A WINTER WONDERLAND... ON YOUR FRONT WINDOW!
Forget silly string snow... here’s how one magical artist can make any home look super cool
LOOKINg out of my window, I can see the sort of wintry wonderland everyone dreams of waking up to at Christmas time. Quaint cottages, bedecked with wreathes and covered in 6in of snow glisten under the light of a winter’s moon. I’m itching to grab my coat and run outside to make a snow angel.
Unfortunately, the reality is that I live in a decidedly ordinary terraced street in North London, it’s pouring with rain and the odds of a white Christmas are a miserly six to one.
Yet my windows tell a different story — because this week I have had a visit from ‘The Snow Man’ himself, aka Tom Baker, the world’s first spray-snow artist.
Tom, 40, is also known as ‘The Picasso of the Panes’, and as he gets to work, it’s easy to see why. Armed with nothing more than a couple of £3 300ml cans of spray-snow, a small ice-scraper and two latex paintbrushes, in less than three hours, he manages to create a landscape you could almost walk into.
As you’d expect, it’s Tom’s busiest time of year. His painting season kicks off in October and by the run-up to Christmas he is fully booked, often getting up at 5.30am and working until midnight to create up to five masterpieces a day. Based in Sandhurst, Berkshire, he caters to clients up and down the country.
They range from home-owners, like me, who want a guaranteed White Christmas, to businesses who know Tom’s work is certain to get plenty of oohs and aahs from customers. By the time Christmas is over, he’ll have used a whopping 500 cans — 150 litres.
For a man with such talent, Tom is astonishingly unassuming, happily chatting away while the astonishing diorama unfolds.
He doesn’t even need to sketch anything out, instead starting with a simple idea in the middle of the window — in my case an old stone bridge — and then working outwards. ‘I just go where my imagination takes me,’ he tells me, ‘whether it’s adding in a snowman or a Father Christmas. It just all ends up fitting together.’
It was ten years ago that Tom discovered his skill one Friday night when his partner Keri had an early night in the run-up to Christmas. ‘I was having a couple of beers so I thought I’d do something on the back window of the kitchen with a can of snow paint I’d bought to decorate.’
Most women who’d left a slightly tipsy boyfriend with a can of snow might have expected to wake up to a crudely drawn snowman.
Not so here. Keri, 42, says: ‘I came downstairs the next morning to make myself a cup of tea and discovered this delicate Christmas cottage. I knew Tom was artistic. He’d done A-level art and briefly gone to art college, but until then he’d mainly been working as a folk musician.
‘From there, Tom started painting snow pictures for family and friends and in 2012 Keri put some on a community Facebook page.
‘When I checked my phone an hour and a half later, I’d had 800 comments saying: ‘Wow, can he come and do my windows?’
FOr the next few years, they put the idea of turning his snow painting into a business on hold when they moved to Australia with Tom’s band. When it disbanded in 2015, the couple, who have two children, Isaac, seven, and rae, nine, decided to make a proper go of it.
He has built up an array of celebrity fans. An early one was DJ Chris Moyles, who has asked him to snow-paint the windows at radio X, as well as his home
After that, Jamie Oliver asked Tom to decorate the set of his Christmas show and paint a snow scene at his Essex mansion. He’s also created a snowy surprise for Kirstie Allsopp’s sons.
The cost depends on the intricacy of the design, how long it takes and how far Tom has to travel — but prices start from £150 an hour, with a 2m-wide window taking around two hours.
He works with amazing speed and precision. Upon arrival at my house he started by sticking up a black tarpaulin on the outside of the windows, so he could clearly see what he was creating.
From there he moved inside, carving out tiny square shapes. At first But as he pushed around the white powder, it gradually became clear these were the bricks of the bridge. Next, a cottage emerged on the riverside, then another with a wreath on the front door, all with delicately criss-crossed window panes, and in perfect perspective.
Cleverly, his snow scenes look just as good from the outside as the inside. As Tom does his finishing touches, I can hear passing children shouting to their parents to ‘look at the snow picture’.
Although most of Tom’s scenes are traditional English landscapes, he can incorporate anything and no job is too big or too small.
This season, his work has taken him from creating a snowy scene for Knightsbridge department store Harvey Nichols, to a Yuletide Wallace and gromit as part of creator Aardman’s charity appeal, to a Santa’s grotto on a family’s conservatory. Other customers ask him to include loved ones they want to remember at Christmas.
Keri says: ‘A couple of year ago, Tom had a call from one lady who asked him to paint the windows of the upstairs bedroom of her mother who has terminal cancer.
‘They got chatting while he worked and as he left the mum told him: ‘Your window is going to be the last thing I see before I go to the other side.’
‘He refused to take any money for it, but she insisted and said if he wouldn’t, she wanted him to spend it on presents for our children, so that she could still have a role in Christmas after she’d gone.
‘He came home in tears. It’s wonderful to have all lovely compliments, but those experiences also affect him a lot.’
Other requests are to include
personal details from clients’ lives, whether it’s places they’ve visited or beloved pets. Hearing this, I ask if my cockapoo Honey can be included in my snow scene.
Tom quickly obliges, sketching in my husband Anthony and I taking her for a walk along the riverside.
WHen I mention I have two teenage daughters, Lily, 17 and Clio, 14, they instantly make an appearance too, both in woolly hats.
Finally, he adds in the tour de force, a mountain and Santa sleigh. All in all, the effect in breathtaking.
The scene will stay up as long as I want. Painful though it is to imagine, all I have to do is scrape it off when Christmas is over. When my girls arrive home from school they are stunned. Clio says: ‘I feel I could go outside and throw a snowball.’
For Tom, all this wonderment is a perk of the job he never gets tired of.
‘I really love this time of year. I love the fact I am a normal guy most of the year, but at Christmas I get the power to do lovely things for people and make them happy.’
nor is Tom worried that most of his pictures will be wiped away in the new Year. ‘My work is like Christmas. There’s a big build-up, you enjoy it and then it’s gone,’ he says. ‘What makes it so special is that it’s only here for a short amount of time.’
For more information on Tom’s work and the stencils go to snowwindows.com