It's Friday, Surprise Someone!

For some months, in Stourbridge (England) homeowners were surprised with an empty extra bottle when they went to pick up the milk at their doorstep.

This misterious bottles started appearing in the spring. They were empty, yes, but etched with pictures of animals -often cows or mice-, carefully carved into the glass in astonishing detail.

The identity of the artist behind them -nicknamed by some the 'bottle Banksy' after the secretive graffiti artist whose work appears overnight on buildings across the UK- remained a mystery for a long time. Another nickname was Pic-Glasso in obvious reference to the painter and -probably- the liking for bulls.

Attempts to "chase" the artist during the late night or early morning delivery were futile but finally the mistery was revealed. The Daily Mail finally identified the person behind the milk bottle creations as Charlotte Hughes-Martin a 30-year-old artist that said she had been motivated by a desire to show how 'domestic, everyday objects can be things of beauty too'.

In an interview with the newspaper, she explained: 'I like to give people a surprise and make them do a doubletake when they step outside their front doors in the morning to pick up their pints of milk...'

'Everyone should be able to enjoy art in their everyday life and I just love the idea that my designs could bring a smile to someone's face as they make a cup of tea in the morning.'

This is part of her work, being the ones with animals the bottles that have been left on doorsteps:









Miss Hughes-Martin said she buys the bottles from local shops -where they are sold containing orange juice- and then works on them in her spare time. She has completed between 30 and 50 milk bottle engravings to date and she had been dropping off batches of her work at random addresses for months.

I find her work pretty enough to get the attention it got, but what I like the most was her "marketing system".

On purpouse or not, the fact that she left those bottles randonmly and surreptitiously created a "mouth-to-mouth" around her work that I am not sure it could have been attained in any other way. In a moment in time with so many ways of market your job (blogs, social networks, Etsy, etc.) it seems that sometimes going back to basics with a creative twist can surely pay off.

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