[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI4WPuudERo[/youtube]
Four-year-old Aelita Andre welcomed art lovers to the opening of her first solo art exhibit called The Prodigy of Color at the Agora Gallery in Manhattan on Saturday.
0
Photo Gallery of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull Volcano
Just days ago… Lightning flashes within a cloud of volcanic matter as it
rises from the erupting Eyjafjallajokull volcano
The volcano has now simmered to 80 per cent of its intensity, but scientists are warning that earth tremors could cause an even larger eruption at a neighbouring crater.
An eruption at the Katla volcano would be ten times stronger and shoot higher and larger plumes of ash into the air than its smaller neighbour.
The two volcanoes are side by side in southern Iceland, about 12 miles apart, and thought to be connected by a network of magma channels.
Katla is buried under one of Iceland’s largest glaciers, the Myrdalsjokull, which is 500m deep.
This means it has more than twice the amount of ice than the current eruption has burned through, threatening a new and possibly longer aviation standstill across Europe.
The volcano has now simmered to 80 per cent of its intensity, but scientists are warning that earth tremors could cause an even larger eruption at a neighbouring crater. An eruption at the Katla volcano would be ten times stronger and shoot higher and larger plumes of ash into the air than its smaller neighbour.
Continue reading… “Photo Gallery of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull Volcano”
0
‘Your Photo on Canvas’ Website Turns Photos into Art for Less
Search online for canvas prints — those art-gallery-like, huge renderings of your photos — and there are dozens of choices. Specialists such as Canvas on Demand, Photogonia and CanvasPop and traditional photo labs such as Mpix, Shutterfly and Snapfish all let you upload your images and put them directly onto stretched canvas. And the pricing rarely differs: 16-by-20s for about $90.
John Doe (his real name), the owner of newcomer Your Photo on Canvas, is trying to get atop the market with one of the most popular marketing concepts of all time — drastically lower prices.
His website still offers 16-by-20s at the standard $90, but he has a marketing arrangement with retail giant Costco offering the same prints via Costco’s website (and 50 California Costco retail stores) for $39.99. (The prices on other sizes are also dramatically lower than competitors’.)
Great positioning on Google (his site pops up near the top of search results), word-of-mouth and the Costco arrangement have paid off. Sales for privately held Your Photo on Canvas have exploded. In March, for instance, Doe saw $210,000 in sales, up from $9,000 at the same time last year. He’s doing an average 250 canvas prints a day.
Canvas prints are pricey, premium products, yet Doe can chalk up his good fortune to the recession. Before starting Your Photo on Canvas, Doe for 20 years made canvas reproductions of fine art for art galleries.
“But the gallery business got hit really hard,” he says. “Instead of making prints for galleries, I decided to go directly to consumers, with their photos.”
Zvi Margalit, a sales rep for a San Francisco-based tech company, ordered his first canvas print after seeing the team from Your Photo on Canvas demonstrate their offerings at his local Costco.
“The colors were so vivid and real,” he says.
He picked up a huge 60-by-40 print for about $200 and says he saved a great deal because he didn’t have to get it framed.
“I ran over to the framing store around the corner before I ordered it, just to check, and they told me it would cost $400 just to frame it,” he says. “With a canvas print, I didn’t have to spend time and money hanging a heavy picture on the wall.”
Joe Schmidt, co-founder of Raleigh, N.C.-based Canvas on Demand, one of the Web’s most popular canvas retailers, started in business seven years ago at a time when “There were just two of us out there, just us and a guy out of his garage. Those were good days.”
Still, he says that even with the increased competition, his company grew 20% in 2009 and has made more than 350,000 canvas prints to date. “We ship out thousands a day.”
As more photo enthusiasts find out about canvas prints (or “gallery wraps,” as they’re also called) sales are up not just for the specialists but for traditional photo labs, as well.
Mpix, a unit of popular photography lab Miller’s Professional Imaging, says canvas sales are up 130% this year. “The growth is unbelievable,” says Joe Dellasega, Mpix’s marketing director.
Chris Chute, an analyst at researcher IDC, says that canvas prints account for just 2.5% of the $400 million photo accessory market, but he sees that growing in coming years.
“Buying a print on canvas adds more dimensionality to the image and gives it a more artistic bent than you could ever get with a frame and glass,” he says.
“In the old days, the only way you could get a good family portrait for the wall was to hire someone to paint it. The technology makes this much more accessible.”
Cranking out canvas
It also makes it easier for mom-and-pops to enter the business. “The cost to actually produce a canvas and get started in the market is not incredibly expensive,” says Schmidt. “Anyone can get a printer and produce one nice canvas. The difference is whether you can produce a thousand in a day and have all of them be of impeccable quality.”
The crowded market for canvas prints does more harm than good, Chute says. “This is a more pricey product, and if it turns out badly, you’re less likely to order a second one.”
Doe has a 50,000-square-foot facility in Anaheim, where he does nothing but make canvas prints.
The process begins with the photo enthusiast uploading a picture to Doe’s website, where it is pulled down by a computer technician and tweaked, and gets a bar code added for delivery. It is then sent to a large industrial inkjet printer that compiles several images from different orders onto large canvas sheets. The images then are chopped up and stretched separately onto wood frames. Then the print is packed up and sent out for delivery.
Doe says he saw bigger revenue when the art business was good but that by next year, his photo business likely will surpass what he was seeing from the galleries.
Search online for canvas prints — those art-gallery-like, huge renderings of your photos — and there are dozens of choices. Specialists such as Canvas on Demand, Photogonia and CanvasPop and traditional photo labs such as Mpix, Shutterfly and Snapfish all let you upload your images and put them directly onto stretched canvas. And the pricing rarely differs: 16-by-20s for about $90.
John Doe (his real name), the owner of newcomer Your Photo on Canvas, is trying to get atop the market with one of the most popular marketing concepts of all time — drastically lower prices.
Continue reading… “‘Your Photo on Canvas’ Website Turns Photos into Art for Less”
0
Earthquake in Tibet – Amazing Photo Gallery
Earthquake survivors cook on a makeshift stove in front of their demolished homes
On April 14th, residents of China’s remote Yushu County, located on the Tibetan plateau, were awoken by a magnitude 6.9 earthquake. In the sparsely populated villages and the larger town of Gyegu, thousands of wood-earth buildings collapsed and many larger structured heavily damaged or destroyed. The region is difficult to reach for the response teams of the Chinese government outside aid groups – lying at an elevation of 3,700m (12,000 ft) and connected by few roads, most of which were damaged in the quake. Chinese state media now says the death toll has risen to 1,144. Rescuers continue to search for survivors as homeless residents work to recover what they can and set up shelter from the freezing overnight temperatures. (35 photos)
Continue reading… “Earthquake in Tibet – Amazing Photo Gallery”
0
Star Wars Religious Art
Madonna Leia and Baby Yoda by Sylver on Worth1000
Star Wars is a religious experience for many of us, whether or not we actually feel the Force. But some artists take it even further, depicting Star Wars characters as saints, martyrs and religious icons. (Pics)
Continue reading… “Star Wars Religious Art”
0
Autonomous Living Unit
Autonomous Living Unit
Designer Eduardo McIntosh has proposed a way of putting all the functions of a home into a single chair. (Pics)
Continue reading… “Autonomous Living Unit”
0
Artist Stelarc’s Extra Ear Project At The Exit Art Gallery
Extra Ear Project
Luckily for us, the Australian performance artist known as Stelarc, formerly Stelios Arcadiou, is not prone to sensationalism. He only wants to transform his body into a portal on the internet. Which is why visitors to Exit Art, a gallery in Midtown Manhattan, are being treated to a video of Stelarc’s left arm being cut up like a rare tenderloin to implant what will eventually be a Bluetooth-enabled artificial ear.
Continue reading… “Artist Stelarc’s Extra Ear Project At The Exit Art Gallery”
0
Retired Subway Cars Used For London Artists
Young London artists looking for cheap studio space in an expensive city are turning their eyes toward subway cars – though those eyes would be looking up, not down. That’s because these retired subway cars are actually on top of a warehouse-turned-art-gallery in Shoreditch, London, where they offer a sparse, multi-purpose space for artists who pay an oh-so-cheap $30 a month. Auro Foxcroft, the mind behind Village Underground, even got a sweet deal on the cars: £800 for four of them.
Continue reading… “Retired Subway Cars Used For London Artists”
0
Think Like A Genius 2.0: Software That Let’s Kids Build Anything They Can Imagine
Featured Invention at the Colorado Inventor Showcase
Think Like a Genius is a dynamic software program that enables kids of all ages to build 3D virtual worlds that are fun, interactive and inspiring.
0
The Remarkable Breastfeeding Gallery
Breastfeeding creates a “forever bond” between a mother and her child
Few things are as beautiful as a woman breastfeeding her child. The following gallery is intended to be a celebration of the remarkable grace and poise that women today bring into the world, and the legacy they leave with their offspring. (Pics)
Continue reading… “The Remarkable Breastfeeding Gallery”
0
The Jelly Box: Workspace For The 21st Century
Ever think about what it would be like to see the world from inside a Jell-O mold? Looking like a Jell-O mold, but calling itself the Jelly Box, this new workspace is now on display at the Truman Brewery during London 2008 Design Week. This clever design by architect David Hingamp of the London firm Archic, has just been named runner up in the 2008 Urbantine Project.
Continue reading… “The Jelly Box: Workspace For The 21st Century”
0
Sound Art By Kim Kuchul
The work of Kim Kichul is something that delves very deep in to both the scientific world as well as the spiritual world. It is one of the most amazing works of abstract art which Kim puts in the form of a definite science and uses to try and find a spiritual metaphor to the physical world. In its amalgamation of the three most different subjects of study and crafting them in a fashion where the compliment and enhance one another is a the work of a master who wishes not only to take his art to a new level but to find answers to question that have eluded man forever. Kim’s attempt to put Sound in to a visual form and his idea that vision and sound are not as dissimilar as we make them out to be, is simply awesome!
Continue reading… “Sound Art By Kim Kuchul”
0
