they could auction off and raise some money, to help this continue to be a free event.

We deiced to recreate a old photo from the WW2 and add a IDa4 twist to it.

this is the original

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We sprayed this as a live show in the main part of Pride on the Sunday.

We also sprayed it round the back of  The Yard bar on Scotswood road, Newcastle.

Beat Farm: Belgium Free Festival

As our time on Continental Europe was coining to an end, we had a spare weekend before we got the ferry back over to the UK for a friends wedding.

We were looking at Antwerp night life, as this has never let us down, and Amsterdam as this is just a crazy place, then i some how managed to find this small free festival in the middle of the Belgium countryside and to me the equation goes:

Free Weekend X Free Festival =  PARTY!

Beat Farm Festival is a free festival that takes place annually in Essen in the north of Antwerp. On Friday, July 11th is the theme of 'brown café with performances. On Saturday, July 12th will be a DJ festival with three stages

Beatfarm as we later found out was started by a group of friends who wanted to put on a party every year so they could all meet up after moving away.

They started with only one tent and a handful of people now it has grown to 4 tents and 500+ people.

It's a really friendly place and we were the only people from the UK.  But the Belgium’s know how to party!

We spent the majority of our time with all the locals mostly parting in our van, this happens a lot! 

But we made some new friends here and hopefully we will meet up with them once

again when in Belgium.

Once at the festival, we got in touch with the owners of the festival and we offered our services and we got about stenciling the place.

this is the results:

21# IDa4 MURAL IN EUROPE: Hostel ROOM Rotterdam, Netherlands

On The Road from Berlin.

So as we said our goodbyes to Berlin, we left feeling sad, happy and tired, real tired! Berlin has this knack of never letting you get enough sleep, there is so much to do.

Anyway we left for the 700+km drive on high spirits (well Redbull  and Chocolate!) I'm the only driver and I wanted to get this over and done with in one go, if possible..

 As the Hollies said "The road is long, With many a winding turn"  well this road was unbelievably long and with NO winding turn, just a long straight road. A LONG STRAIGHT ROAD!

After 11 hours driving after leaving Berlin we finally arrive at the Hostel at 3am to check in. Head.Pillow.Sleep!

We all awoke to a lovely breakfast in Room Rotterdam, one of the famous hostels around Europe list.

This hostel has a great feel to it, an old building (hard to find one of these in Rotterdam after the bombing in WW2) it has been beautiful restored and transferred into a hostel by the two owners Mirjam and Monique who themselves were travelers at one point.

The staff here are a mix of Rotterdam locals and international travelers. Its a well run place with Annick managing the day to day things.

We were luckily enough to find ourselves staying at the hostel when they were celebrating there 9th anniversary of opening up the hostel with a fancy dress theme of 70's and obviously orange.  This also coincided with the Netherlands V Costa Rica, Quarter Final World Cup match. Double Celebration!!

The party went down a storm, with all the staff and helpers making an effort to get dressed up and the owners put on a lovely spread of typical Dutch food!  

The party got even better when The Boys in orange beat Costa Rica on penalties, needless to say the party went on in to the wee hours!

There is one main character at the hostel that I have not mentioned yet, and  that is Lexie..

This in the words of the hostel "Our sweet, enthusiastic and very persuasive four-legged team member Lexie is guarding the hostel and taking care of happiness and entertainment."

Everybody loves Lexie so we thought that we would make her the main focus of the art.

When we were talking about what the hostel needed,we found out that because it was an old building on many floors, people were sometimes getting lost and not finding the kitchen and showers etc.

So we put the two things together and we made a stencil of Lexie pointing out the way!

We also redecorated one of the toilet signs to  make it more fun and recognizable.


                                            BEFORE                             AFTER

Over all this was a fun place to stay and you will always feel welcomed by the mix of workers, locals and obviously Lexie.