Tiny Bullet: A Few Of My Favourite Things

Finding 'A Few Of My Favourite Things' is a little tricky, as I don’t really have that many things.

After living overseas and travelling around quite a bit, I got into the habit of constantly selling or giving stuff away, so I’m a bit of a minimalist.

But a few things have somehow followed me around over the years.

I guess the fact that they survived says something...

The Briefcase

Move over, Alan Sugar.

My schoolyard business empire started here...

I have this pink briefcase full of all my old drawings and paintings from when I was a kid.

I wanted to be an artist for as long as I can remember.

In my head I was going to be a female Leonardo da Vinci, but I didn’t want to be a “poor artist”.

I had no idea you could actually make a career out of art.

As far as I knew, the only professional artist was my dad [legendary cockney sign writer Terry Bull], and he painted signs.

So I started hustling early.

My brother and I started putting on exhibitions in our kitchen, charging my mum and dad 50p a drawing.

I then expanded the business...

At seven, I had a big old knobbly oak tree in the school playground I’d sit under and get 60p for either a tattoo or a caricature of the other kids and teachers.

For any concerned parents out there, for clarification I wasn’t a seven-year-old tattoo artist.

They were drawn in felt-tip pen and the designs usually involved a snake wrapped around a heart and sword...

A few years later, I had my own little pitch at car boot sales, doing portraits for £30 a pop.

My dad even made me a professional sign, which you can see I still have.

There’s also a GCSE project on advertising buried in there somewhere, in which I confidently wrote: “If a product is good, it should sell itself.”

Apparently I was talking myself out of a job before I’d even got started.

Then I became a penniless art student...

The Meditation Robots

One loves being on camera.

The other two are strictly BTS, setting the mood.

I have three little robot projectors.

By day my workspace is a fairly normal office.

By night, they come to life and turn it into an intergalactic meditation space / rave.

I’m a lifelong insomniac and can disappear down late-night rabbit holes of quantum theory, Buddhism, consciousness and everything in between.

I’ve always been interested in things that don’t quite make sense.

While the universe is spinning across the ceiling and lasers are firing in every direction, somehow my brain goes quiet.

My friends call me a space cadet, which I think is a bit unfair.

The Bodoni B

This old Bodoni B has been knocking around with me since college.

It’s travelled around the world with me and picked up a few knocks along the way, but somehow I’ve never managed to get rid of it.

I’m a bit of a typography nut, which is probably my dad’s fault.

He’s a signwriter and pinstriper, and when I was growing up he’d quiz me on typefaces and pretend my maths homework didn’t exist.

I’d come home from school to find he’d customised my go-kart with flames, pinstriped my hockey stick or had a go at my guitar.

Years later, when he was staying with me in Australia, I came home from work one day to discover he’d pinstriped my BBQ.

For no reason whatsoever...

Clearly, some of it rubbed off.

I can spot a font at twenty paces and bad kerning can ruin my day.

The £15 Warhol

I bought this Batman print for £15 years ago.

It was the first poster I ever bought for my room.

I had absolutely no idea it was famous, or who had created it.

I found out years later it was a Warhol.

Together with the letter “B”, it’s probably the one thing that’s followed me everywhere.

It’s been in student halls, shoved in rucksacks, rolled up, stuck on walls with Blu Tack and Sellotape and, whenever I settled somewhere for a bit, I’d get my mum to post it out to me.

Now I’m a grown-up, it even has its own frame.

It’s pretty battered and torn these days, so recently I thought I’d go online and buy another one, only to discover it’s actually a pretty rare Warhol print and now sells for considerably more than what I paid for it.

So I’ll stick with the knackered one.

It’s got a better life story anyway.

The PlayStation

When I arrived back in the UK after ten years in Sydney, everything I owned fitted into two suitcases: some clothes, my sketchbooks and my PlayStation.

The games came too.

All fifty-odd of them.

Apparently my minimalism has a zombie apocalypse loophole...

I justify it as a legitimate work tool.

Years of scanning screens for things trying to kill me have made me ridiculously eagle-eyed.

On set, I can spot a rogue pixel, a dodgy reflection or a random extra staring directly down the lens in a heartbeat.

And, crucially, it’s tax deductible.