Tuesday, June 6, 2017

With a photo snap the world's great paintings can become unique art for your home

This painting is in the British Museum and is pretty unusual.
    If you would like to have original prints and artwork for your home at a really cheap price, you might be interested in my recent experiment, which I think worked out great.
    While visiting the British Museum a few months ago I snapped a photo of a large painting drawn on the occasion of the coronation of Ethiopian Emporor Haile Selassie in 1930. I was planning to try to make a copy of the painting, so I made a point of trying to get a straight and level shot.
    Museums are full of really neat paintings, and while the museums might try to claim reproduction rights to these, the fact is that the museums have no rights at all if the paintings are out of copyright -- the older paintings are in the public domain. In the case of the Ethiopian painting, there was no copyright law in Ethiopia at the time it was created, but even so, under current Ethiopian law any copyright would have expired after 50 years as it is an anonymous work.
    A few weeks ago I got around to doing some photo editing. I decided to have the painting reprinted on a 16x20 canvas from Wal-Mart, as the cost was only $30. That meant I had to chop off the two side panels, which showed various animals living peacefully ever after, keeping just the main section. I had never used the “skew” function of Photoshop, but this is important, as it will help make your painting into a perfect “square” or “rectangle,” essentially removing any distance distortion that was created from your camera angle.
    After a bit of tinkering, I put the print on a Wal-Mart canvas. I actually had to “undersize” the print by about five percent, leaving a white border all the way around it, as this ended up being cut off; if you don't do this, you will lose part of your picture. With luck and a bit of trial and error, I was able to get the little rope border on the painting to appear on the side of the canvas, at the very edge of the frame, which I think looks neat.
Rope border worked perfectly
    I made this painting for my son, Ash, to put in his dorm room. Daughter Lucy has demanded one of her own. I am going to experiment with some other companies that do canvas prints, and perhaps go ahead and pay up to get a larger version that will include the chopped off side panels.
    In addition to creating unique art for personal use, I would think one could make a little extra money by finding neat paintings and later reproducing them on canvas. Some people call this cultural appropriation, which is a great thing to do because it makes liberals mad, so have fun with art!

The final product, perfect for home or dorm room

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