Hiya, thanks so much for visiting The Kitschen Disco website! I'm Katie D'Rozario from Manchester and the artwork you find on these pages is inspired by the artists I love, plus slices of life and conversation in Northern England.
Kitschy, colourful chunks of nostalgia mixed with DIY punk vibes, dry humour, empowerment, neon animal print and trashorama arcade aesthetics are just some of my influences, along with my vintage 80s home design, plastic toy and jewellery collection, stuff I used to watch on telly or music I listened to, killer one-liners my Nanna used to say and anything Jem and the Holograms or Bet Lynch would've worn!
As a kid I used to love stacking up squares of paper, stapling them together into little zine-type 'books' and filling them by drawing patterns I coloured in with my brightest felt tips (from one of those wide packets where they were all in rainbow order, remember those? 🌈), and I still love the Zen of just doodling a good Technicolor pattern now - I use a lot of these in the background of my 'sayings' prints.
Background
As a teenager I loved a huge mix of music from Pulp to Beastie Boys to hardcore-punk, and decided I wanted to work in the music business. I did my 'work experience' at an indie record label, under the very scary 😳 wing of a girl who ended up in prison for murder (true story), but somehow that didn't put me off, and also at Spin Media, mostly helping organise press and celeb lists for club launches, which there seemed to be loads of in town in the late 90s!
I studied sound engineering, got my degree in music industry management and marketing, then moved down to Camden Town. I worked at a record label and in radio and TV promotions, and when I wasn't at work, gigs or on tour I loved going round markets, visiting exhibitions including Vivienne Westwood at the V&A and Andy Warhol at the Tate and reading loads of music biographies.
After moving back to Manchester years later I started selling vintage alongside my day job, and my Nanna gave me a hand-coloured, framed photo of my Mum as a kid, which got me into colouring photos of my icons like Emmeline Pankhurst and Bet Lynch but covered in neon animal print, very roughly, using my finger on a 'Paint' app on a very early, chunky iPhone! 🤣 I bought myself a badge machine and started a shop on Etsy, which evolved over time as profits allowed via paper, pencil, a scanner, an iPad and Apple pen! My artwork, sayings and patterns expanded from the OG medium of badges to art prints, greetings cards and everything else you can find here today! New ideas come all the time and end up added onto neverending 'to do' lists. If I'm not doing the 'to do' lists I'm probably thinking about them! 😂 If you got this far here's a trophy 🏆😆💖💚💙