Findingviews
Picture sales and an open notebook of thoughts from Orginal Robart
The Evolution of Findingviews:
The 2nd in a series of articles talking about the evolution and redevelopment of the Findingviews digital arts website.
Buying glasses, originally uploaded by originalrobart.
Buying Glasses is all about looking at the design that comes from a display. I recently needed to buy new spectacles – a good experience as I have an excellent optician, but that’s not the point. I noticed the precision in which the glasses were laid out on display and thought it would make a fun perspective shot.
That got me thinking about the relationship between celebrity, art and design in advertising.
One common norm in advertising is “stick a celebrity in and people will come”. In fact these days you cannot move for celebrity filled advertising.
Yet art, photography, design and pretty much all the creative arts tell us – get the image right and people will be moved in the way you want them to.
Are these two in conflict, or are they mutually self reinforcing?
Do some creatives work out beautiful images only to be told to stick a celeb in regardless of the quality of there work.
Or do the powers of art and celebrity combine to produce uber ads; adverts so imbued with emotional + celeb allure that we cannot help but buy.
Or is something else, more interesting going on?
Personally I think we’d only ever complain if we were bombarded with dull and uninteresting advertising.
Earlier this week I released the first Mascot of Madness, it’s an idea I’ve been playing around with for a little while but I hadn’t 
decided on how to go about it. First decision was the final format. The Mascots of Madness have always been intended to be a series of images so I had to decided the size and format. I figured on T shirts. That was due to the drawing style. I wanted them to be fun and a little childlike, so I thought T Shirts would be echo the fun side.
The first Mascot of Madness is “Strrrach”. Each mascot has its own name and none will be easy to pronounce. After all these are creatures of madness. Strrach is the mascot of peeping, looking, running after and grabbing. He is all eyes on stalks and narrow limbs.
Strrach is narrow, pipe-cleaner styled and a little bit hairy. To achieve this I used a large curved brush for much of his body. To say the brush was curved is an understatement. It was a series of curves – enough to give the outline of his body a little structure and his hairs a little kink. Another similar brush was also used – sparingly to add some extra fuzziness.
Strrachs eyes needed a kind of blankness. I thought of a realistic eye, and then thought that a real eye would be a little out of place amongst the fantasy of Strrrach, I also wanted his body to reflect his soul and not his eyes. His eyes are simple gradient fills with a red centre. I hope its not too simple and still fitting for the image.
The body needed to be odd. Not a true torso. Just something for pipe-cleaners to fit around. So a simple generated interface fill with some brush spots over it would suffice.
Strrach was made with some simple tools, that were carefully picked. The rule all the way through was simplicity leading to a basic form. Creating Strrach was about setting some principles and working them through to an outcome. That is the creative principle behind the first Mascot of Madness.
Link to Aspect of Winter T Shirt
Ok this is the final post about Aspects of Winter and I promise that the after this I will move onto something new.
I thought I would talk about how the Aspects of Winter T-Shirt came about.
It started with the original 3 image design and I wondered if it would look good as a wall print if I added the title to it. The image was always going to be called Aspects of Winter so I started adding the text above and below the image. At that point I realised that the font was part of the art and I had to find an appropriate font to carry the message. After some experimentation and quite a few rejected fonts I decided to use Lithos Pro. It had the feel of traditionalism and impact that I thought the image needed. With the font decided on I worked on the spacing of characters and words that to me at least worked best.
So I printed out some test copies. I always recommend testing. Its easy to work purely in the digital but when something is on paper you can often get a better feel for it.
I spent an evening looking the paper and decided that for wall and card art the images would probably look better on their own. Something kept niggling at me, it felt that I was missing a point.
That was when I thought T-Shirt!
So I made a note to work it into a T-Shirt. I finished off the print versions then I focussed on the Shirt. The spacing on the images had to change for the T-Shirt form factor but that wasn’t such a bad job.
That’s it – the Aspects of Winter T-Shirt came from the a printed test copy that didn’t work out. I’m very happy I made that print.
Design Evolution in Progress
Findingviews is changing. This is the second part of my account of this change. Last time I wrote about deeper integration to Redbubble. This has now progressed some what.
I’ve decided to make the shop the home page of this site. I want to make fuller use of this shop and hiding it in the menu won’t help there. I also want to talk more about photographs and pictures I work on so putting the gallery front and centre makes a lot of sense to me. It’s not just about seeking sales. It’s also about arranging this web site in a manner that better reflects it’s job.
I’m sticking with keeping the shop powered by Redbubble. The reasons for this are very simple. Redbubble do a great job of printing and posting my work. I thought about keeping stock and selling it directly. It turned out that conflicted with my belief that we should only use what we need. Creating stock and hording it is not as environmentally as printing images and T-Shirts individually for each and every customer.
The blog itself continues to expand and is improved by the new look. Its made up of two components, thoughts about my work and comments that should be published here on Findingviews and a stream of discoveries and thoughts from Sharedcreation. Sharedcreation seeks out to discover and publicise things that people are creating and publishing. Its a look at the expansion in creativity that has been perpetuated by the Internets ability to enable low cost distribution. I believe that this is changing bout how our culture operates and also how we get our entertainment. I feel sure that this can only get more interesting.
The actual black on white design itself is meant to enable reading. I hope it achieves that.
There are other updates and changes to come. I’ll update this blog as these happen.