Smiles Ahead : Dicky Smiles
Folkestone illustrator Arron Miles on taking the plunge and creating character Dicky Smiles
If you have ever seen Dicky Smiles, you’ll know. The colourful ‘rock on’ motif that hangs about with a satan-worshipping duck… No? Well, listen up.
Direct from the brain of Folkestone artist Arron Miles, Dicky is a character who ends up on clothes, walls and even people with their motto to ‘Live Happy or Die Trying’.
Dicky is something of an extension of Arron, who is a self-confessed massive heavy-metal fan and has also walked the walk that the motto proposes.
Having studied art at college, Arron was like many who struggle turning their creative passions into a self-sustaining career.
“You know, life just gets in the way,” he reminisces. “Eventually you meet a girl, have some children, get married, and divorced, and that artist lifestyle just doesn’t seem sustainable when you’ve got to go to work to make money. I did that for 10 years. I was working at a gym as a maintenance guy and I just ended up going from one sh*t, unfulfilling job to another.
“Someone asked me how long I had worked there and when I thought about it I’d been there for four years. Four years, I didn’t even like it! So I spoke to the woman who was in the office that day and said ‘If I just quit my job right now, would I get in trouble?’. She said ‘No’. ‘OK, cool, I’m going, right now’ and I quit my job.”
Having already used any downtime to come up with the concept of Dicky, Arron got to work right away and took on a hut on Folkestone Harbour Arm.
“I just took the plunge. I had a part-time job with a workshop making furniture but just ditched the security blanket and went to do the art thing.”
THE LOGO
Sounding like the nickname of a 20s gangster, Dicky Smiles was inspired by cartoons of the time.
“There was a lot of stuff from Fleischer Studios and Walt Disney, a lot of rubber-band stuff, and that introduced me to brands that were using that style for their own artwork and it just clicked. I just sat down and drew Dicky for the first time,” says Arron.
“The heavy-metal hand, because I’m into metal. I love metal. It doesn’t always come through the artwork, which is very shiny and poppy and cute sometimes, but I love to rock.
“I started to draw imagery with Dicky in and started to figure out who he was and who his friends were.” Enter Antichrist Mallard, the satan-worshipping duck.
“When I first drew her, she didn’t even have a gender at the time. She was just this weird character in what looks very much like a gimp suit, but I kind of resonated with the character and then eventually just kept redrawing and redrawing until it became that Dicky and Mallard were two humanoid characters, but their heads were weird things.”
APPAREL
While collabing with brands on murals – he’s painted the walls of The Skull Bar in Maidstone and The Beer Shop in Folkestone – or designing packaging for Viking Coffee, the vibrant and upbeat-urban illustration styles of Arron’s work lends itself to all sorts of locations. Meanwhile, the Dicky Smiles brand has found a real home on clothing. From the beanies and cotton caps to the hoodies, there is a skate and street element to the range, which customers can get from the shop on the Harbour Arm as well as his online store.
“For years I’d wanted to run a brand and I was banging on about it to my mates and not doing anything about it,” says Arron. “When I was younger, baggy jeans, big T-shirts and baseball caps. So I wanted to make clothes that I liked wearing. And T-shirts are a really fun commodity to use to get artwork out there.”
Screen-printing his artwork on to garments, both at his shop and using a local family company in Hythe, the Dicky Smiles brand also helps to get Arron’s artwork out into the world.
“Wherever possible, I use organic, ethically-produced, Fairtrade products,” he says. “I don’t buy cheap sh*t. I do care where it comes from and how it was made. I try my best to exclude silly old plastic from my supply chain and products because it sucks and I don’t want it.”
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