Art Inspiration: bad photographs

I’ve been working on an art project for a friend over the past couple of days. I like the project so much I wanted to do a little something of my own. Below is a picture I took the day we got our second dog, Rawley (a cairn terrier, like Toto from the Wizard of Oz). While I like that the dogs are facing each other in profile, the lighting is strange, there are toys around them, and you can’t really see Rawley’s face. It’s a bit of a mess.

Not great photo of the day we got Rawley

But, it inspired me to make a different version of it.

I started out by making this (using Adobe Illustrator, but you could use Paint or any number of free drawing programs):

Then I duplicated and reflected it so I ended up with two. Since Rawley (dark gray) was on the left in the picture I decided to keep it that way. My plan is to have 1 dog per picture frame with the frames next to one another (or maybe with some distance, like on opposite nightstands). I’ve been debating between having them outlined (option A) or not (option B), or some combination of the two.

{Option A}

{Option B}

Just to try it out, I printed out the image on the left in Option B (Rawley, no outline) and the image on the right in Option A (Baxter, no outline) using my basic printer, stuck them in frames, and voila!

P.S. If there are any Westie, Cairn or Scottie lovers out there, leave your email in the comments and I will happily send you the file so you can have your own!

UPDATE:

Dictionary art

http://www.flor.com/so-happy-together-rug-set-black-3x5.html#

This image went into my artwork inspiration file from the moment I first saw it in the FLOR catalog. It’s cool, unusual, wordy, and most importantly (since I like to make all of the artwork in my apt) DIY! The question is, what section of the dictionary to choose? Quite literally, you get to choose the meaning of your art.

The brilliant set decorator at FLOR (seriously, you do a great job making me want almost everything in the catalog) chose to go with “betray” as the central word. For my own apt I’m thinking something I bit happier.

Alternative ideas: use a thesaurus, foreign dictionary, design or fashion encyclopedia.

I’ll post my finished product when I decide what words to use. In the meantime, here are a few shots from my very old thesaurus to give you some idea of where I’m leaning.