Original Abstracts & Photography

Thankfully, we have found what we are best at - designing and printing canvas art via espiritoart.com. But we have also tried a few other techniques in the past, with varying degrees of success. Having viewed an uninspiring exhibition at the Baltic Arts Center, we decided that it couldn't be too hard to produce attractive, original abstract art on canvas - rather than use the digital art packages we were used to.

This prompted purchase of canvases, brushes and paint, and a day was set aside to quickly achieve artistic perfection by our own hands. What followed gave us a greater respect for painters, no matter how simplistic their abstract creations appear. The sum total of two people over a period of 5 hours each was this, untitled masterpiece: -

Although it may be tempting to think so, we can promise than no teabags or bodily fluids were used in the creation of this... this.... well, whatever it is. Thankfully, we never repeated this experiment so the world's worst painters can rest easy at their easels that nobody is about to take their crown. We're going to stick with canvas art.

We have had greater success with photography, using many of the shots we have taken for the basis of our Global Scenes collection, which features different takes on some of the world's famous places and most beautiful cities. True, the great Milan robbery of 2007 did set this back a little as along with stolen laptops, the camera too was passed in the possession of Milanese street villians.

Freshly furnished with a new camera, we've been concentrating on building up stock photography for use in the canvas art commissions we receive.

One such trip was made just yesterday, for some closeups of beaches, pebbles and rockpools. These are useful either when clients want a specific request (and you'd be surprised what is asked for!), or just as textures to use as the basis of our canvas art prints. Occasionally a shot will come out realy well and be transferred to our Contemporary World collection for customers to purchase as a canvas print.

Yesterday's trip was a little problematic as despite being a matter of five miles away, I managed to miss the coast, and ended up on a road going inland. By the I got the car pointed in the right direction, I'd gone too far north and was just south of Amble. Given the approaching night, I took advantage of the deserted stretch of Northumberland coastline to lie on the beach pretending to be a professional photographer taking unusual angles.

This quickly progressed to a very relaxing and theraputic activity, stacking pebbles up like prehistoric man. Looking at the results, well, at least the original objective of stock photos and textures was achieved, coupled to lots of fresh air courtesy of an artic wind! Now perhaps a little more work is needed, but you have to agree - the photography is better than the original art!