After Many Requests, I have Finally Typed the Brooklyn Bridge!

Win a Personalized Brooklyn Bridge Print

I'm excited to share my latest typewriter artwork of the Brooklyn Bridge, created with over 500,000 keystrokes using my trusty Smith Premier and Olympia SG3 typewriters. It took two weeks to complete, and now, I’m offering you the chance to win one of two personalized prints!

🎟️ How to enter:

If you're already signed up for my newsletter, simply check out my latest video of the Brooklyn Bridge artwork on Instagram (link here) and leave a comment on the video.

🏆 Prize:

The two lucky winners will receive a limited edition print of the Brooklyn Bridge, customized with their name typed into the artwork. Winners will be contacted at the end of the competition.

⏰ Deadline:

The competition closes on Tuesday 29th October, 12:00 PM (UK time), so don’t miss out! Results announced the following day in my next newsletter.

Good luck!

Celebrating 10 Years | The Story of How I Became an Artist | Part 2

For my previous newsletter, I shared a glimpse into the beginnings of my typewriter art journey. In 2014, I was a student with ambitions to become an architect. Today, let’s pick up where those plans left off and dive into how instead typewriter art turned into my full-time gig.

My Instagram following was quite small back in 2014. Two years later, I was grateful to have hit 1,000 followers and so to celebrate this milestone, I worked on a collection of typewriter portraits of film and TV characters. This included the cast of long-running sci-fi series, Doctor Who, and 2004 indie-hit Napoleon Dynamite. To my surprise, some of the actors shared my work on social media. Most notably, Jon Heder, who played Napoleon, posted about the artwork on Instagram when I gifted him his typed-portrait at Comic Con in Olympia, London. Between Instagram shout-outs and Reddit love, courtesy of my small following sharing my work elsewhere on the internet, my following very slowly started to grow.

From 2017 - 2020, I continued my studies in Architecture at UCL, London. Typewriter art remained a hobby at this stage with no ambition to take this on as a full-time gig. I focused on portraits of actors and musicians who inspired me. However, the real game-changer to my artwork came in December 2019 during my postgrad year. In the UK, we have the main news and also regional news. BBC Look East, a television programme that broadcasts in the east of England, reached out to me. Their producer got in touch and asked if I wanted to feature my typewriter artwork of local Essex-based landmarks as piece for the new year in January 2020. BBC presenter Debbie Tubby and a colleague drove down from their Norwich-based studio to Essex to interview me in the freezing cold of December.

In preparation, two weeks before my interview, I hit the road and visited places within a 15-mile radius of my home. I visited Thaxted Windmill, Finchingfield — the most photographed village in England — Rayne Station, a disused railway station along the Flitch Way, a beautiful trail through the Essex countryside that follows a former railway line, and finally, Blackmore End Church, a building with an appearance straight out of a gothic novel.

For this project, I used a portable 1970s Tippa typewriter and a 1970s orange Silver Reed. These were my second and third typewriters, which I both picked up from Facebook Marketplace, following on from my first machine, the 1956 Oliver Courier. I picked the Tippa and Silver Reed specifically because they came with carry cases and were fairly lightweight, making it easier to transport them between locations.

It was the middle of December, freezing cold, and for the first time, I was creating art outdoors. I had made the mistake of using regular printer paper, which wasn’t cut out for the cold and drizzle of a typical December day here in the UK. Frustratingly, the typewriter hammers punched holes straight through the paper, making my artwork look like it had been attacked with a hole puncher. The next day, I managed to patch it up with tape, but that day I learned the hard way to use thicker cartridge paper. I convinced my brother to help with the filming since he was studying film and television in college at the time. You can watch my 2019 trip around Essex creating typewriter art on location here.

When the BBC Look East feature aired in the new year of 14th January 2020, I was immediately flooded with interest. I woke up the following morning in my tiny little London student accommodation, only just big enough for a single bed to the sound of my phone buzzing with messages and notifications from friends and family who had just seen the story pop up on their phone. The news story hadn’t just broadcast on TV, but was also published in an article by the BBC online. The title of the story: Typewriter artist James Cook says 'it's a weird way of having fun' You can watch and read that first interview here (apologies for that frightening image they used of me as the cover photo!)

To my shock, the news story was then picked up by the main BBC News team that week. Suddenly, my Instagram leapt from 1,500 followers to 13,000 followers in one day. I didn’t have an online shop at the time selling prints, so foolishly, I ended up selling the original artworks from the on-location trip around Essex; something I still regret to this day. These early pieces were a huge part of my journey, and I sold them for what I’d now charge for a print. Also, since I was still learning and making mistakes along the way, I forgot to keep a record of my first original artwork purchase. What I do remember is that I sold the original Finchingfield Village piece to a member of the BBC Eastenders production team who had emailed me (to those of you from the UK who know what Eastenders is, I am sure you will find this quite funny!)

This news story became a launchpad for other broadcasters and journalists to write about my story and my typewriter artwork. Shortly after, I received a call from ITV’s Good Morning Britain—the UK equivalent of NBC’s TODAY Show in the U.S. The producer had somehow gotten my number and asked if I’d be interested in an interview. I hesitated for a moment, and before I could answer, she quickly reassured me, saying, “Don’t worry, Piers Morgan won’t be interviewing you.” At the time, Piers was still on the show, though he left abruptly later that year after famously storming off the set. It made me wonder how many people had turned down interviews with Good Morning Britain because of Piers?

After that, other major news outlets in the UK, like Sky News, began reaching out to me. I also did a live interview from the UK with Australian programme, The Morning Show. This required me to head to a London recording studio near Old Street roundabout for a live-feed broadcast at 1am in the morning. This was, by far, the most nerve-wracking interview I have ever done. It’s one thing to sit face-to-face with an interviewer, but quite another to just have an earpiece (with the volume set low) while staring into a camera. To make it even more surreal, a screen below the camera showed a live feed of myself on Australian TV, being broadcast live to millions of viewers. I’ve had no media training, and the whole experience was utterly terrifying. With the time difference, it was early morning in Australia, and I’m sure the audience could see how tired I was—I definitely had bags under my eyes! Since the BBC news story aired, things snowballed, with one interview leading to another. I should point out that I didn’t have a manager—still don’t!—to handle requests for publicity. It was just journalists and producers who caught wind of my artwork and reached out via email to see if they could feature it. I decided to seize the moment. I had no idea if opportunities like this would come around again, so I felt incredibly grateful to share my art with the world.

Later that year, I had the chance to chat with American singer and talk show host Kelly Clarkson on her show. The interview was taken over Zoom where I shared the screen with Billy Ray Cyrus and Rainn Wilson—yes, Dwight Schrute from The Office! This was before I had a proper studio space to work because I was still studying Architecture at UCL, so I took the call in my bedroom at 3am in the morning, thanks to the time zone difference between the UK and US. It was beyond surreal. Because of COVID, all interviews had shifted to Zoom, and seeing other celebrity guests just pop up on my laptop was a bizarre experience.

By the end of 2020, the exposure had really boosted my Instagram following, taking me past 20,000 followers. I had sold nearly all of my original pieces, apart from a few personal portraits. At that point, I realized that to keep selling my work, I’d need to make prints available to the public.

In my next newsletter, I’ll fill you in on what happened after I graduated from UCL, how I started exhibiting my work in galleries, and how the pandemic shaped my artistic journey.

Until then, thanks for reading!

This Way To My Print Shop →