The exhibition features 50 portraits of celebrities who have died before their time including James Dean, Amy Winehouse and Heath Ledger (which is one of my favourites). It is based on the idea that to be an ultimate iconic celebrity, you have to die for the title.

Using traditional methods, this exhibition features portraits drawn using mechanical pencil with collage from vintage fabrics, Lucie creates detailed and quirky work with a vintage feel which allows her to give a definite sense of personality. To see more examples of Lucie’s work then please visit her site.

Lucie will be selling the framed original artwork at the Custard Factory along with a small gift shop including cards, postcards, prints and tote bags. The private view is being held on Friday 23rd November from 7.30pm till 10pm with live music, canapes and cocktails. If you would like more information or to attend the private view please RSVP here.

While the rest of the festival season winds down, on the 19th-21st October Supersonic Festival shows up again for its 10th year running to give the music scene a good hiding . If you haven’t been before then your eardrums are in for a treat (and a bit of a pounding) as the weekend session, run by Birmingham’s Capsule, takes over Digbeth’s Custard Factory in a multi-discipliniary cornucopia of experimental performances, workshops and films. Check out the line up here for a glimpse of what’s going on.

Tickets are still available from a multitude of locations around the city and if you happen to have an records left about then you can hand them in at this weekend’s Zinefest for the Vinyl Rally – Record Amnesty < which looks awesome fun.

And to give you a little taste, here’s a video from last years Supersonic:

Nestled in the heart of Digbeth’s Custard Factory is the soon to be opened vintage, arts and creative market Mr. Bird’s Emporium. Set up by the great minds behind Urban Village and Sutton Coldfield Vintage Market, the emporium is looking for people to take up stalls, both permanent and temporary, inside the market space for either a resident space or at one of the Saturday ‘Custard Cream’  visiting trader sessions. Right from the opening there looks to be 50 stalls ready to trade for their October 13th opening.

This looks to be both a great opportunity for creative and artists around the city to get their work out there and displayed in a community of their peers, as well as exposing more people to the ‘always on the verge of being’ creative district of Digbeth.  Along with the success of traders at Artfest’s Art On The Railings, this will hopefully be a great starting point, especially for those just starting out and local graduates, to get some income from their craft.

So if you’re interested in exhibiting head over to the Mr. Birds Emporium and hit them up. Or if you just think this all sounds rather jolly exciting then be sure to check out the launch party on 13th October from 10:30-5:30 with live music, entertainment and all that other good stuff.

Animation Forum WM have teamed up with Dice Productions and Flip Festival to bring three separate programmes of screenings of the best UK animated films of 2010 and 2011 to Birmingham. The shorts will be screened on Thursday 9th, Friday 10th, and Saturday 11th February from 7pm each night at The Custard Factory Theatre and you can vote to help determine the Public Choice winners.

Buy tickets and get more information on the Animation Forum WM website.

Hello Culture is a one day conference with a series of keynotes, panels and workshops exploring how those in the cultural sector can work with digital technology to improve their audience development, organisational operating process, raise their profile and collaborate across the digital sector and with new partners to develop and innovate new cultural product and practice..

17 November at Zellig (Custard Factory).

Links:

• A ‘save the date’ email with more info
• The Eventbrite ticket-booking page
• Hello Culture on Lanyrd
• helloculture.net might be the website (but there’s nothing there at the time of posting)

FlixFixer launched at the Custard Factory last night. It’s been on my radar for a while but I’ve not had much chance to check it out. I’ve just had a look and I suspect it might be a genius idea.

It’s really quite simple:

• You pick a cinema (just the Custard Factory for now)
• You pick a date
• You pick a film (you can show what you like if you own the rights or you can pick something from Park Circus‘s list)
• You pay a minimum amount

Tickets for the screening then go on general sale, and if at least 20 random punters come along then you’ll break even. Any more and you could even earn a bit extra for some popcorn.

Most people would be surprised just how easy and affordable it is to hire a cinema. What FlixFixer does is simplify the whole process and, on top of that, it gives you a hand promoting the screening and helping you earn your money back.

It’ll be interesting to see if they can sign up some other venues, making it a kind of Newspaper Club for cinema.

For now though, there’s already a programme of interesting events coming together and people are being encouraged to get involved putting on their own screenings.

One to watch.

The venue – which hosted the shoot for Juice Aleem’s Rock My Hologram music video and more – made this announcement on their Facebook page:

It’s with a great deal of sadness that we have to announce BOXXED ceased trading on Monday the 19th Sept 2011. We’ve had fun and we hope everyone that experienced our unique space did too, but it’s time for us to bow out.

Massive thanks go to everyone that was part of our project, particularly Dave Checkley, Ksmk Neil, all the graff guys that painted our walls just for the love of it (especially Hoaks & Fluid), The Project Pigeon Crew and everyone that volunteered their time to help us out. You know who you are.

According to Digbeth is Good (hat-tip for posting about this originally), Project Pigeon, which is based on Boxxed’s Custard Factory grounds, will be unaffected for now and there will be a couple of closing parties at the venue to see it off in style. Inquiries should be directed to the Boxxed team on 07826 523 650.

Lewis Maxwell Bloor does photography, design, typography, digital manipulation and post production. He’s on Carbonmade and Tumblr (which is where I spotted a version of the pic above), has accounts on Flickr and Twitter and he’s available for freelance work.

I thought I recognised the name, but I was probably thinking of Simon and Tom Bloor who are from Birmingham too.

On Saturday Electric Carnival is taking over half of Digbeth – the HMV Institute, Custard Factory, Air, Heath Mill Lane car park and the Rainbow venues – and they’ve got space for 9,000 people (1,500 more than last year). That’s kinda big.

Via Digbeth is Good, who also have a map of road closures for the more logistically minded.

• Animation Explosion 2011
• Creative Enterprise Conference
• The Online Mainline

There’s also a set of Creative Metropoles Case Studies which looks interesting (if you like that sort of thing) and features a range of European projects, including the Advantage Creative Fund, Custard Factory and Fazeley Studios office spaces, the PLOT Project and Brilliantly Birmingham from our own fair city.

Meanwhile, the other day, D’log posted about some notes about some other articles including some mentions of Birmingham in a paper called “Enabling and Inhibiting the Creative Economy: The Role of the Local and Regional Dimensions in England“.