Sale on canvas prints! Use code ABCXYZ at checkout for a special discount!

A Cup of Art

Blogs: #7 of 40

Previous Next View All

I'm still on holiday vacation from art but as the new year approaches it'll be back to the drawing board soon enough. Meanwhile I ponder art. I noticed on this website that I can have a coffee cup with my art on it. So I looked at my various paintings on a cup to see what they would look like. It dawned on me that many of my paintings don't work well with a cup and were never created to do so and on the other hand, a few did work. This is where graphic design comes into play. If I knew ahead of time my art will go on a cup, of course I would make it work. I would look at the shape of the area that needs to be filled and design to work in that shape. The art has to make sense with a cup as well, perhaps making the image more simple to grasp. It could even boil down to almost a logo like image if I really wanted a simple impression of art.

Many ways to create art for the cup but still the art is dictated by the cup. Graphic Design vs Art. The same, yet different. I once heard a well known artist make a comment about a budding art student's work. He said "That's a graphic design not a painting." Back then it was kind of a puzzling statement to me because I thought graphic design and art go hand in hand. Now that statement makes much more sense to me. Graphic design is not any better or worse than traditional art and the two are not exclusive to each other. There is design in art, there is art in design.

The bottom line is that if I want a cup of my art, it'll be much better if I designed the art for the cup from the beginning. It may not be a painting for art's sake. But it might expand my horizons. Plus I'll have something to put my coffee in... So maybe that's one of the many possibilities for 2017, make a cup of art.