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دسته: سازهها
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The Strategy of Art
The Strategy of Art If you can find a job you
enjoy, you’ll never work a day in your life. I’m not sure who first said that,
but I followed that advice and became an artist expecting that my days would be
filled with glitter and paint, evenings would be spent nibbling on canapes at
my next art exhibition and I would be able to wear paint-stained clothes in
public and drive around in a sleek Italian sports car.At no point did anyone ever
suggest that it might actually be hard work, nor that I would end up driving
around in a cute little yellow Fiat 500.To be fair, I did manage to
fulfil the dream of owning a sports car, although it was a British Jaguar
rather than some sleek Italian number. The Fiat 500 though had been on the
bucket list for a while, and I wanted to become a lot more environmentally
friendly, and in part, because art supplies have become exponentially more
expensive and my keen to be green attitude meant there would be more cash
available to import Japanese paintbrushes. I never questioned if they were
arriving by air.Nor did anyone mention that
mostly, I would need to be concerned about things like sales funnels or
distributed growth strategies, which to be totally honest, I’m still not
convinced is an actual thing. More recently there’s so much currency given to
being ‘agile’, a business buzzword that as far as I can tell, means that you make
it up as you go along. Not that there is anything wrong in making it up as you
go along, I’m convinced that’s exactly how you innovate, it’s certainly how you
learn, it’s also how you make mistakes which are also great and essential
lessons to learn.Whenever I write an article
about starting out in the art business I always mention having a strategy that
covers both marketing and sales, and I have often talked about having a content
strategy for the works that you create and of course, the content you put out
on social media. That’s all well and good but what I don’t usually expand on in
too much depth is what you really need to focus on when writing those
strategies.This week, we’re going to take
a dive into the world of creating a strategy to build your art business on, and
I will provide a few ideas that you might not have thought about but might be
important. They’re certainly things that have helped me over my increasingly
long career.
80s Pop Music Culture by Mark Taylor When I first started out as an
independent artist there was no such thing as the internet, or at least the
internet that we know today. Hey, we had bulletin boards and a dial-up modem
that the phone needed to be placed on top of. If you were born in the age of
anything more recent, you most likely have zero idea what I’m even talking
about, just know that life was hard.If you needed to find anything
out about running a business it usually involved some insane amount of effort,
a few books, and some good luck. It’s a little easier today in one respect,
almost everything you need to learn can be found online, but to some extent
running a business has also become much more complicated than it once was. There’s
a heap more distraction for a start.In the art world of the past,
there was a structure that an artist would generally follow. You would go to
art school, make contacts, work your way up through the gallery system and then
hopefully at the end of it, you might have sold some work. There was though,
never a guarantee despite being told that was the only way.It was a well-trodden, almost
linear path that was more or less easily understood, even if it was next to a
nightmare to navigate or even get a foothold into at times. Today, that
structure has been eroded away, gone are the gatekeepers to the art world that
once stood outside the gallery doors. Today
it’s entirely possible to have a successful career in the creative sector
without ever having stepped into a gallery at all.Today’s relatively easy access
to the art world doesn’t have anywhere near the same structure. Sure, there are
still, gallery routes that artists can follow, but you now also have the option
of going it alone or working in collaboration, assuming you can find someone
who is willing to collaborate and understands that collaboration is a two way
thing, but that’s another blog entirely. The downside is that you then have to
also, do the job that the galleries once did, and that means that you need to
learn the art of the business of art, rather than just the art of creating
great art.
Tools of the Trade – by Mark Taylor and now available in my store! Unfortunately, there is no
simple shortcut that allows you to only ever focus on creating art if you want
any of that art to find a paying wall to hang itself on. It takes effort, an
effort that can feel herculean at times, and I think it’s fair to say that
almost every artist who has chosen this route in the history of ever has found
out that at times, going it alone in the art world can feel incredibly daunting,
even lonely, and it most certainly identifies and exposes your vulnerable side
like no other business I know.That daunting feeling is a
difficult one to overcome. An artist today has to work in so many different
areas than they did at any time before. Back in the days of showing my work in
a gallery, I had no idea about any of the business buzzwords that we hear so
much about today, it was simply a case of knuckling down and doing your best
and following the galleries lead, it was still incredibly hard though. I don’t
think I even came across terms such as progressively disintermediating
functionalized channels until a few years ago and to this day, I still have
little idea about what it really means. For all, I know it could be a made-up
business buzz phrase designed to put us off even trying.One thing I absolutely do know
though, is that the daunting feeling can be overcome and the business side of
things can start to become second nature, so long as you have the absolute
basics in place from the off.And that’s the rub with so
many of the new artists I come across who are just thinking about stepping out
onto the creative path as a professional artist. Knowing exactly what the
basics of running an art business are, isn’t a topic generally covered in any
meaningful depth in many academic art studies, that’s if the subject of
business is even included at all.My advice to anyone thinking
of formally studying art is to double up on the learning and take an academic
program in business too and maybe even do this first. For those who are going
down the self-taught route, it matters
not where or how you learn, that’s another upside that has come from the
erosion of old school ways of doing things, but my advice is the same. Spend as
much time learning about business as you spend learning about creating great
art and then some more if you can.Learning about the business of
art is more critical than ever before. There has been an explosive growth in
technology over the past eighteen months and that growth has fractured an
already outdated art world even more. It’s a sector that has become much more
destabilised due to the pandemic, and as a result, the way we now have to work
has changed almost beyond recognition.
Ascend – one of a number of Space inspired artworks in my new collection – Space and Beyond! That might sound as if a
career in the art world should be even more daunting than before, and it can be
if you don’t have a plan that builds the foundations on which you can build a
successful career, one step at a time. Given that the art world now looks and
functions very differently to the art world we all knew just a little under two
years ago, having a strategy that factors in those new changes and challenges makes
sense, even for artists who have been in the business for a while. Things have
changed, it might be time to change your forward strategy a little to take into
account what might be around the corner and of course to take into account the
massive changes we have been seeing over the course of the pandemic.The single most critical
element when writing any strategy, be it for marketing, sales, content,
whatever is to avoid noise. It’s essential that the foundations are well built
and robust enough for you to build a business in a world that has changed,
in some cases, almost beyond recognition when compared to the same business a
couple of years ago.Noise has no place in an
artists strategy, yet I see it far too often, and I see the impending
frustration emerges when the art fails to go out of the door. Whenever I work
with new artists, I’m often struck at just how hard they work and by how much
currency they give to new trends.Some trends are worthy pursuits,
it’s great to be right in at the start of something, but the fact that a trend
is a trend implies that you wouldn’t be the first to do it and that
automatically puts you in at least second place. You need to spot the next
trend way before it’s a trend and that my friends ain’t exactly easy.One of the more recent trends
that we have all seen is a classic example of noise. The noise in question is
around the use of non-fungible tokens or NFTs. No doubt a trend spurred on by recent NFT
sales that have grabbed headlines in mainstream media around the world. Inevitably,
after about ten minutes of the first headline to announce that millions had
been paid for artwork through an NFT, artists were offering work for sale
through NFTs and perhaps missing the point a little that NFTs aren’t something
that only takes five minutes to master and slightly less to set up.NFTs aren’t new. A few years
ago I wrote an article asking whether artists were ready for bitcoin,
blockchain, and cryptocurrency in the art world. This was something that I had
been dabbling in at that point for a while, more out of interest than it being
written in any kind of master plan. It wasn’t an easy process back then and
it’s still as complex and costly to do it today. Another misconception that
seems to influence a lot of strategies is that NFTs are some kind of golden
panacea to being discovered, they’re not.NFTs won’t make your art
either more valuable or more desirable, indeed, they might even put a lot if
regular buyers off. If you are totally unprepared for NFT then it’s better to
leave that as a strategy for later, in the meantime, it’s totally fine to
accept the currency of RFM, or real freakin money, just like millions upon
millions of artists have done and continue to do every day.There is a place for NFTs, and
they will continue to be prevalent for a while, although my guess is that at
some point the world will change. Indeed, they can provide the provenance for
digital works that have been impossible to supply in any other way. But their
prominence could be undermined if some of the financial institutions, countries
and governments who are generally doing their best to make them less relevant
get their way.Personally, I can see some
form of the blunt instrument called regulation being imposed on them, not least
because the other side of cryptocurrency has both uses in illegal activity
and a massive negative impact on the environment.
Obsolescence by Mark Taylor – available in my store – digitally hand-painted recreations of vintage technology that was designed to become obsolete! The point is, that many trends
are generally noise and they can hamper whatever strategy you currently have,
especially if you’re not well prepared. Once those foundations of a strategy
are built, that’s the time when you can begin to lay the bricks, and then in
time, you might want to add the roof and a few essential extras. You don’t have
to do it all today, you don’t even have to do it all tomorrow, art isn’t a
race, it’s way beyond even a marathon, it’s an entire career that can last a
lifetime so you need a strategy that evolves and flexes throughout that
lifetime.Let’s address that one thing
we all know but prefer to never really talk about. Writing down strategies and
plans is plain and simply, boring. I know, and it’s not lost on me that the
minute anyone sits down with the good intention to knuckle down and strategize,
that’s when life 1.0 gets in the way, or oh shiny happens, or another
commission comes in. The thing is that you are the one who knows where you want
to go with your art business so it makes sense that there is only you who can
map it out. There are no templates, art is the least cookie-cutter type
business to be involved in, your strategy has to be as unique as your art, and
as unique as the people you want to buy your work.Once you begin to recognise
that you don’t have to fall in with every trend or become distracted with every
little noise, or get confused by the obscurity of business terminology, you can
begin to focus on the basics.If you were to ask a business
guru, and that’s definitely not me, they would tell you that a well-developed
marketing strategy will help you realise your goals and focus on what you need
to be doing to reach your target market. In my experience, which to be fair
over the years has often drifted between try it and see and a laser-like focus has proven to me that it’s the time when I’m least lazy about doing the
business-critical things is when I tend to get the majority of sales. Equally,
it’s not always possible to be 100% focussed on the business side of things
when you also have to be 100% focussed on creating the art at the same time.
Storage Wars by Mark Taylor – one of my latest creations – all drawn by hand using a digital medium and saved on, you guessed, a drive that isn’t depicted here! At its most basic, a strategy
is something that provides you with some direction that makes it less easy to
be lazy, we’re human and by default, we’re tuned to seek out the shortcut. The
strategy has to identify the core principles and direction that your business
needs to take, in a way that you can follow. It has to outline what your
business is, what your aims are, what your product and/or service is. Knowing
that should give you the confidence to know the value and purpose of your
business, and identify your place within the industry. Those really are
critical things to know and understand. Break it down to its most basic level
and it becomes exponentially easier to get to grips with.- The strategy should identify
what you and your work are about. - The strategy should explain
how your artwork fits into the market – do you have a theme, a specific medium,
genre. - Your strategy identifies the
people you are trying to reach with your work. - A good strategy sets out the
tactics that you will use to reach those people. - A strategy has to define your
business goals and it calls for a need to be totally honest with yourself as
to why you are in the business you are in and what you really want out of the
business that you have created.
There is no right and wrong
answer to this last point, if your primary motivation is to produce great art,
that’s awesome. If your primary motivation is to make a living wage, that’s
completely fine too. If it’s to make a living while creating great art, that’s
perfect, but never confuse why you are doing what you are doing.If you’re serious about being
in the professional art creating business, you kind of have to forget being a
fragile genius who thinks that art and money have no place in the same sentence.
If that were the case then art supplies would be free and the bills would never
get paid. Never think that you have to compromise making a living to create
great art, the myth of a starving artist is as real today as it was in the
eighteenth century, and it really is just that, a myth that belongs in some
romanticised period novel.
Hot Flamingo by Mark Taylor – Oh those colours just pop! A quick point to note here is
that the starving artist myth was at one time more likely to be applied to an
artist who had only one, or a small number of assistants, it had very little if
anything to do with actually starving. The media probably romanticised the myth
more than the art world did. Throughout art history, art has attracted artists
from all kinds of backgrounds and incomes and whilst many historically
successful artists weren’t necessarily wealthy, not many of them were actually
starving either.The starving artist label has
prevailed throughout art history, and to some extent, we’ve been forever led to
believe that art that is functional or commercial has no legitimate place and
that an artist must suffer to produce great work. Nope, you don’t have to
suffer to produce great work at all. In
fact, you can enjoy creating art, even if it is functional or commercial. Being
an artist shouldn’t be about surviving, it should be about thriving and having
a conversation with the world.You really do have a choice,
you can hang around in the hope of being discovered and be the one in however
many hundreds of thousands of artists who manage to find success this way, or
you can do what every other successful artist is doing right now, and that’s to
build a business around your work. Forget the romantic and noble notion of
working in a darkened room, for the majority of working artists who are making
it already, they tend to have the lights well and truly on.I do get it, there’s a fear
that by somehow commercialising our talent we will lose the purity of our art,
and while that can be a legitimate concern for some, it’s not a rational way of
thinking about how you should create. That is something at the very core of
creating a strategy and I sometimes wonder if that is something that puts
artists off creating one. If you formulate any strategy with a view that
devalues your talent and your work from the start, that really won’t be a very
good business or marketing strategy to move forward with and you will forever
be chasing the proverbial tail.Once you have this nailed down
you can then think about a marketing strategy, something that can only be
defined by the goals that you set yourself through your business strategy. Your
marketing strategy relies on having a strong symbiotic relationship with your
business goals, but they’re not the same.
Toucan Play This Game by Mark Taylor – Available in my store! Now we understand that there’s
a need to define your business goals so that you can focus on developing your
marketing strategy, we now have the basic foundations on which you can build
upwards and outwards. The marketing strategy differs from the business strategy
in that this is the plan that will lay out the roadmap of how to get your art
hanging on the walls of other peoples homes.That might mean defining how
you plan to increase the size of your market, or how you develop the market to
sell your work to other people who don’t already buy from you. These don’t have
to be overnight strategies, I don’t think that would even be possible in the
art world unless you already have the pedigree of say, Matisse or Banksy. Van
Gogh even found that his pedigree needed some development even after his death.
I think that in most cases, the art will always need a strategy that outlasts
you.Marketing strategies and by default,
the business strategy, should constantly evolve and they should remain aligned.
If you update one you need to update the other, at a minimum you should be
rewriting strategies year on year or whenever you notice a change in the market.
What happens if your next-door
neighbour starts selling the same work as you and starts selling it in the same
space, what happens if you suddenly find that your current market has moved on
to something else? They can and they do, and whilst these things might sound
extreme, this is what happens in any business.Your market today is never
guaranteed to be your market tomorrow, and I think that’s a good thing. I would
think it would be really hard work to keep the same market engaged forever
purely in terms of what you would need to create to keep them engaged. There’s
another train of thought in that you should at some point want to change the market
of your own volition. If your current market is only buying one hundred buck
prints, you might want to find the market that wants to buy the two hundred
buck print or the five thousand buck original.Much of your marketing
strategy can be completed by thinking about the reasons you create what you
create and who you are creating it for. I have previously said that if you
haven’t currently got vast amounts of customer profile information it’s a
useful exercise to set out on paper, the exact type of person you think you are
creating for. That will at least get you a customer profile to build on, and
once you have that fleshed out with some reasonably basic information, you can
then think about how you might attract a different audience, perhaps a younger
or older generation or a generation with a little more disposable income.
Eat Me by Mark Taylor – from a commissioned series and available in my store! Those strategies might include
changing how you run your social media, creating a presence on other platforms,
or getting out and about in your own local community. In fact, any strategy
that fails to include drawing in the power of your local community is missing
something that has the potential to significantly make selling easier down the
line. For me, creating a community strategy and raising my local profile by
becoming involved in the community has opened more opportunities than any
number of previous exhibitions.If you ask some of those
business gurus I mentioned earlier, I think many of them would say that any
strategy needs to be smart. Smart being the acronym for specific, measurable,
achievable, relevant and timely. I’m personally not a fan of setting targets,
especially SMART targets, they don’t necessarily have a perfect fit with the
art world, they’re cliched and often destructive and more than that, they’re
outdated.Instead, forget the acronyms.
Whatever you do has to be purposeful, it has to move your business forward, and
any goals that you set for yourself should be set with affirmative action,
and then rinse and repeat over and over, tracking your progress so you can see
how far you have developed, and this doesn’t have to be complicated.What it comes down to is
knowing whether something needs to be done, did your last work land exactly
where you thought it would, and if it didn’t, identifying what didn’t work and
taking an affirmative action to put it right. Remember, this really doesn’t
have to be complicated, if you can create something that is really easy to
follow you will be more likely to continue following it. It really is as simple as that.
Majestic Mushroom by Mark Taylor – available in my store from a commissioned series of work! If you can align the stars
that are the business strategy and the marketing strategy, you then have the
foundations that will begin to solidify the rest of your business.A marketing strategy is
essential if you plan to do things like running online advertising, and that’s
something that you should never even contemplate attempting without having any
kind of strategy in place at all. The glossy invites luring you into spending a
few dollars a day on clicks isn’t necessarily a worthy strategy to follow,
especially if you have no idea about who you need to target to get the best
bang for your buck. Coupled with all of the new privacy restrictions
implemented by tech giants such as Apple, it’s even more vital that you know as
much as you can know about who your market is before you spend anything on ads.
Out of all of the artists I
know who have travelled down this rabbit hole without having the information
groundwork completed beforehand, only those who have taken the time to
understand who they need to reach through advertising has had any real success.
Your strategies will inform everything
that you do. If you haven’t strategized something beforehand, there’s little
point in jumping in with both feet. Ad spends are a great example of absolutely
needing some level of planning to be in place, not least when it comes to
funding the spend.A strategy should provide the
details around funding a campaign and perhaps even more critical, it should
outline the tactics that you will engage throughout the campaign. Without these
in place, you’re more likely to misread the market and ultimately you could end
up paying even more for your campaign trying to salvage it.Many business owners representing
all kinds of businesses get online ad-spend completely wrong through a lack of
having a strategy in place that identifies the target audience, only to find
that the spend doesn’t land anywhere near who they need to reach.
Miami Nights by Mark Taylor – Each piece is hand-drawn and represents an original work in itself! Figuring out the question of who buys your
art is easy. At least it is when people are buying your art. If they’re not, it
becomes a tad more challenging and can even feel impossible. If you’re starting
from scratch and don’t have a consistent sales record you will need to carry
out some market research, and this shouldn’t be limited to online research.The art world isn’t known for
its transparency. Googling another artists sales history or the type of buyer
who buys their work isn’t a guarantee that you will find any level of useful
data to suggest that you should go after the same or similar clients. There’s never
a guarantee with online research that the information you find is anything like
the truth. Sure, the internet will play a role in your market research but
physically getting out and about and talking to real people is going to bear
more fruit.What you need to figure out is
who are you creating your art for? Once you work that out you can then identify
the potential size of the market, its potential to grow, demographics such as
age, income levels, gender, and perhaps just as importantly, the markets social
trends. Are the people you identify on Facebook or Twitter, perhaps they don’t do
social media at all. That’s the kind of information that can turn a potential
sale into a guaranteed sale if you are targeting the very people you know will be
more likely to buy your work.That might sound obvious,
except in the art world, it’s not. Artists who have carried out any level of market
research tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Art doesn’t always fail
to sell because it’s bad, it usually fails to sell because the marketing isn’t
reaching the right audience. The people
who are more likely to buy your art just have no idea that you are there.Of course, there will be other
reasons why work doesn’t sell. Just last week I noticed a relative newcomer to
the art world marketing a thousand dollar print, with no provenance, little
experience, and clearly little idea that the platform they were selling the
work on wasn’t suited to that type of work or that kind of price level.That’s not to say that a thousand
dollars for your first work is unobtainable, it is, but only if someone with a
thousand dollars is looking at it and wants to buy it. The thing is, the work
was pretty good, but on that particular platform it wasn’t close to a thousand
dollars kind of good because it was the single most expensive print on the
platform by around $900!
Together In Electric Dreams by Mark Taylor – available now! Once you have identified the market,
figured out where they hang out, and begun the process of connecting with them,
that’s the point when you can begin to profile your ideal customer. Profiling
will reveal the customers buying patterns, do they only buy occasionally or are
they regularly purchasing work, and more importantly, what is it that they’re
buying and when?When the profile of your audience
changes, that’s the trigger point to change the strategy, give it a fresh coat
of thinking and a fresh coat of research. Again, that’s something that is often
missed, a strategy should live, evolve, and grow along with your business and
any changing trends.It’s not just about your own client
base though, keeping an eye on the market to figure out what’s working for other
artists who sell similar works is also just as critical. I’m reluctant to say
that any other artist is competition, for me, other artists are my inspiration,
but that’s not to say that you can’t learn from how other artists are using
marketing to attract their own buyers, sometimes you just need a little
inspiration to think outside of the proverbial box.Having said that, if the
market of another artist is exactly the same as yours, you do have to identify
what makes you the better choice and then you have to somehow convey that
message to your buyers. It might be that you offer a much more personal
service or your products are created on better quality materials, equally your
products might be of a lower quality, and you need to consider whether the
buyers are indeed even the same at all, it’s not always obvious.You can begin to use this
information to work out what sets your business apart from everyone else’s.
This will improve your performance, improve your offer, and give you an opportunity
to review things like your pricing strategy, or marketing tactics, and even
your supply chain. A good example of this would be if your market shifted to
become much more environmentally friendly. Your current supply chain might not
be as environmentally sustainable as another artist and that could make a difference
in a client deciding to buy or walk on by.Knowing the audience allows you
to begin to cater exactly to their needs, you no longer have the tedious and
complex job of trying to market to anyone and everyone which is in itself a
really hard way to run any business. By taking the time to strategize and work
out your audience you can focus on the product because you’re being smarter
about the strategy. That really is the Holy Grail for artists, every artist I
have ever met would give up their best paint brush to spend more time arting
than marketing.It’s really important to test
out any new ideas first too rather than jump in with both feet from the off.
Remember when I talked about avoiding the distraction of noise earlier, it
becomes way too easy to fall into those distractions when things begin to go
well so you really do have to be mindful and remain both focussed and grounded.
You have to strive to become the signal that is so much louder than the noise.
Turn it Up by Mark Taylor – available in my store now! You should absolutely get this on an acrylic block and illuminate it from behind, it looks super-80s-awesome! Lastly, you absolutely have to
resist the romantic notion that your art practice isn’t a business unless it
really is a hobby, and if it is, that’s absolutely okay too but don’t get
concerned about not selling art if that’s the case. Art is too often seen as an
incredibly vulnerable undertaking that is fragile and can be disturbed or even
sullied by the concept of commercialising it.With art, you can’t wait until
the time is right, it never will be, and you can’t afford to hang around in the
belief that inspiration for your next masterpiece is just around the corner.
You have to resist anything that stops you pushing forward with your creations,
and just as importantly, selling the work that will fund the next piece. It’s
only when you are known by someone that you will be discovered and you’re more
likely to be known by someone when that someone can see that you are striving
to be prolific, and to an extent in the art world, it’s fair to also say being profitable. Sounds cold, that’s a reality though!You absolutely can’t be
fragile or lazy when it comes to creating art. If you have a belief and a deep
passion for something, anything, it doesn’t even have to be art, there will
forever be competing factors that will work to stop you pushing forward. If you
park your truck in that space there will always be competing excuses that stop
you from realising your full potential. Excuses
can become comfort blankets that you hold on to so tightly that you never take
the leap over the edge and you never take the leap of making a firm plan. We’ve all been there!
Warp Speed by Mark Taylor Art is hard work, but it’s not
the only work of an artist. Every successful artist before and after you will
have reached out and engaged with their tribe. They will have done the
marketing thing, even if they now have a team of people who do it for them.The one’s who got discovered
will have initially found that someone who noticed them and they will have
realised that confirmation of talent doesn’t come solely through sales, they will
have found validation in other ways long before they even sold a work.Your art is the conversation
that you have with the world, so make it count, but try not to get too
distracted with all that noise on the way. You totally have this. Anyone who
wants to be an artist as much as you do has the potential to become a great
artist, but you really do have to remember that resisting what needs to be done
in favour of only ever taking the creative path isn’t going to make the journey
any easier.Before I go for this week,
there is one very simple thing that has proven to me time and time again that
the business of art doesn’t have to become messy and chaotic. That simple thing
is to make sure that you get the things that you least like doing out of the
way early on. Even get some simple things out of the way early too in order to
give you the confidence to tackle something more challenging. The more early
wins you get, the more willing your mind will be to accept that the business of
art is essential, even critical to your success. Most of all, have a plan, define your own
space, define your own style, and there will come a time when even the business
of art will become fun.
The Night Garden by Mark Taylor – now available in my In the Night Garden Collection! If you have been wondering
where I have been for the past month or so, I have been inundated with new
commissions, building out my new retro-inspired collections and I took on
another major project – more on that in the weeks ahead! You can see some of my latest releases throughout this article!I have plenty of new articles
lined up, we’ll be deep-diving into some of my processes in creating art, including
my work on vintage computers to create authentic 8 and 16-bit artwork! A niche
that hasn’t gone away for more than thirty years of creating the art for a
community that keeps vintage computing alive, and I will be exploring the art
of the artist side hustle!As always, stay safe, stay
well, and happy creating!About Mark…
I am an artist and blogger and
live in Staffordshire, England. I began creating digital art in 1980, moving on
to coding 8-bit computer games and producing graphics for early computers. To
this day I am still involved in the retro and vintage computer industry creating
8-bit and retro-inspired works along with my more traditional landscapes, book cover
and box art designs.You can purchase my art
through my Fine Art America store or my Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.com and
you can purchase my new works, special and limited editions directly. You can
also view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.com Or you can reach out directly
if you need a digital commission or rights-cleared work for your next TV or
film production – digital files can be with you within minutes when you need work on set!If you are on Facebook, you
can give me a follow right here, https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia
You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia - The strategy should identify
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The Cold Art of the Side Hustle for Artists
The Cold Art of the Side Hustle for Artists When it comes to writing new
articles I have a process that I have to follow. It usually involves late
nights, early mornings, lots of coffee, and copious amounts of research because
I want every reader of my site to go away with the best information and to come
back next week when they’re ready for more.So that’s exactly what I did
when I began preparing this article, and oh my life, did my eyes get opened!
This week we will be looking at the side hustle, the sideline that an artist
can use to pay the bills in between major works and commissions, or at least
that’s the theory. Sometimes, the side hustle can be a huge side hassle that
can pull you as far away from your art as possible.So, in my quite literally,
weeks of undertaking research to figure out what kind of side hustle might bear
more low-hanging fruit, I discovered that hundreds of websites had already
covered the subject. I distinctly remember thinking that my work here has
already been done and I would need to select the next subject on my list of
must-write articles, or at least that was until I read them.The thing is, I have
absolutely no idea who even wrote some of what has been written on some of
these websites purporting to have the insight that would point an artist towards
a side hustle that would complement their art practice, because in no way, in
any universe, would less than a tenth of what’s been written and described as a
fruitful side-hustle complement your art practice or pay any bills, not even
your Netflix subscription. And besides, none of the themes was exactly what you might call easy side
hustles either.Want to know what most of
these websites thought the highest paying side hustle would be for a visual
artist? YouTube. Apparently, you can earn mega-dollars just by being you in
front of a camera and uploading the finished video to the Tube of You. Yep, no
you can’t. Well, you can, eventually, you know, when you have as many viewers
as the Pew di Pie character, but that’s never going to happen with visual art
unless you are already established or your name is Banksy.Sadly, that’s the cold reality
of YouTube, there’s just so much competition for the same eyes and there are so
many artists, all vying for the same viewers. So, unless your production
quality is on a par with those who are getting the big views and your content
is different enough to stand out, YouTube will be a long grind that certainly
isn’t as easy as all of these websites will have you think.
Oh My Gogh Art Supplies by Mark Taylor – art supplies can be a lucrative side hustle for artists too! Another one that appears on
the many lists that promise your days of scratching a living will be over, is
the tip that I’m sure no artist in the history of artists has ever considered.
There’s a hint of sarcasm there, any working artist will be all too familiar
with the grind but the tip in question here is to sell your creativity through
services such as Fiverr and Upwork. At their core, these services pit creatives,
and in fact, pretty much anyone with a pair of hands and a pulse, together with
the intention of offering cheap services that can be ordered by anyone with a
need for a pair of hands to create or do something. They’re popular with
providing the skills to produce things like logos, where the commissioner wants
something as quickly as possible usually for the least amount of money.To be fair, there are some extremely
talented folk on these services but the way that the services are structured
lends itself to creating an almost disposable talent pool that can be picked up
and put down at will, and the competition and often low-cost services offered
do no one any favours as it devalues the work being done.Sure, there will be a few who
manage to scrape a living wage creating on these services, but these tend to be
the exception rather than the rule. Mostly, the gigs provide fillers in between
major projects and while they’re especially useful if you don’t already have a
commercial portfolio and need to quickly build one, let’s not think for a
moment that these gigs will be any easier than anything else and, neither will
they necessarily bear enough financial fruit for you to forge a decent living
on.
The 80s Newsagent by Mark Taylor – Nostalgia is a great side hustle! It’s as if whoever has written
these long lists of possibilities hasn’t actually tried any of them out. If
they had, and the ideas worked, most of the authors would be too busy with side
hustles to write such an article in the first place.As an artist, a side hustle
can be an essential part of the creative journey. Sometimes the hustle is essential
to filling in the gaps between major projects so that the bills can continue to
be paid. That’s not to say that just any side hustle is going to be compatible
with your ambitions to create a successful and professional art practice,
indeed, some side hustles can cast a shadow on what you are trying to achieve
with your art or they can quickly become a distraction that takes your artistic
focus away.Whatever the side hustle is,
it’s also kind of a bonus, if not essential, that it is also something that you
enjoy doing, otherwise it could become something that is a grind that you then
begin to resent and that would just be miserable. The whole purpose of the side
hustle is to fill in the financial gaps, whether they’re small or big, so it’s
critical that any side hustle you choose is one that can fill whatever gaps you
have or as I intimated earlier, it really can become a side hassle. The more
fun you can have with a side hustle, the better it will be, it should never
start to drain your artistic creativity.If the last eighteen months
have taught us anything at all, it’s that as artists we need to be resilient.
There have been many artists who went into the pandemic probably thinking that
they would still get to turn up at physical events and keep their art flowing out
through the door. Those that relied on turning up in a physical space had to
refocus their efforts online and if they weren’t prepared for online sales,
will have had a choice to respond quickly or continue to struggle.
Art Supplies by Mark Taylor – art for artists is another side hustle! Other than ideally being fun,
the side hustle should complement your art practice rather than being something
that is disparate from it. You have to avoid confusing the market that you
already have and it’s even better if the side hustle isn’t a single thing.If we learned any lessons
throughout the pandemic it should have been that plans can change, economies
can stop spending, and even the most resilient businesses faced, and in some
cases continue to face a struggle.It’s not that any of those
issues have never happened outside of the pandemic, they did and they did
frequently. The art world is perhaps more ebb and flow than most other
businesses even in the best of times but the one thing we did see that we haven’t
seen previously, was the closure of physical spaces. Some people will continue
to buy art whatever the economy looks like, others won’t, or their buying
habits will change, and there have always been busy seasons and slow seasons,
that’s the art world in a nutshell.What the pandemic did was to
shine the spotlight on the problems that inherently existed in the art world
even before the pandemic and it shone an even brighter light on the changing
buying habits of collectors who for the first time, began to take online more
seriously.These issues will appear again
in the future, it’s the cyclical nature of the art business and any other
business. So, when it happens again, and it will, the pain will be the same regardless
of the cause. The key is in how well you prepare during the good times so that
you can combat the bad and how prepared you are to counter things like physical
closures which we could one day see again.Whatever the economy looks
like, it’s just not worth placing any blame for any lack of sales on that
alone, a tumultuous economy is an expected issue that arises over and over in
any business and you really do have to learn to adapt, and in part, accept that
this is generally just how any business really works. It’s not fun, but you can
plan and prepare and at least stave off the worst of it when it happens. Those
who read my previous article on business strategies might be more attuned to
thinking outside of the proverbial box when it comes to preparedness. You can
read that article right here if you missed it.Having multiple income streams
means that you’re not putting all of your eggs into a single fragile basket,
but it’s how you choose those side hustle that really counts. I mentioned
earlier about making sure your side hustle is compatible with your core business,
but it also has to be compatible with you.One side hustle might be to
start selling sunglasses alongside your artwork, but wouldn’t that be
confusing? How about selling a professionally created course on how to paint
instead? That certainly sounds like it would have a fit that makes more sense
to the market of an artist. What you are really looking for are business assets
that do most of the heavy lifting for you rather than potentially quick wins
that can turn into an unsustainable grind that takes your focus away from your
core business. You absolutely need something that will be relevant long term if
you want to create a sustainable side hustle.This is what happens over and
over, side hustles can quickly turn into let’s also do something that will just
make a lot of money fast, rather than being carefully planned to leverage your
core business. Surely the intention, if you’re not selling much art, should be to
do something that has the potential to help you to sell more art if art is
indeed your first passion and you are serious about making a living from it.If you already have a market,
even if the market is currently spending less, you really don’t want to lose
that market even temporarily. When the market eventually corrects course, you’ll
certainly want them to come back and spend just like they did previously.An incompatible side hustle
can lose you the business and the market you have strived to build maybe for
years if the side hustle introduces any confusion. So what might be compatible?
Thankfully, I have researched this, spoken with numerous successful creatives,
and have my own experience to draw from after running the side hustle of
creating retro, computer and game-related artworks for more than three decades.
In fact, that was exactly how I originally cut my teeth in the art world so you
could say that the non-computer and game-related art I produce to this day is
probably my original side hustle!
The Wedding Planner Hussle Custom upcycled furniture is
currently hot and it allows you to extend your creativity in new ways, and it’s
not just furniture that you can work with. Custom frames for your work can
extend the story within your art outside of the canvas. Taking a bottle and
decorating it can make an awesome table centrepiece, add sequins to the outside
to give it a shimmering look and feel, or dip it in environmentally friendly
glitter to sit in the middle of a wedding party table, alongside the wedding
party name cards you designed.If you enter markets such as
those populated by wedding planners, there’s a myriad of options for artists
from producing environmentally friendly confetti out of dried leaves, wedding
invitation design, and there are markets for portrait artists.
Look towards natural resources to create unique gifts and products… Once you begin to open up new
markets you can widen the market even more by offering more compatible items, and
you can even customise almost anything to make it bespoke for your clients.The
sky really is the limit here, and what you should never do is judge other
peoples wallets by the value of the contents of your own. That’s true of your
artwork too.There is a market for premium,
and that market didn’t go anywhere during the pandemic, in truth, the market
grew considerably in some areas. That means that you can find premium markets
for premium quality items that might also now be interested in your now premium
art.Upcycling isn’t necessarily
about turning a bargain into another bargain, or something that no one else
wants into something that they might want, it’s about turning a bargain into
something useful, something that people need, and even something that people
desire.If you do try the upcycling
side hustle, it can be the stuff of social media dreams, especially on services
such as Instagram or Pinterest, yes, Pinterest is still relevant today especially
if you are doing cool things with a mason jar or a garden.Subscribers are as good as
collectors…I’m not too sure why we don’t
see many artists jump onto the subscription bandwagon, because subscribers are
quite literally becoming the new collector. We pay subscriptions for almost
everything these days from streaming services to coffee and pretty much
anything and everything that you regularly consume.I’m not talking about Patreon
type services here, although Patreon might not be a bad way to start out, having a direct relationship with regular collectors who continuously provide
you with funding in return for art.One subscription model idea
might be to charge a reasonable amount each month or two or even each quarter
and in return, the subscriber will receive a brand new quality frame each time
they pay their fee, along with a number of downloadable artworks which can be
swapped in and out of the frame.A good example might be that
the subscriber signs up to an initial bi-monthly plan, receiving the frame at
the start of the first month and then a new downloadable artwork every week
until the next subscription is due. The benefit to the subscriber is that they
get to showcase a new artwork on their wall or create a gallery wall which is a
great idea for those who might be short of wall space.Larger frames, larger
artworks, personalisation, or receiving art more regularly might even be useful
upsells to increase the available subscription tiers. If you can collaborate
with another artist to create new subscriber-only works you could even double
the output with half of the work, or you could go down the subscriber-only
edition route to provide your newfound collectors with art that you will never
make available anywhere else.Even a low-cost subscription
can get people interested in collecting your other works, even if they only
have aspirations to own one of your originals today, there is a chance that one
day those aspirations will be realised.
Storage Wars – each of the storage mediums in my artwork can be reused as they are created individually – meaning you can exponentially grow your portfolio with different images using the same assets! I am nervous when it comes to
suggesting that you create something like a full-on tutorial course, purely
because most of what can be learned already has a tutorial to teach and the bar
is set pretty high. Unless you absolutely know and understand your subject,
creating tutorials can be challenging, competitive, and bear in mind that the
Tube of You already makes most tutorials available for free, so long as you don’t
mind the occasional 4-second ad.There are other ways you can pass
on your talent for profit, and they’re all going to be infinitely easier than
creating a YouTube channel and learning about almost Hollywood level production
quality. Patterns, templates, vanilla book covers for e-book authors, stickers,
planners, photoshop brushes, digital textures, are all in demand from other
artists.In the past year alone I spent
over $500 on commercial digital brushes, texture overlays for commercial use,
and fonts, and I know a heap of other artists who are so time poor that they
buy them too, purely because we have so little time to create our own.$500 might seem like a lot for
digital assets but the reality is that I only buy premium digital assets with
licences for commercial reuse, so that doesn’t equate to a lot of digital
assets at all. I’m happy to pay the premium for quality, as are other artists
and it is a niche that needs way more choice.Digital assets for artists can
also be added to subscription models, particularly if you are offering
something that is unique to you and it allows you to grow a community that then
buy into you, for your creativity.You can also create resources
for e-learning content, the assets that can be used when producing interactive
learning, and there is a steady market to feed the games industry with visuals,
even product box art.Rights Free Music…
Video is huge, it has been for
years and its growth on social media is exponentially growing. The problem for
any creator of video on social media is the issue around using music in your
videos. Unless you can demonstrate that you hold the right to use a piece of
music, and demonstrating that can be what can only be described as a faff, then
the almighty algorithm will strike your post down, or mute it.A lot of artists have a side
hobby that is often just as creative, and many of these hobbies also involve creating
and playing music, it must be a right-brain thing or something. If that
describes you, there’s a world of potential in creating musical assets that
other creators can benefit from.Artists who create videos for
their own social media and YouTube channels, or promotional videos showcasing
their own artworks are all potential customers for some good quality rights-free music.
Glow Over A Dry Stone Wall by Mark Taylor – Frames can be a lucrative upsell. 9 out of 10 purchases of this work are purchased with a frame! How many artists currently
offer a choice of frames, or offer bespoke frames and accessories? Mats,
frames, hanging fixings, are all simple things that can make a completed
artwork feel even more complete. What tends to happen when people purchase
prints is that they might decide to buy the frame at a later date, you have an
opportunity for the upsell that will take that hassle away from the buyer if
you offer them a choice of price points. You can point out the value in adding
a frame such as protecting the work, and you could combine the upcycling side hustle
by offering buyers a frame that extends the artwork beyond the canvas.In my experience, if you can
provide a worthy value add, people will take it. Here are a few of the upsells
I have the most success with:- Handcrafted Frames made from
sustainable wood - A choice of print mediums –
from value canvas (but still acid-free and still great quality) right the way
through to Somerset Rag, Archival canvas and paper, wood and acrylic block and
steel. - Personal hanging service
- Hanging Fixings
- Collector only editions – only
available to collectors who have access to the collector’s area on my other
website. - Commissions
- Art Consultancy – including authenticity
Beyond that, some of my other
side hustles include:- Art Rentals (from a consortium
of independent artists) - Digital Originals on encrypted
drives - Book Covers
- Restaurant Menus – Graphic Design
- Hotel and Restaurant Art
- Licensed Images
- Video Editing
- 8-bit Graphics for vintage
computers – including classic retro designs - Illustration Work
- Cover art – from media publications
to video games - TV and Film prop artwork with
immediate clearance – because clearing art is a logistical pain for studios who
need a work of art on set that day!
The best thing about having
multiple upsells and side hustles is that you have a menu of options that can
be mixed and matched to any particular buyer.A good side hustle should reinforce
your brand and even take it to the next level. Equally, it can be about providing
value to those who can’t quite reach the financial outlay for your premium
option, but you should have in mind that offering a smaller work isn’t about
compromising on quality, it’s about the aspirations of the buyer in the future.You should also consider your
own aspirations in the side hustle too, and let’s not forget the aspirations of
your existing collectors. Your one goal as a professional artist who relies on
selling art to make a living is to get as much monetary return as possible for
each piece of work sold. Now that might sound a little selfish, or as if you’re
selling out, but the reality here is that this is a great thing for your
collectors. If you take a cut in earnings from your work, the work your collectors
already own takes a cut in value.It’s worth pointing out here
that there is a single critical difference between buyers and collectors.
Buyers want value, collectors want you to increase your worth. Something that
is often forgotten when events such as Black Friday come around and you desperately
offer crazy discounts to chase the immediate sale, you not only devalue the
work you are trying to sell, you devalue the work that your collectors already
paid you for and that isn’t a good place to be.It’s much better to serve the
market for lower-priced works by creating something different, perhaps smaller
more affordable works, offering your work on alternative mediums, or publishing
on less expensive mediums without compromising the quality too much. Again,
this is about creating a market of aspirational buyers who will one day hopefully
become your primary buyers and even collectors.
Colouring sheets make great gifts – I often create them to give away on social media! As for most of these articles
that promise a one-stop list of money-spinners that are easy enough to run as a
side hustle, it’s as if the writers of such articles have been scratching
around for ideas but not necessarily knowing too much of anything about the
reality of the side hustles they recommend. The intent is to be helpful I’m
sure, but it’s not helpful for an artist to sink hours into something that will
either be yet another grind without the potential of any real reward, or a
pursuit that can damage the professionalism of your art practice. Art is a
funny business at times and existing buyers can be put off if they become
confused or feel as if the original art is now the side hustle.Sure, an incompatible side
hustle might reach a short term goal, but it has to be sustainable, not devalue
your collector base or future collector base, but more than this, if it’s not
fun, it becomes yet another grind.There is value for every
artist in running a successful side hustle, in most cases, it will give you
another niche that can add value and open markets so that you can chase that
YouTube dream. A side hustle can differentiate you from everyone else, it can
make you stand out in the crowd, but you absolutely want to stand out for the
right reasons when it comes to selling art.Having a compatible side
hustle can generate new business for your existing work. It should complement
what you already do rather than be something a million miles away from it. The
key is to turn your mind into that of an entrepreneur rather than chasing the
next big thing regardless of what it is.Until Next Time…
Hopefully, this week’s blog
will have given you some food for thought and at least an idea or two about
what your next side hustle could be, and maybe you’re now feeling more excited
about the possibilities that you have. You are creative, so go ahead and be
creative in everything else that you do too. Creativity is wasted if it only
comes out in the studio.Until next time, stay safe,
stay well, look after each other and always stay creative!Mark x
About Mark…
I am an artist and blogger and
live in Staffordshire, England. My days are filled with art, dog walking and
living my best life while still being stuck somewhere in the eighties. You can
purchase my art through my Fine Art America store or my Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.com and
you can purchase my new works, special and limited collector only editions
directly. You can also view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.comIf you are on Facebook, you
can give me a follow right here, https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia
You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia - Handcrafted Frames made from
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The Art of Retro Inspired E-Art
Painting the Eighties, one bit
at a time…
Painting the 80s One Bit At A Time! If you have ever wanted to
create interactive artworks or artworks from alternative mediums such as
electronic waste, this week’s article has you covered with tips, market
insights, and even a brief history of early eighties computing and how it
shaped digital art today! We will also be taking a glance at technology inspired artwork and you might just get a few previews of my next creations!Technology is often sold with
built-in obsolescence and most people will probably have some old electronics
sitting around that they no longer have a use for. Technology has been
providing creatives with original ways to express themselves since, well,
technology first existed, but eventually, it stops working and all too often
ends up buried in the ground, left to leach toxins into the soil and
groundwater supplies.Recycling old electronics is
an option, and the best option by far, but the facilities to do this in a safe
and sustainable way simply don’t exist everywhere. But there is also a certain
beauty that can be found in looking at something that previously had its very
own history. An internet router that communicated with millions of other
routers, a phone that would have been used for countless conversations, or a
camera that took thousands of pictures. So where electronics cannot be
recycled, they can be turned into very unique pieces of art.
Obsolescence by Mark Taylor – available now from my stores! Just a cursory glance around
the internet will demonstrate just how big the market is for this kind of work.
You can see everything from statues to posters, apparel to home appliances.
Sega – a company that created coin-operated amusement machines as far back as
the 60s before releasing major systems such as the Genesis (Megadrive elsewhere),
even set up a Kickstarter to create a Sonic the Hedgehog themed toaster which
would burn an image of the character into the toast.Regular readers will know that
despite being known perhaps more for my traditional landscapes, for more than
thirty years I have been creating technology inspired artworks, video game
graphics, box art, and retro images for vintage gaming collectors. From 8-bit inspired pixel art prints to the artwork used on the side of arcade
machines, and more recently, the artwork for physical packaging used in special
edition collectors editions of modern retro-inspired works.Wherever I can, I still use
the original hardware to create the most authentic visuals, it’s extremely
difficult to recreate say a Commodore 64s unique display in something like
Photoshop. If I don’t have access to a physical system I fall back to
emulation, a way of getting a modern PC to replicate whatever system from the
past.
One of my workbenches in the studio where I soak test systems and create e-waste art – oh, and also create props! Notice the Commodore 64 to the right of the image – one of a number of systems I use to create authentic retro-inspired art. My Eighties inspired
collection, Retro Revival, has become increasingly popular recently and it is a
series that continues to grow and evolve. Throughout this article, you can see
some of my more recent additions to the collection, all of which are deeply
rooted in the nostalgia that many collectors have for the true golden age of
home computing and video games.As a niche, vintage and retro
gaming and computing have seen a recent resurgence and there are plenty of
collectors who you might never have even thought about previously, let alone
reached. This week, I have you covered so that you can at least step onto the
vintage technology ladder with a little confidence.Not just prints and paintings…
Whilst you might not want to
extend your talents to manufacturing a Sonic inspired toaster, you might want
to consider extending your art portfolio by using electronic waste. In 2019,
some 53.6 million tonnes of electronic waste was produced and yet only 17% of
it was recycled sustainably.What’s perhaps just as
concerning is that the raw materials in the e-waste stream from 2019 was valued
at some £44.8 million ($61,44,944 US). The real issue here is that the lost
resources are then having to be mined again, depleting the planet’s resources even further while the unrecovered waste is buried within landfills and left to
create toxins and health issues. Just £7.9 million ($10, 842,789 US) was
sustainably recovered through professional recycling and recovery facilities in
the same year.Artists have always found use in things that others have thrown out. What might be perceived as junk
will have some value to someone, and this is almost always the case with
vintage technology, even if it is only ever reused to provide spare parts.CRT TVs and monitors are
becoming increasingly difficult to find in working order, yet a serious retro
and vintage collector or owner of an original arcade game machine prefer the
glow of a CRT over the flat and sharp image produced from a modern screen and
they are happy to pay for that level of authenticity. Now that CRTs are no
longer produced, they are highly sought after by the purists, either for that
distinct original glow or simply because some vintage systems just won’t work
at all with a modern display.New CRT production is in
demand, yet no one has started to reproduce them. Perhaps, because we have lost
many of the skills required, but more likely because we have lost the
technology and the production facilities to produce them, and of course,
environmentally, CRTs were much bigger and heavier than modern screens and they
were notoriously problematic to dispose of in later years.Interestingly, cassette tapes
are something else that has seen a surge in demand of late, and whilst one
company continued to produce them in small numbers over the years, they were
very much inferior to the tapes of the past. That has recently changed as
another company have now begun production of high-quality tapes, for a premium
price of course.
Tools of the Trade by Mark Taylor – Now available in my store! This has been welcomed by the
retro gaming community who have had to transition to utilising after-market
add-ons that allow SD-Cards to replace the need to load programs from tape, but
a genuine retro lover would rather wait for a tape to load and listen to the
noise of data being transferred than have something modern that loads the
programs almost instantly. The retro purists prefer authenticity over
convenience and they’re very happy to pay for that authenticity. I think you
get the idea, the retro and vintage technology community are actively seeking
an anchor to the past, and in big numbers.Art Projects using E-Waste…
Printed circuit boards can be
used as a unique canvas, repurposed into a sculpture or made into a clock, the
only limit for their use is your imagination. For a number of years, I have
reused old technologies in the props I created for TV and film, and more
recently I have been taking old technology, deconstructing it and turning it
into functional items such as clocks.Old technology isn’t an overly
expensive medium to create with, so long as you have a constant supply of
components. Waste really is just a lack of imagination but when it is turned
into art, it can unsettle the viewer and make them think about their role in
adding to the overall problem of generating e-waste. E-Waste can be immensely
powerful at conveying some of the most poignant environmental issues that we
face today.Much of what we see in the art
world today, be that the performing or visual arts, wouldn’t have been made
possible if technology and science had never found a parallel with creative
people.Leonardo Da-Vinci was known
for his forays into the world of technology, Warhol wouldn’t have become quite
so well known without the Commodore Amiga computer, and the genre of new media
art, a term that had been coined in the 60s wouldn’t have had a hand in the
introduction of the internet.Technology is as critical to
artists as a tube of paint, whether you currently use digital mediums or you
continue to only use more traditional mediums such as pen and ink. As a digital
artist, I’m not only interested in pushing pixels around a screen, I also push
paint around a canvas, something I would never have done in a professional
capacity if I hadn’t received a small microcomputer as a Christmas present from
my parents back in 1980.My first steps in home
computing…My passion for technology goes
back to me being a small ten-year-old boy growing up in one of England’s newly
built “new towns”. Towns that had been developed to ease the overspill
population from the major cities. The seventies had been a decade of innovation
and a hot summer in 1976, and by the 80s, the new town was thriving with new
technology companies providing much-needed employment for the grown-ups. Not
quite like Silicone Valley, think more like eccentric British inventors in a series
of large sheds.By the early 1980s, life had
changed from the life I had known as an even younger child in the 70s. Accessible
technology seemed to suddenly appear around every corner, beeps, flashing
lights, shiny tech, I was suddenly sucked into a digital world before we humans
even realised what digital really meant.It was an incredibly important
time in history, it was an era that
would define the tech we see today, and as the population of today reaches a
certain time in life, nostalgia for the period grows stronger by the day. In
part, maybe because back in the 80s we never had to wait for a Windows update
to do its thing, but in part, because for most kids of the eighties, technology
created a happy place that meant you could play games with friends on your
portable TV after school.Today there is a sizable and
fast-growing market for vintage technology. There is also a market for artworks
depicting vintage tech, and there is a market for technology to be implemented
within art. The question that we need to ask ourselves as professional artists
who are looking to communicate our individual messages to the world, is why
wouldn’t we embrace any of that technology when we think about creating our
next masterpiece?In life, change is the
default, not the exception. Evolution is baked into every aspect of our world,
from physical growth to scientific progress, it’s little wonder that people
long for stability. Maybe that’s why many of us choose a nostalgic anchor to
the past to remind us of simpler times.My anchor, as many of my
regular readers will know, is a combination of the eighties and technology.
Having grown up during the dawn of the home computing age, I feel incredibly
lucky to have not just witnessed the beginning of something that has
significantly changed the world in which we live, but something that I have
been involved with right from the start.Had it have not been for that
small microcomputer sitting waiting for me under a Christmas tree in 1980, I’m
not sure I would have ever had an art career at all. I had always loved drawing
and painting, just as every child does, but it wasn’t until I began to learn to
program a computer that I began to see the potential to create art on a screen.
At this time I had no idea
that anyone had already created artwork using a computer before, but the first
art created with a computer had already been created sometime in the sixties.
By the eighties, the process of using a computer to either create or assist
with creating a piece of art had become more prevalent and the term, digital
art was first spoken.When I discovered that the not
very powerful device I found under the Christmas tree was capable of producing
some level of visual output, it was a game-changer that opened up a completely
new world of possibilities and it sparked a lifelong passion for the arts, not
just digital art, but traditional art too.
Storage Wars by Mark Taylor – now available in my Pixels and Fine Art America stores! It’s funny how technology has
changed since the days when I started out creating digital art back somewhere
around 1980. In the old days as they’re now known, you needed a small box that
contained extra memory (RAM) to be precariously connected to a not very
powerful home computer so that you could do anything remotely half productive
with it.Those small boxes were
optional extras that were also kind of essential, and they would wobble and
crash the computer if they hadn’t been attached with the aid of Blue Tack or
Duct Tape to keep them in place. Excited fingers would vibrate a table just
enough so that you would lose all of the work you had already done, only for it
to be replaced with a blank screen and the need to cycle the power off and back
on.Computer programs were
available on cassette tape, sometimes they would be available on
interchangeable cartridges, and the code to create programs would often be
listed, often incorrectly, in the computer magazines of the time. Those
listings were the reason I learnt to program a computer, after spending a good
few hours diligently typing the listing into the computer you would find out
that somewhere, there would be an error that you would then need to track down
and debug.We had, by the eighties, just
about moved on past punch cards and paper tape, transitioning to either huge
floppy discs or compact cassette tape, but we hadn’t moved on when it came to the
public perception of computers. Most
people still equated computers with a science fiction future and geeks wearing
white lab coats huddled around a green screen display in a dimly lit lab. I
knew of no one who saw computers as a viable art medium.My interest in art had been
piqued, the more I created on screen the more inspired I became to create art
using any medium I could get my hands on, eventually selling my very first
landscape work which was a watercolour painting of Westminster Bridge in London
with a big red double-decker bus driving across it in front of the houses of
parliament.
Glow Over A Dry Stone Wall by Mark Taylor – One of the hundreds of traditional landscapes I have created. This one is also available on my Pixels and Fine Art America Stores! Landscapes became my thing,
yet behind the scenes, I was still creating on any computer I could get my hands
on. That creativity even stretched to creating computer games on 8-bit
microcomputers, systems such as the Sinclair Spectrum, Atari 400 and 800, later
moving on to the Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, and eventually the PC.If I wasn’t creating games, I
was creating graphics for other people to use in their games or creating the
artwork for the box art and I was suddenly earning real money for doing the
things I loved. That Christmas Day in 1980 didn’t just present me with a
computer, it presented me with a lifelong career.A brief history of computing
in the 80s…If you plan on creating art
based on vintage technology or create art directly on vintage technology, then
knowing the history of that technology is extremely useful, especially if your
intention is to show your art at one of the many thousands of retro events held
around the world every year. Don’t worry, I have you covered with this, it’s my
other specialist subject having been a collector since I realised that I never
throw any technology away!8-Bit and beyond…
In the States, the 8-bit home
computer scene wasn’t quite as vibrant as it was over here in the UK. The
Commodore 64 did really well in the USA, but come 1983, the American video game
bubble burst, while over here in Britain, the scene was becoming busier with
more and more home computers becoming available and their popularity increasing
as more and more kids convinced their parents that computers could help with
school work.Computers of the time never
really did help with school work, there were few teachers at the time who understood
computers quite as well as the kids did.
By now, many teenagers were turning into entrepreneurs and creating
games to sell from the comfort of their bedrooms through the power of mail
order and placing cheap ads on the back pages of one of the many home computing
publications at the time.It was a lucrative time for
many bedroom coders. I remember a time when you could turn up to a computer
fair to sell your independently produced game and people would constantly be
six or seven deep at the table, literally throwing money at you in return for
the code recorded on a compact cassette tape.I was earning more money for a
few days of work than both my parents earned in a month, just from creating a
program that would take a couple of days to code or maybe a week if it was
something special. Once I had created the code, I would visit a computer fair
twice a month to sell my wares. Amazing times, but it wasn’t a sustainable
business model in the long term.Technology was evolving into
something new every week. No one could keep up with the pace and the choice of
technology available began to dilute the market for games. It was the original
print-on-demand model, but without the need for a middleman, but then came the
saturation as the industry grew ever larger.
The 80s Handheld by Mark Taylor – Available in the coming days on my store! I love, love, love, painting these! The problem with such market
saturation was that unless you developed for every system, it wasn’t viable,
and it also wasn’t viable to develop for every system. Here in the UK, there
were three original staples of the home computer market, The Sinclair ZX
Spectrum which sold phenomenally well in the UK. It was sold as the Timex
Sinclair 2068 in the USA where it didn’t do very well at all. Then there was
The Commodore 64 which did incredibly well everywhere, and the Amstrad CPC464
which I don’t believe made it anywhere outside of Europe in significant numbers.
There were plenty of other systems, Oric, Acorn, MSX, but none would really
find similar market sizes that the Spectrum, Commodore and Amstrad had found.Those three systems were the
systems that you would develop for if you wanted to find an eager market, but
as 16-bit microcomputers and consoles began to gain popularity, the base of
available models exponentially increased consumer choice and the development of
software became exponentially more challenging. It would be an even greater
challenge when the 32-bit systems such as the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast
arrived.Commodore introduced the
Amiga, again, a system that didn’t do overly well in the USA, but this was a
system that would go on to enable an artist by the name of Warhol to create
some of the most iconic pop art of all time, and I have to say, he was creating
on the Amiga much later than I was, he was simply better at marketing his work.
I still own my original Amiga and frequently still use it to create authentic
Amiga art.
80s Pop Music Culture Artwork by Mark Taylor This is when everything
changed. Suddenly, the lone bedroom coder had to become a team of people and
today, that team has become in some cases, 500 or 600 people strong, often
more, in order to produce a modern video game. The other difference is that in
the eighties, the limitations of the devices became the mother of creativity,
today, we are blessed with plenty of resources to more or less build whatever
we can imagine and add some photorealistic images and a full orchestra in too.
In the 80s, you had to be an efficient coder, today, the software is nowhere near
as efficient as it once was, despite its visual greatness.The other difference between
then and now is that not only could you create a title for very little outlay
back in the eighties, you could also work on graphics and sound without relying
on too many others. Today, you need the high side of a six-figure start-up fund
and at least eighteen months of development on specialist development hardware,
just to get close to getting your product to market. But, maybe the tide is
turning once again.What we are beginning to see
today is a return of the indie developer.
Small teams, sometimes even lone coders going up against the big
players, writing smaller games that are then sold via a platforms online store
as a digital download, or, as is more increasingly the case, as a limited
physical edition release which is often targeted towards collectors.We are also seeing more and
more retro remakes using modern hardware to replicate the look and feel of the
old-school equipment that we once owned, although some of the best remakes
still require huge teams and significant budgets to bring to market. As an
example, you would probably need something like $100,000 to stand any real
chance of success if you developed a title for the Nintendo Switch.Fast forward to today and the
gaming market that sprung up as a direct result of those early home computer
innovations is now bigger than Hollywood. We’re talking about an industry that spans
the globe and is worth billions in revenue each year, and there’s no sign of it
slowing down. Recent predictions suggest that the video games market will be
worth $200 billion per year by 2023.Much of the recent surge of
popularity around these old, now almost vintage systems rapidly increased
throughout the pandemic, although interest in them had been gaining traction
for a number of years pre-pandemic. Nostalgia has had a huge influence on the
market, and it has even spilt over into the art world with retro-inspired
vintage computer and gaming artworks becoming increasingly popular, especially
when you look at the number of works now appearing on platforms such as Etsy.
Data Corruption by Mark Taylor If you are looking for a niche
and have an interest or ideally a passion for all things vintage technology, it
is one of the few niches that you can dive into today that might very well
still be a viable niche in a decade, and there is no other art niches that I
can categorically say will grow quite as fast and still be popular so far in
the future.There’s a lot of gaming-related artwork out there already and there are some great pieces to be found, equally, there is a lot of work out there already that is fairly generic and I have to
say, there is quite a bit that lacks any understanding of the technologies that
it portrays. The more specialist works are also commanding higher prices, and
if you can bring a new idea to the market, there are buyers who are willing to pay
a premium.We might not be talking about
a Matisse original level of premium, but certainly, three or four-figure sums
instead of two. A decade ago, some of my retro-inspired original works would
hang around the studio for a few months, today they tend to go out of the door
almost immediately, and they are increasingly being requested as commissions.As we have seen throughout my
recent blogs about creating retro-inspired works and looking at alternative
niches, your success in this will be determined by how well you stand out above
everything else that is already out there.Before you embark on a voyage
throughout this niche as an artist, it has to be said that you ideally need to
have at least some knowledge of vintage technology and/or retro gaming, and
it’s even better if you have a genuine passion for the subject, as you should
as an artist in whatever you create.The market for this kind of
artwork is very switched on to the many nuances of technology and if you ever
confuse your Mario’s with your Sonic’s, the community will let you know, often
quite brutally. It can be a difficult niche to enter if you aren’t currently
creating in the genre, at least until you begin to form relationships with the
community. Thankfully, the community, wherever they are around the world are
almost always willing to engage with you in return.
All of my work is created by hand using tools such as Procreate – each line on the board was drawn using an Apple Pencil in this piece. This was a WIP shot of my PCB artwork – more than 60-hours of drawing lines had been completed at this point! As I intimated earlier, buyers
pay a premium for technology and gaming-inspired art that isn’t generic, but
you also have to be mindful, especially if you chase the video games market,
that you don’t inadvertently stumble into an intellectual property fight with
the likes of Nintendo, or “Ninten-don’t” as they have become affectionately
known.Companies like Nintendo are
fiercely protective of their IPR as are many others. It’s also worth noting
that companies have been set up with the specific intention of buying out the
intellectual property rights of long lost companies with the sole purpose of
scouting the internet for unauthorised and unpaid use of old IPR.Some modern companies with
hugely popular back catalogues actually encourage fan art projects on a
non-commercial basis, but there is a fine line when it comes to making any kind
of profit from the work. There are a few who are perhaps a little more willing
to negotiate the rights to use older IPR in works, although you might find that
there is a curation process alongside a licensing fee that will need to be
paid. No company wants to see their 8-bit character shown in a bad light.The good thing about vintage
technology is that, whilst you do have to respect the general principles, you
can also take some artistic licence. People tend to value the feeling of
nostalgia that the art brings over and above any precise technical detail, well,
mostly.Creating technology inspired
artwork…Throughout this article, you
might have noticed some of my more recent works inspired by vintage technology,
some of which is now being reproduced as mixed media pieces using original
components. One of the pieces I am working on at the moment is to create a
clock that uses an enterprise-grade Cisco router, a device that cost over $1000
( £728 UK) a few years ago, but since the model is now end of life and is no
longer upgradeable with security patches, there is no place for it in any
corporate or home network. By extracting value from turning it into a piece of
functional art, it becomes one less component destined for a landfill.The paintings I have created
have all been hand-drawn and painted using Procreate on the iPad Pro before
being refined further in Photoshop/Illustrator and in some cases, using
original hardware from the period. Some of the works are more than 70inches in
size when printed out at full size, and they have been included in my Retro Revival
collection of artworks which has become increasingly popular with its focus on
the golden age of video games and home computers in the 1980s.
Together in Electric Dreams by Mark Taylor – available from my stores now! I’m not sure there is a
specific term that defines the entire home computing/retro-inspired art genre
that also encompasses e-waste art, so I prefer to call it collectively, E-Art,
perhaps it could make it as a new art movement. One thing I do know is that there’s
certainly not enough of it about right now!Some of the most inspiring
works I have seen made out of e-waste recently have been themed around
Steampunk. It’s a popular genre that has a significant market share of upcycled
works in the art world. Take a look online and you will find artists who have
created everything from shoes to coffee tables out of e-waste, even 3D skyline
landscapes of famous cities, and they’re attracting collectors who are willing
to pay that all-important premium price. More importantly, buyers in this genre
tend to quickly turn into collectors.Small printed circuit boards
are being turned into keyrings and jewellery, speakers are being transformed
into lamps, cables have been turned into paper towel holders and even an iMac
clone. You can find the projects and instructions to recreate these things
right here.Adding Micro-controlled
interactivity into your artwork…I kind of remember when any
computer would take up about the same floor space as a large house, although by
the time I started to use them they were by then, comparatively pocket-sized
until later in my career when I began working with data centre based
infrastructure. Fast forward to today and not only does the smartphone you are
reading this article on have more power than was used to launch a man into space,
you can now accommodate an entire computer on a single chip. A quick technical
note here, your phone might be more powerful than NASA’s space era technology,
but it still can’t launch a man into space!Devices and computers on a
single chip are now increasingly common, there’s a good chance that something
you already own has an FPGA device within it. Field Programmable Gate Array
(FPGA) is a semiconductor device that is based around a matrix of logic blocks.
In non-geek speak, that means that you can essentially create almost whatever
device you want on a chip and then reprogram it later to become something else.FPGA can be complicated for a
first-timer, it’s not something I would dabble with had I not have been using
FPGA technology in other projects for a few years, but there are easier options
if you want to embed technology within a piece of artwork.If you have ever used an
emulator on a computer, and you might have done without realising it, for
example, if you have ever played an old video game on a modern system, then
emulation of some kind was probably involved, especially if any part of the
game relied on or used the original game file. That would have been software
emulation, or in short, not quite like the real thing. FPGA is full-on
hardware emulation and pretty much it becomes the real thing in a modern and
often tiny package.Using a MiSTeR FPGA device, I
built an entire arcade machine that is capable of running over 70,000 video
games from a multitude of video and arcade game systems and home computers and
it all runs on a device that is barely bigger than the palm of your hand. FPGA
does have a downside right now when it comes to a device such as a MiSTeR, it’s
expensive, although it can be done much more cost-effectively when it is
focused on recreating a single device.Slightly easier and cheap
enough to instil into an art project is the Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is
a series of small single-board computers (SBCs) developed in
the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in
association with Broadcom. The Raspberry Pi project originally leaned
towards the promotion of teaching basic computer science in schools
and in developing countries.The original model became more
popular than anticipated, selling outside its target market for
uses such as robotics. It is widely used in many areas, such as
for weather monitoring and because of its low cost, modularity, and
open design. It is typically used by computer and electronic hobbyists, due to
its adoption of HDMI and USB devices.And that’s what makes the
Raspberry Pi such a great device to incorporate into art projects, and
especially devices such as the Raspberry Pi Zero or PICO which only cost around
twenty dollars for the most basic versions. The question I guess, is just how
much of a technology expert do you need to be to create an art project that
involves this kind of tech?I think, for the most part, the
creative process is going to be the most problematic aspect. When you realise
just what the possibilities are, it can feel overwhelming to settle on the one
idea that will add some value to any particular piece of art to turn it into an
interactive work, or a work that has the added depth of working technology
embedded within it.As far as the technology
itself goes, that is perhaps the easiest part because there is a huge community
both active and willing to provide help and support. I think it is one of the
best communities for knowledge sharing that I have ever come across. Virtually
anyone can learn how to use a Raspberry Pi just from watching 30-minutes of
tutorials on YouTube, and if you utilise pre-configured SD-Cards, anyone can have
a project completed and built within a very short space of time.It would be awesome if you
understood the programming language they call Linux, but for the most part, you
are able to purchase those pre-configured SD-Cards I just mentioned with both the
operating system and the application pre-installed. Your role is to then
assemble a few simple components using the vast library of tutorials available
on the internet or from the hundreds of books that have been written on the
subject, slide in the pre-configured SD Card and turn the power on.The versatility of the Pi is
unsurpassed. You can quite literally buy an accessory that will make the device
do almost anything you could imagine. From inexpensive high definition touch
screens to home automation and robotics, cameras, facial recognition, and if you
need a very cheap PC, you can even use a Pi as a fully-featured computer,
especially if you have the latest Raspberry Pi 4.I have seen Windows 10 functioning
better on a Pi than one of my old laptops, so it is, without doubt, the cheapest
way to get into computing and many of these devices have been used throughout
the pandemic to allow children to access their schoolwork and participate in
remote lessons, this is especially useful when finances have been drained a
little too much and there’s a need to use a computer or access the internet.
Pi’s today are perfectly capable computers in their own right.Generally, if you can think of it, there is a device that has been made to attach to the Pi that will allow
you to execute the idea, usually for pennies on the dollar compared to other
technologies. Who wouldn’t want to add artificial intelligence to an
abstract painting of the mind?
The Raspberry Pi is built within an official keyboard – Image copyright Pi and Pimoroni – the best place to buy Pi devices! There are some materials and
components that you definitely want to avoid in your e-waste art projects, used
batteries that can leak, any materials containing lead and mercury, and smoke
alarms that actually contain radioactive components are probably the most
obvious components to avoid. Always check that the materials you are using are
not only safe for you to handle, but they’re legal and safe for you to resell.You will also want to take
some precautions when creating your projects, especially when using old PCBs
which can have very sharp edges, and using a soldering iron to deconstruct and
reconstruct projects is fraught with risks, not only are they hot, they can set
fire to anything they are resting on. That might sound obvious, but sadly it’s
not, I have known people who have picked up a hot soldering iron by the tip
rather than the handle.Use a soldering mat to avoid
damage to surfaces and if you can, use a heat resistant silicone soldering mat
as this has the benefit of providing some additional grip to prevent components from slipping. Soldering irons should never be placed on a surface that doesn’t have
a heat resistant mat, instead, they should be stored when you are not using them
within a specialist soldering iron stand but these are inexpensive enough for
you to not have to worry too much about set-up costs.If you are thinking about
deconstructing old electronics, it is worth researching the value of them
before you do. A sealed iPhone 1 in its original packaging is currently on sale
on eBay for £20,000 although an unsealed original boxed iPhone 1 is going to be
closer to £2,000.You also need to be cautious
when comparing the prices of vintage computers and technology. Many eBay sellers
will describe their Commodore 64 home computers as being super-rare and will
inherently place a high value on the items. A person’s own nostalgia is worth
nothing at all to someone else, and as many as 30-million Commodore 64s may
have been manufactured, although some sources state it was closer to 22-million
units. With that in mind, the Commodore 64 isn’t actually rare at all, many of
them are packed in boxes in attics having been forgotten about, they’re not
rare, they’re just in hiding and that’s the same with most vintage
technologies. The tech that is perhaps genuinely worth more will be prototype
units or tech that only ever found a very limited market. Equally, you have to
be mindful that this too isn’t the bar to set a value against, I own some very
rare technology, but its value will be from nostalgia rather than being
monetary.It’s the same with a lot of
vintage technology, although prices have gone even crazier recently after
the graded sealed copy of Super Mario for the Nintendo Entertainment System
sold for over a million dollars. There was though, a very specific set of
circumstances that led to that price.According to some websites and
experts, the price the game sold for happened in a way that’s not too
dissimilar to the way the murky parts of the art world operate, allegedly, but
it did begin to drive retro prices up and up more widely for everything,
despite there being no real reason for prices to increase. What it did do was
to encourage more people to dig out lost treasures from their attics and list
them on sites such as eBay for exorbitant prices.You can find the full story on
the Mario game and the auction online, and a number of conflicting views around
why the game reached such an eye-watering price. There is an explanatory video
on YouTube that may or may not present what really happened, of course, I’m not
convinced we will ever know for sure. If you read about it or watch the videos
that have been posted online and you are familiar with the stories from the
murkier parts of the art world, I’m sure you will see more than a few similarities!
Just Google the term, exposing fraud and deception in the retro video game
market and you will find videos that allege what might or might not have
happened.We artists do love to research
our subjects before attempting our next masterpiece so you will be pleased to
find out that the internet generally has you covered with enough information to
provide you with sufficient knowledge that will more than get you started.I’ve broken the links down
into sections so that you can pick the most relevant ones to gain a better
understanding of what you want to do, be that create 8-bit retro computer
art, find out the history of any specific computer, or listen to podcasts that
cover all things retro and vintage computing.
Turn It Up by Mark Taylor – available now from my store! Low End Mac:
If you are already into retro
and love your Mac, you might have already come across a website called, Low End
Mac where they guide you through keeping your Mac alive for as long as
possible. What you might have missed is a feature on the history of Commodore’s
8-bit computer range. You can find Low End Mac right here.Gamasutra: More
of a general IT related website but with a decent history of Atari’s 8-bit era
for those who didn’t buy into the Commodore machines. Back in the day, there
were only two real choices outside of the UK, Atari and Commodore. You can find
the Atari article right here.Old Computers: Old
Computers is by far one of the best resources to learn about old computers,
there are currently 1261 systems represented, most with information about the
devices, the peripherals, software and a copy of the original documentation in
some cases. I’m not convinced this site gets anywhere near as much love as
people ought to give it, but I can spend hours on it just browsing systems that
were only available in other countries. You know they still manufacture the
Sega Genesis in Brazil right? You can find the online museum right here.Vintage Computing: Vintage
Computing and Gaming have a wealth of retro information and it’s not just about
computers. Toys are represented here too, specifically the kind of early
electronic toys that we would once see in Radio Shack, or Tandy as it was known
here in the UK.I had completely forgotten
about the Radio Shack Armatron, The Takara My Robot Watch which was an
alternative to Transformers, and there are a number of 80s adverts scattered
around which, if nothing else, will either provide you with a healthy dose of
nostalgia or remind you that graphic design today can at times, be really dull
in comparison.You can find Vintage Computing
and Gaming, right here.Byte Cellar: I
stumbled across Byte Cellar while looking for Apple accessories online and
found a personalised cut wood Apple logo sign from 1984, sadly, I don’t as yet
have one of these in my collection.There are a lot of systems
represented here, the iconic TRS-80 which I still need to get my hands on
because it was a great little development machine, and the early Woz and Jobs
era Apple machines seem to be well represented. You can find Byte Cellar right
here.Stack Exchange – Retro
Computing: I have to admit, with such a need to consume
everything tech-related, I can often be found exploring Stack Exchange –
usually for answers to some strange coding issue I have come up against when
programming 8-bit artworks.There is also a Retro Computing
Stack Exchange where questions get asked and answers are given. This is an
ideal site if you are researching older technologies for art projects, the
community are eager to support everyone with even the smallest of questions,
and they’re knowledgeable.This is the site that also
touches on pre-8-bit computing, namely the times of punch cards, and mainframes
such as the Russian Strela from 1953, a system that played a pivotal role in
the Cold War. You can ask all of your retro technology and computing questions
right here.The Centre for Computing
History: Based in Cambridge, here in the UK, the Centre for
Computing History is much more than a museum, it hosts hands-on exhibitions,
educational workshops and a wide range of activities and events. If you plan to
visit in person, it’s only open on weekends, and there is an on-site shop that
sells everything from a MyZ80 maker kit to floppy disk notepads, and icons of
beige computer poster prints.Upcoming events which might be
useful for those in the UK who want to start developing skills to add
technology into art will find the Pico Clock event useful where you will learn
to build and program the Raspberry Pi Pico! You can find out more here.Vintage Is The New Old: One of
the things I really like about Vintage is the New Old, are the news articles
that often showcase recent Kickstarter projects, often projects that are art-related and vintage technology focussed. Recently there was an article on a
Kickstarter to create a deck of 52 playing cards, each paying homage to a
classic video game, with each card promising some sweet 8-bit pixel art. You
can find the site right here.Commodore News: I know
I have a lot of readers from the USA and I am always minded to research things
that will be suited to both US and UK audiences, and with that in mind,
Commodore News might be just the site that US and UK audiences will both love
given the popularity of the machine in both territories.The Commodore 64 was huge over
here in the UK and Europe, but until the Nintendo Entertainment System arrived,
the C64 was the defacto 8-bit computer of choice in the USA, alongside the
TRS-80 (also lovingly referred to as the Trash 80!)For those considering using
the Commodore as a source of artistic inspiration, it will be good to know that
the machine is still huge today and there is an avid army of retro-heads,
myself included, who still continue to both use and develop for the machine
even today.Visit retro fairs and there
will still be deep queues forming around anything related to the breadbin of
computers, so-called because of its distinct breadbin-like shape. The modern
C64 scene is perhaps the most vibrant of all of the retro communities.If you want to find out the
latest developments and news, then head over to Commodore News, right here.
Raspberry Pi 4 from Pimoroni – This is a fantastic computer that can do almost anything you can imagine! The Commodore Amiga wasn’t an
immediate follow up to the Commodore 64, there was also the Commodore Plus 4
and Commodore 16 along with a couple of other variants and we almost got to the
point of seeing the Commodore 65 land in the wild before Commodore fell into
bankruptcy, although a few prototypes did make it out into the wild and the
machine is finally being released as a recreation. An original C65 prototype
will set you back around $20,000 – $25,000 today. The Commodore Amiga was
hugely successful in Europe, not so much in the USA, but it has become the Holy
Grail for some US-based collectors of late.The Amiga was an incredibly
important computer in the digital art scene. Programs such as Delux Paint
predated Photoshop and gave users an incredible amount of power over digital
imaging, it was also the preferred tool for Warhol who used the Commodore Amiga
to produce some of the most iconic pop art of our time.The Amiga was also legendary
for its music power, with chip-tunes created by demo groups of the time that
are now highly sought after by collectors of the early demo scene floppies, discs
that would often also contain cracked versions of commercial software with a
musical intro created by hacking collectives of the day. I can neither confirm
nor deny that I was involved in the demo scene for obvious reasons that would
probably implicate me in the grey art of breaking disc copy protection.The Atari ST (and later the
Atari Falcon which didn’t do anywhere near as well) would be utilised alongside
the Amiga for its incredible, for the time, ability to act as a MIDI
controller, and between both machines, the digital arts and music scene was to
become well established.I still use both my Commodore
64 and my Commodore Amiga for creating original digital art and a little games
development whenever I have the time. They are incredibly important machines
and anyone who is into digital art should definitely understand where digital
art and music really originated. The scene today is arguably just as vibrant as
it once was, and collectors and fans of the machines provide a ready-made
market for artists who utilise the systems in art projects.You can find out more right
here.Atariage: In the
USA, it was all about Atari. Youngsters would never admit to playing video
games, instead, they would play Atari. Atari was also one of the most
influential companies in the history of computing and video games releasing the
Atari 2600 Video Computer System on the 11th September 1977.The company ran into trouble
just ahead of the video game bubble burst of 1984 in the States, having
manufactured more ET game cartridges for the 2600 than there were 2600 consoles
in existence. They then buried those that were never sold in the desert. Some
were dug up relatively recently and some even still played the game without any
issues when inserted into a working console, despite having been buried in sand
for decades. ET as a game it has to be said was pretty bad and it disappointed
a lot of folk including me.Atariage is perhaps the best
known Atari website of the modern-day, and you can find it here. It’s
also worth noting that the Atari VCS has recently been re-released, and the
verdict, it’s nowhere near the same as it was, and fans who bought into it are
firmly split into two camps, lovers, and haters. It looks really cool though.Lemon 64
I mentioned emulators earlier,
C64 forever is one such emulator that focuses on the Commodore 64 (others are
available) and it comes complete with a library of original games and it is
available through the Lemon 64 site. If your research extends to the history of
the C64, then Lemon 64 is perhaps one of the finest C64 resources out there.
You can find it right here.Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi
Art Projects…If you have ever considered
creating a truly interactive art project that utilises technology, the
complexity might very well have put you off from even trying. Enter the
Raspberry Pi.Raspberry Pi on Toms Hardware:
There
are some great ideas on this site here, that
will get your creative minds thinking about how you might want to incorporate a
Raspberry Pi type device into your next art project.The Raspberry Pi scary picture
frame would be an ideal addition for Halloween, albeit probably a little too
late to get something produced for this year, although there is a simpler
Turning Jack-O-Lantern. Perhaps you might want to create a George Orwell
inspired 1984 style facial recognition artwork, although be mindful of any data
protection issues that might arise if you display the work in public!
Inky 7 colour screen available from Pimoroni – what a great art project this would make! Pimoroni: This
is one site that is frequently recommended to me as a brilliant single source
of Pi-related devices and components, so much so that my next Pi order will be
heading over to them. Pimoroni offer worldwide shipping and prices are some of
the lowest I have come across, even if you have to factor in import taxes,
although they do have a network of global distributors.This is also where the
potential to utilise a Pi and technology in your art projects becomes financially
possible. The HyperPixel high-resolution screens come either in a traditional
rectangular format, or as a circular display, and they are touch-sensitive,
making them perfect for interactive projects, or to utilise at art shows and
exhibitions. The colours really pop on the screens and I can think of a hundred
and one ways to bring an artwork to life with a Pi and one of these screens, or
even multiple screens.
Hyper Pixel Touch Screen available from Pimoroni 
Available from Pimoroni – Hyper Pixel Touch Screen – traditional shape There are other devices, so
many other devices that you will only get a sense of the number and variety of
them if you visit Pimoroni’s website, but of all of them, the most obvious to
include in art projects for me would be the audio amplifiers and air quality
monitors which would be a fantastic addition to artworks focussing on issues
such as global warming.
Audio Amp for Raspberry Pi – available from Pimoroni – I have found Pimoroni to have the best range of Pi Products on the planet! Retro Podcasts…
If you prefer to listen to
history rather than reading about it, there are a number of retro podcasts,
although all are not created equal. I listen to a lot of retro podcasts and
have probably listened to at least a couple of episodes of most of them that
have been created over the years, so I have picked the best of the best that
are currently on my daily podcast playlist to share with you!Retronauts: Retronauts
is described by the hosts as America’s favourite games podcast… probably. The
website to accompany the show is full of articles and includes videos so you
can not only listen to the show but visit the site to get even more context
around whatever they’re discussing. The shows are around 90-minutes long as
many of the shorter shows are and podcasts are released a couple of times a
week.You can find the website and
links to the podcast to play in your podcast player of choice, right here.The Retro Hour: One of
my most listened to podcasts is The Retro Hour, a British podcast with hosts
who record the shows every week, and not too far away in Nottingham. Dan, Ravi,
and Joe bring exclusive interviews with some of the greatest names in the
industry, from Atari veterans to modern-day developers who have worked on some
of the latest retro remakes. The Retro Hour Podcast is a founding member of
‘The Videogame Heritage Society’ alongside BFI, National Science and Media
Museum, Museum of London, C64 Audio, Centre for Computing History, Bath Spa
University and the British Library.If you want a definitive
history of vintage computing, then you can find it right here.Maximum
Powerup: Another great podcast, especially for collectors of vintage
computer and gaming magazines and publications. Some of the past episodes have
bought interviews from some of the early video game journalists, reviewers, and
editors who shaped computer and videogame journalism in a pre-internet era. It
is an incredibly important and historic look back at an industry that didn’t
document its own progress very well, if at all, during the early years.You
can find Maximum Power Up right here.Retro
Asylum: If you are looking for a nostalgia hit, Retro Asylum is
another podcast that reflects on times past and also provides useful tips for
retro collectors and enthusiasts. Covering computers and games consoles from
all over the world, although, with a heavy hint of the popular systems available
in Britain, the team have extensive knowledge of all-things-retro.This
is perhaps one of the most authoritative podcasts on the subject and there are
plenty of past episodes to listen to. It’s a little like having a conversation
about retro with friends in a pub on a Friday night! You can find the Retro Asylum right here.
This is one of my latest works in progress – massively popular in the 80s, the CB Radio! Who remembers the astounding K40 antenna? My handle was Mr Wimpy! Based on the character from the British fast-food chain that is still selling fast food in a few remaining restaurants today! Stay Tuned for More on this one!! Arcade Attack: Covering
a range of arcade games and retro consoles, Arcade Attack is another podcast
that reflects on the history of video games and home consoles, PC and even the
retro scene on the Nintendo Switch.There are also a number of
celebrity interviews from the likes of Al Acorn (of Atari and Pong fame), Rob
Hubbard, who has to be one of the most prolific and most revered video game
musicians ever, and there is a great interview from Tom Kalinske, one of the
main driving forces who were behind Sega in the 1990s.You can find Arcade Attack
right here.RGDS: Retro Gaming Discussion
Show: RGDS began as a podcast back in 2014 and has since covered
thousands of historic video arcade games from developers all around the world.
Discussing platforms such as the Panasonic 3DO, Gameboy, classic Nintendo
consoles, Atari, PlayStation 1, right the way through to modern remakes of
classic games, the show is chock full of information. You can find RGDS right
here.Ten Pence Arcade:
Focussing on video games culture between the 70s to the mid-90s, the Ten Pence
arcade also covers some of the lesser-known systems from the time. There are
also features around the restoration of video games cabinets and arcade PCBs, so if
you are one of the growing numbers of people who are jumping on the recent surge
to have an arcade machine in your own home, then this is probably one of the
best sources of information you will find. They also cover emulation, a method
with which you can emulate many of the systems on today’s modern PCs and Macs.
You can find the site and the podcast right here.The Ted Dabney Experience: In
association with The American Classic Arcade Museum, the Ted Dabney Experience
is a serious conversation about the golden age video arcade greats. With some
of the most iconic interviews, often with the original people involved in the
birth of games and systems back in the 70s and 80s, this is another definitive
history that is being documented in a professional way.The hosts, Paul Drury, Tony
Temple, and Richard May, all have a deep connection to the industry. Paul
writes for Retro Gamer Magazine, a British magazine that is also popular in the
USA, Tony holds the Guinness Book of Records for his high score on Atari’s
Missile Command, and Richard was co-founder of the popular geek-culture ‘design
portal’ website, Pixelsurgeon.Since 1998, Richard has been a
freelance illustrator with clients such as WIRED, Edge, Computer Arts,
Waitrose, Nordstrom, New Scientist and The Guardian. His long-term relationship
with British rock band Echobelly has seen him design the covers for the
majority of their post-Britpop era releases, so if you are still in any doubt
that this is a history that is also steeped in art, Richard is probably all the
proof that you need.You can find the Ted Dabney
Experience right here.Retro Magazines: I
collect vintage computing, gaming and technology magazines and now have a
collection that is in the high three digits and growing. From both a design and
technology perspective, they represent a stark contrast to the technology
available today and because the magazines are for the most part, in a physical
format from the pre-internet era, there is a sense of nostalgia every time I
pick one up.Today, it’s rare to see a
computer magazine, though back in the 80s and 90s there were at least two or
three magazines on the shelves for each of the many systems. What often stands
out is the design and publishing standards of the time, not forgetting the copy
contained within each magazine, they’re sometimes also representative of the
time when there were very few editorial standards around political correctness
and I find that it can be a fascinating insight into just how much the world
has changed.Retro Gamer: Talking
of magazines, if I didn’t let you in on the retro world’s best-kept secret, I
wouldn’t be doing any justice to the history of gaming. I mentioned Retro Gamer
earlier, and this is a magazine that I am lucky enough to own every issue of.Published monthly in a
physical and digital format, Retro Gamer since 2004, is a publication that
looks back at the entire history of retro through reviews, interviews, and
features and the publishing standards are outstanding. The magazine itself has
become a bit of a collector’s item of late, and it’s also one of the few
remaining physical gaming magazines available on the shelves in news stores.There is a no-nonsense
approach that feels down to earth and familiar and often there is a humorous
writing style that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The copy is always very well
written and edited and the production values, especially with the subscriber-only cover editions are in themselves an art gallery of gaming’s greatest
moments.Covering every major computer
and system, the magazine provides plenty of information every month, and it
provides the inspiration to go out and search for some of the lost gems from a
previous age that we might not have played, or played a lot and then forgot
about. You can subscribe wherever you are in the world and the link to the
subscription can be found on the Retro Gamer website here, or you
can purchase a physical copy from all good newsagents in the UK.The Importance of Computing in
the Digital Art World…The history of computing and
video games is fascinating and it’s not something that is reserved purely for
gaming enthusiasts, there is enough history throughout the above websites for
you to get at least a small idea of just how incredibly important early
computers and video games systems are to the modern age.Without the likes of Delux
Paint on the Amiga, a precursor to Photoshop, it’s fair to say that early
computers defined the way that we create digital art today. It’s also
surprising to find out things like the Sega Genesis (Megadrive outside of the
USA) is still being manufactured and supported in Brazil, despite being last
manufactured by Sega in 1997. The podcasts are always full of information that
will sometimes make you say wow, and other times make you say oh dear. They are
though, performing an incredibly important role in their quests to document
and retain the information that is quickly becoming lost.Most of the podcasts also
reflect back on the decades between the 70s and 90s, often covering popular
culture of the time and not just computers and video game consoles, if you have
fond memories of any of those decades then you’re likely to find something of
interest beyond the subjects of computing and gaming.Happy Creating!
Hopefully, you will have found
this week’s article at least a little useful if you plan on utilising
technology in your artwork. Being a long-time collector of technology, gaming
platforms and video games, I have a huge passion for anything and everything
that involves electronics.I even have a collection of
vintage gaming and computer magazines and am always on the lookout for more,
especially magazines from the USA which I missed out on here in the UK. I love
comparing the industry around the world and there’s nothing more retro than
sitting down with a coffee and flipping through the pages of a physical
magazine with the phone turned off and not a screen in sight!I mentioned earlier that I
never throw technology away, but in my younger days I did sell on computers
that I had owned for a while so that I could purchase the next latest model. My
parents funded what they could but that usually meant waiting until machines
came on offer towards the end of the model’s life, or as a result of me saving
up. Since then, all I seem to have done is try to replace whatever I sold in my
younger days and lived with the regret that I sold some hyper-rare items for
pennies on the dollar compared to what they are worth today, both in a monetary
and nostalgic sense.Even some of the magazines
that I had read at the time made me get that warm, safe, fuzzy feeling, and my
own video games were advertised in some, yet I still don’t have a single copy
of a magazine that featured any of my work, or any of the many letters I would
write to the letters pages which got published. I also passed up the
opportunity to work in video games journalism after being head-hunted at the
age of 14, a regret I carry to this day. By headhunted, I mean they were pretty much, taking anyone on who knew how to play video games and write BASIC programs! Big regret, massive, my life could have been so different!I have to admit that my
digital art studio has become more museum-like over the past few years, but my
ever-growing collection always manages to provide an abundance of inspiration
for my eighties inspired work, and I can justify it by calling it research
rather than hoarding! So, if you are sorting out your attic and need to find a
home for any old computers, vintage computing magazines, or if you need to
either know more about them or donate them to a good home, I’m all ears and
always willing to find space! My bank manager agrees that I should just cut out
the middle-man and exchange my art directly for vintage systems. Maybe they
should create a special version of Patreon where I get funded in tech in return
for art!That’s all for this time, but
keep an eye open for a future article on popular culture and art through the
70s, 80s and 90s, which might just give you a clue as to what my next artworks
are likely to feature!As always, stay safe, stay
well, and look after each other, oh, and Happy Creating!Mark x
About Mark…
I am an artist and blogger and
live in Staffordshire, England. My days are filled with art, dog walking and Teams
Meetings, while still being stuck somewhere in the eighties. You can purchase
my art through my Fine Art America store or my Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.com and
you can purchase my new works, special and limited editions directly. You can
also view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.comIf you are on Facebook, you
can give me a follow right here, https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia
You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia -
The Road to 2022
The Hottest Art Trends of 2022 Every year about this time, I
write a new article predicting the next year’s art trends and colour schemes and
this year is no different! With my usual level of over the top research and
many, many hours of running through the numbers, flicking between Google, Bing
and countless other search engines and consuming almost a lifetime’s supply of
art in the process, the predictions this year are the most solid yet!With Christmas around the
corner, it’s time to start thinking ahead to 2022 and the art trends that any
self-respecting thriving artist should consider working on. We very often talk
about the side-hustle on these pages and even if you have a regular style, some
of these trends might just give you a new sense of inspiration and to be
totally honest, next years trends look like they’re going to be fun to work on
too.
Highland Nights by Mark Taylor – Available in my Pixels and Fine Art America Stores now! Figuratively Speaking…
First on the list shouldn’t
really be a surprise, although look back a few years and figurative art gave
way to non-representational abstract and to an extent, for a while, it looked as
though figurative works were under threat of becoming less relevant outside of
the museum. The dry spell was short-lived and figurative works have become
increasingly popular year on year.Even during the times when
non-representational art was becoming increasingly popular, figurative works
never really went away with new Hockney’s coming on the market and just as
popular as ever.2022 will though, feel like
somewhat of a resurgence for figurative work with a number of exhibitions
already pencilled in (pandemic permitting), with a number already started and
running into 2022. There’s a major double David Hockney exhibition at the Bozar
Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, running through to the 23rd
January, and displays of work by Jenny Saville at Florence’s Museo Novencento,
and Tate Modern’s large scale show of recent work by Lubaina Himid runs right
the way through to July.
Glassmorphism – a recurring trend? Glassmorphism, and yes, that’s
an actual thing in user interface speak, is transitioning from screen to canvas
and it’s becoming ever popular in digital artworks where layer transparencies
are easier to accomplish than using traditional mediums.If you’re wondering what
Glassmorphism is, it’s essentially the effect of glass panes in a similar
fashion to how modern operating systems look with a slightly blurred background
image behind the foreground image. Whilst not impossible to recreate with
traditional mediums, it is made much simpler using tools such as Photoshop or
Procreate with the built-in Gaussian blur and transparency tools.It is a stylish way of
bringing the background of work into the foreground without it taking over
and the effect can be strikingly clean, although when used in user interfaces,
the misuse of Glassmorphism can create confusion and the work can end up
becoming what’s known technically as being, a bit of a mess.Illustrations that have been
hand-drawn, especially when used for product marketing will become even more
popular during 2022. Hand drawn works can convey an immediate feeling of
familiarity and warmth, and they have become massively popular with products
such as beer cans, particularly with the small micro-breweries that have been
popping up to produce IPA beers.There’s also a certain
aesthetic and quality to hand drawn elements that are not always easy to
produce using digital formats. Particularly popular and appearing in many
searches online are works that give the appearance of being etched, or utilising
lines to produce the shaded areas and they also have a great fit with another
trend that has begun to emerge through Google’s search trends, and that is in
the use of monotone and black and white images.
Eighties Social Media For those of you who have been
paying attention to the writing on these walls over the past few articles,
you’ll have noticed a heavy influence of creating retro and retro inspired
works to evoke those nostalgic feelings that more and more of us are getting as
we drift between episodes of the pandemic.Whilst nostalgia for the past
will be different for everyone depending on a myriad of factors like your age,
where you grew up, and the type of childhood you had, there is no doubt that
the pandemic has made us all reflect in some way and think back to simpler
times.For me, I grew up in the
seventies and have fond memories of my childhood though it wasn’t until the
eighties that I became much more independent and old enough to remember what I
did and what I enjoyed.The eighties was a very
formative decade for me, not least because that’s when I really began my art
career with a landscape work and the creation of graphic images using very
basic home computers of the time. It was also the decade Michael Jackson hooked
me with his Bad album, I was able to drink alcohol legally by the end of the
decade, and I had somehow managed to solve the Rubik’s Cube in less than a day
and have never solved it since.I have never stopped creating
80s inspired artworks, creating hundreds, if not thousands of designs since I started
out that somehow still continue to find some relevance with collectors and
still manage to sell today, but it seems that the art world is ready to grow up
and move into the nineties, or it will be in 2022.Nostalgia loving demographics
who grew up in the nineties have been reaching out for a while to ask when I
will be creating 90s inspired works, and an extensive search on Google Trends
seems to indicate that this is happening more broadly. There’s a new retro
demographic that we see every decade or so and this time it’s the 90s that will
be providing the visuals. There are also
nods to the year 2000 appearing in many online art markets, influences of that
crazy time when we all thought that our Nokia’s would die at the stroke of
midnight, a New Year’s Eve spent anticipating the end of the world in between
bottles of alcopop, it’s palm trees with a not-so-subtle hint of Miami, so let’s
party like it’s 1999!
Hot Flamingo by Mark Taylor – Available in my stores now! A genre of Japanese art that flourished
during the 17th to 19th centuries, Ukiyo-e is once again
providing design inspiration for artists in the 21st century.
Whereas traditional Ukiyo-e works were more likely to feature prominent kabuki
actors and sumo wrestlers, the method was used to depict a myriad of subjects. Often
created using woodblocks, the modern twist is somewhat less traditional.The modern take is more of a
combination of flat vector art and traditional woodblock, to produce flat,
simple images that will often make use of negative space on a page. The subject
matter is still wide and varied but the trends of the moment are more likely to
inspire works depicting travel and nature and simple figurative subjects.The result is a clean image
with crisp lines, as simple as it is complicated to get to grips with as an
artist, but if the artist masters the process of creating this style, the
effects that can be produced can look stunning and unique. I wasn’t too sure
why Google trends were pointing to this style until I began to wonder if the
past few years of living under the cloud of a pandemic meant that people were
searching for simpler, yet bolder statement pieces.
Sunset Valley by Mark Taylor – A flat art style with added foreground and background depth! – Now available in my Pixels and Fine Art America stores! The Re-emergence of Brutalism…
sort of…Maybe we’re all a little bored
of the same old, same old by now, and by that I mean, have you noticed how
everything and anything these days has a tendency to look the same? Whether it’s
transport or user interfaces, there’s an instant familiarity to everything that
we pick up, yet it hadn’t used to be like this.Open up an application on your
smartphone and you are likely to be greeted with the stock standard button
toggles in the settings, all displayed on a completely black background in
something they call night mode. User interfaces tend to stick to specific
design standards and if there is one thing about design standards that I have
learned throughout my creative career, it’s that they eventually change when we get
bored with them. Standards are generally only the standard whilst they’re the standard!Sometimes these dark modes are
wrapped up in the guise of being an accessibility feature, mostly though, these
dark interfaces are wrapped up in a feature called, “we think people will think
this looks cool”. The reality of accessibility though is that black and white
interfaces might work for some accessibility needs, they don’t work for all. Sorry to burst your UI bubble, but accessibility should run way deeper than a dark mode.That maybe explains why there
is a growing trend towards anti-design, where the artist rips up the rulebook
and creates new rules. Hey, what a novel idea, imagine creating something that
could even become its own art movement.
Rebirth by Mark Taylor – planetary anti-design! Of course, it’s available now from my stores! Anti-design shares more
similarities with brutalism than anything else, and yes, its alleged ugliness
is its beauty. Yet it also says so much, it makes a statement that we’re done
with conventional tastes. It challenges us, and it throws the traditional rulebook
right out of the window. In short, it’s a trend that maybe better conveys where
the world is right now, it’s the new kid on the block who definitely doesn’t
follow the rules that someone else made up.While we’re on the subject of
let’s break the rules, we’re also done with minimalism. Sure, we all cleaned out
the cupboards under the instruction of Maria Kondo, but with art, it’s also
about getting that hoarding habit back. It’s the Tiger King to Maria, and it’s
bold, bright, and beautiful. Intricate Maximalism isn’t all about just filling the
canvas, it is about making the use of the space that you have and creating
colour, objects, shapes, and patterns, that once again stem from the inner
artist’s artist.Clashing tastes, primary
colours, big, bold, always something new for the viewer to discover, statement
pieces that have staying power and no shame. It is the perfect opportunity for an
artist to bring out their inner weirdness.
Data Corruption by Mark Taylor – big, bold, brutal, and deep, at least for those who grew up during the birth of big data. This time last year we were
all looking for paintings that reminded us of the great outdoors, a year later,
we’re all ready to just make a break for it and run. This style is another one
that essentially rips up the rulebook, unexpected colours that just work, whimsical
settings straight out of an artist’s inner artist, of course, I’m talking about
escapism.There’s almost a crossover
with psychedelia inspired works and anti-deign, except this looks cleaner, if
not just as strange. Why would you paint a cat sitting on the window ledge
looking out at the astronaut in space while a tiger roams the jungle, all flowing
as one from the same canvas? Because you can and it looks great.This is a style that I have
tinkered with for many years, hence in some of my landscapes you might find oversized
flowers as a nod to the escapism genre, life is full of Easter eggs when you look
closely at some of my work, but this is a style where an artist can be an artist
with imagination and not feel weird that someone might not get it.Here’s the thing. They don’t
have to get it, escapism can be you, your innermost thoughts and feelings, it’s
supposed to make you wonder, no, you don’t have to get it at all, you just have
to enjoy it. I really think this is the artist’s art. Anywho, it’s on the rise
and it’s rising fast in the online trends. Hey, it’s like I always say, if you
can’t paint a landscape or a nude and make a million, just go ahead and be
weird, the world needs way more weird. Oh, and that really is the best piece of
artistic advice in the history of ever, free of charge and only here!
Fall Wall by Mark Taylor – notice the oversize flowers! Pop Art is back again…
I mentioned pop art last time
around and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Bright, bold design, heavy
text, grainy textures, and a trend more recently being influenced by the insane
amount of comic book tie-ins that have been coming out of Hollywood of late.I think to some extent, there’s
a real shift towards bright colours, statement pieces that elevate a space and
a mood, and if you take a look through all of the online art markets and in
particular spaces like Etsy, what you will find are a multitude of works with a
comic/pop-art vibe that isn’t necessarily based on official comics or
characters, but off-brand influences that trigger a nostalgic response, and there’s
that nostalgia thing popping up again!
Eighties Pop Music by Mark Taylor – I was creating digital pop-art way before Warhol! The Third Dimension…
I was on the fence about including
3D, it’s always a popular genre for digital artists but the subject matter in
the images created can often have a tendency to look the same at times. I jumped
off the fence when I beta tested the latest version of the iPad art app, Procreate,
with its shiny new 3D painting engine that takes 3D objects and allows you to
paint them, in 3D.One thing I have always
noticed with Procreate is that they tend to add features to the app that
reflect the direction digital art is travelling. What convinced me, even more, was the trend data that had been emerging over the past few months including
searches for more tactile mixed media works.The Staples…
There will always be a place
for the staples of the art world, landscapes and nudes are always immensely popular,
as too are abstracts, and there is a clear slide towards abstract minimalism of
late. The interesting one for me is around art that has a more tactile feel, so
assemblage art will continue to be popular, perhaps even more so as there does
seem to be more of a shift towards the quality and uniqueness that hand made
arts and crafts can bring. Hopefully, the move towards supporting more and more
small businesses and independent creatives will continue too.As for the rest of the art
world, you know, the high-value part of the market that the majority of
working artists don’t have any touchpoint with, will continue to thrive, especially
as shows and exhibitions that had been cancelled throughout the pandemic have
plans to tentatively reopen in 2022. That said, new variants of Covid could jeopardise
those plans for some. I think we might be seeing a move towards owning works of
familiar names at maybe more realistic prices than we’ve seen in the recent
past, and by realistic, that’s kind of a subjective word at this level.There seems to be a growing
trend of websites harvesting other people’s content and displaying it on their
websites, so if you’re not reading this at https://beechhousemedia.co.uk you will have been inadvertently directed to
reading a stolen copy of my work, so I can only apologise if some unscrupulous website
is making you either sign up, pay to read it, or serving ad after ad, but if
you come to the original source I can promise you that there are no ads, no
need to sign up, no charge, and you will be supporting a truly independent
creative directly!Until Next Time!
That’s all for this week but I
will be back soon with more news including news of some of the projects I have
been working on recently that have meant that my presence here has been a
little less regular of late!And I would also like to say a
huge thank you to those of you who have been supporting my work here by
purchasing prints of my work. This site is completely funded through my own
pocket, completely independent and I rely on a percentage of my print sales
through Fine Art America and Pixels to help with the growing costs! Even the
purchase of a gift card or sticker will provide funding that can go back into
creating more content for this site!Until next time, stay happy,
stay healthy, and stay creative!Mark x
About Mark…
I am an artist and blogger and
live in Staffordshire, England. My days are filled with art, dog walking and Teams
Meetings, while still being stuck somewhere in the eighties. You can purchase
my art through my Fine Art America store or my Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.com and
you can purchase my new works, special and limited editions directly. You can
also view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.comIf you are on Facebook, you
can give me a follow right here, https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia
You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia -
Make Your Place In The Art World
Make Your Own Place In The Art World Here we are in 2022 and it
might seem counterintuitive to suggest that there are alternatives to selling
your art that can still see you earning a good standard of living as an artist,
by not following a traditional path through the art world. The art world in
2022 has changed, some might say that there has even been a reset, but just how
easy is it to embrace the changes and become a commercially successful visual
artist?Art has never been what you
might call an easy business, less so as we tentatively and hopefully begin to
emerge from an almost three-year-long pandemic. During that time, buyer behaviours
have changed almost unrecognisably and once-thriving high street galleries have
either made the transition online or in some cases have shuttered their doors,
leaving the art world looking very different from a pre-pandemic time.It’s not just the business of
art that has changed, businesses of every description have had to adapt to some
quite mammoth challenges. Migrating bricks and mortar stores into the cloud, artists
cancelling long-planned exhibitions, and so many businesses of every description
have faced challenges that often felt more akin to the four horsemen of the
apocalypse turning up to a Downing Street party.As some parts of the world
began to reopen, things were not quite the same as we left them back at the
start of the pandemic. High streets look different, and buyers who would once
fill stores on a Saturday afternoon are not quite ready yet for re-socialisation,
instead, choosing to continue with online purchases.Pre-pandemic, it was the
younger population driving the digital economy, post-pandemic, we’re much more
likely to see a hybrid lifestyle emerging, with the younger generation
returning more readily to the high street, and older generations keener to
embrace newly developed digital skills and continuing with online commerce. In
the art world, that seems to be quite a seismic shift.Highland Nights by Mark Taylor – One of my latest landscape works, prints and other collectables available to order now! Over the course of the
pandemic, buying behaviours that changed out of necessity throughout the past
couple of years, have become ingrained and habitual, with many emerging behaviours
likely to stick around rather than return to anything like pre-pandemic normal.
Depending on your primary audience, how you think about doing business in a
post-pandemic world could be very different to the world of three years ago.There is now a mix of buying
behaviours that feel different. We are definitely moving towards a hybrid
approach in some sectors where buyers are starting their buying journey online
and then finishing off the process in physical stores. We are seeing more in
the way of social commerce, where brands are meeting shoppers in their own space
allowing the buyers to discover products at home through the power of social
media and then not worrying too much about where the ultimate sale happens,
just so long as it does. That makes much more commercial sense for companies
selling products, given that they’re less able than they once were to
access social media user tracking data that would once drive the direction of their
online business.Things are changing online
too. For the first time ever, Facebook has reported a significant drop both in
terms of revenue and daily active users, and that’s a really big shift in what
we have become accustomed to over the past decade or so. That infallible tech giant
seems to be creaking under the pressure of Apple’s privacy war on advertising,
as are other social platforms.I think to some extent because
people are generally pretty fed up with seeing the same old content repeated
over and over, especially where a lot of it has been found to be factually
questionable. Quality counts on social media, today more than ever, the filler
content is becoming a very distant memory with users now actively looking for
the value add, quality content that informs, entertains, educates, inspires and
converts readers into buyers.I also think it goes wider
than that, in part because, for businesses, social media has become an unwieldy
minefield over the past few years, not least, because of how little your
efforts seem to be amplified. There is now a wariness bought on by an inherent
risk that your marketing campaign might fall foul of one of the seemingly millions
of unknown algorithmic rules and you find yourself cancelled, cut off from the
clients you have been hyper-focused on retaining since time immemorial.One of my most recent retro-inspired artworks showing vintage technology and media! Obsolescence is available to order online. Copyright Mark Taylor 2022 – All Rights Reserved. Disinformation has spread
everywhere to the point that in some instances, it seems as if it has reached the
point of normalisation. That’s despite
some rather weak attempts by the tech giants and governments to put the brakes
on it. That makes it incredibly
difficult to find any level of organic reach unless the content cuts way above
the noise.As an independent artist, all
of this change is challenging. Pre-pandemic, there were a lot fewer people than
there are today who were willing to make substantial online transactions in
return for art, and even fewer who would be willing to consider purchasing art
through non-traditional routes to ownership. Then, the world changed and buyers
became much more accepting of doing things differently, and mostly they have
surprised everyone by embracing new ways of doing almost everything we once
thought they wouldn’t.So maybe it’s time we looked
to the future and asked the question, how can we sell more art in the future
and will we need to change our traditional approach to the transactional
process of swapping our art for cold hard cash? Just how different do we need
to be successful artists in a new world?Many alternatives to the
traditional art sale transaction approach already exist today, we just tend to
favour the traditional way of moving art onto walls which has historically followed the ‘you give me money and I give you
art’ model, with no intermediate complications beyond having a website and a
social media account.Traditionally, you develop a
following through exhibitions and galleries and then buyers turn up to a show,
fall in love with a work and then make the transaction. There is nothing simpler,
but buyers for the artwork of the majority of working artists, are now willing
to look at alternatives to the traditional art buying process in order to
purchase and consume their art. They’re not looking in the usual places and
spaces, and they’re looking at alternative ways to pay for the work.As artists, we will need to
adapt. Maybe we tend to favour the traditional approach to selling art because
we’re so much more comfortable with that, know where you are approach, or we
think buyers are more comfortable with that approach. I think buyers are not
only embracing new ways to transact, they’re actively looking for new ways to
transact that make the whole process of buying art and everything else, simpler
for them, and not necessarily us as artists.The
Normalisation of Selling Online…I
remember not all that long ago when you were expected as an artist to be
represented by a gallery. That’s how I began my art career, it was a linear
route that had been followed for centuries, and that’s what we were told to do
as artists. Today, there’s a huge blurring of the lines between physical
galleries and the online space, particularly as many galleries have been forced
to go down the online route.Tools of the Trade by Mark Taylor – Copyright 2021 -2022 – Available from my online stores now! Buyers
who make purchases from the majority of working artists who are either not in
the high-end fine art market or who are not represented by the mega-galleries are less likely to be swayed to make a purchase because the item is for sale
here, rather than there. They just want great art, great quality, and even at
the higher value end of the market, they want to find great value, and that’s
not to say that they’re looking for great value in a monetary sense, it’s much
broader than that.What has
excited me more than anything over the past couple of years is just how well
known some artists have become despite the lack of professional representation.
I take a look through the likes of Etsy and notice small micro-communities of
fans getting behind their favourite creators, anticipating their next release
and then making a purchase and leaving reviews before going on to become brand
ambassadors of real people and extolling the virtues of their favourite
creators online through social media. It’s not the galleries who do the
discovering today, it’s communities of people who might never have previously
stepped through a gallery door.Creators
seem to be finally waking up to the 21st Century/Post-Pandemic, need
for them to become the brand of me, and it’s awesome. So how are these up and
coming creative superstars pulling it off? They’re doing things differently, they’re
being more human-like than corporate-like, they’re being way more authentic and
they’re going direct to the buyer and making the process easy. So how do us
mere mortals get anywhere close to doing that?Rip up
the rule book!I firmly
believe, just as I always have, that independent creator’s can shake off the
starving artist image and become successful artists if they first shake off the
belief that they need things like gallery representation or the thinking that
they absolutely must follow the norms and rules of the traditional art world to
be successful, or that they first need to wait around until they are discovered
by the establishment. Top tip here, there were never any rules, just a bunch of
over-confident people telling you that there were.This
is exactly why you don’t have to follow the traditional transactional process
of getting your art on people’s walls. There are no rules that have been etched
in stone to say that you need to sell through a physical store, a gallery or at
a show, it’s perfectly okay to get your art on walls in a way that works for
you and your buyer without worrying that the sale doesn’t count because you cut
out the middleman, or because you decided to take three turtle doves in payment
for your work instead of cash, so long as it works for you and your buyer. It
is though, probably worth bearing in mind that as cute as Turtle Doves are,
they’re not great at paying the bills.If
there was any kind of etched in stone rule in the art world, it should be that
independent artists should stop worrying about what the not-so-independent art
world hierarchy is telling them to do. If you’re worried about how you are
viewed by the purists, I’m not convinced you’re at that point, any more independent than an artist who is tied to a gallery contract. You have to dare
to be different.Toucan Play This Game by Mark Taylor – This fun piece is available from my online stores! Copyright 2022 – All Rights Reserved. What
all of this means, of course, is that you now have a duty to be less corporate
and more you, and that goes for everything you do including how you present
yourself online. From emails to your website, people are looking for authentic you
rather than boardroom you.Do you
want to know what kind of emails I stop what I’m doing to read? Those that aren’t
filled with generic corporate B/S sent out multiple times a day. You don’t have
to follow a traditional corporate template that sounds like it was written by a
deskbound robot. The difference between pre-pandemic email and email in the new
dawn of independent creators is in the tone of the email and the frequency.This
morning I checked my emails and found three from the same company that had
arrived overnight. This afternoon, another three from the same company. Sure,
they were all trying to sell me different versions of the same widget, but I
don’t have the time to be reminded every 90-minutes about a widget I didn’t
sign up to hear about in the first place.The
email I did read was one that I get in my inbox maybe once a month, sometimes once or
twice a week, depending on the story the author of the email is sharing with me.
I can relate to the author, we share the same interests, the communication is
less corporate and more friend, I can get behind that, it feels more personal,
less like I don’t have a choice, and it’s not screaming desperation.I do get
it, you sign up to an email marketing platform that gives you maybe 500, 5,000
or unlimited emails a month to send out to potential clients, that’s not a
target you need to strive to meet, it’s an arbitrary number linked with
whatever price tier you subscribe to of the email service you use.I once
read something that suggested that an average year of emailing has the same
ecological impact as driving a couple of hundred miles by a gas-guzzling car. If
that truly is the case, then just the act of cutting down on the number you
send will have an impact on the environment. Instead of the typical, do you need to print
this message off, save the trees, straplines, you can at least highlight the
fact that you are reducing filler content/spam. If you are sending emails, you
absolutely have a responsibility to respect peoples time.The
company that sends me at least nine emails a day must be surely responsible for a
big chunk of global warming. I’m not sure how accurate those figures are, but
not having to think for five minutes about filler content that absolutely no
one reads will gift you with some time back that you could spend doing
something useful, or having a nap, both equally less corporate than buy this, or
this, or that, and make our shareholders happy.Hot Flamingo by Mark Taylor – Available to order now from my stores! Image – Copyright Mark Taylor 2022 There’s
something else that these superstar creators are all doing in this new world,
and that is, they are giving themselves permission to think of their art
practice as being a business rather than a hobby. There’s no room for the meek
to hide away thinking that if they come out and announce to the world that they
are a business owner they will be laughed at by the purists, or they will be
seen as being a sell-out. In the art world, you really can’t win either
argument, so don’t even try. Think of your practice as anything less than a
real business and it will always be less.We
often talk about finding our place in the art world, but I am a big believer in
making your own place in the art world. Stop falling in line with the safe
trends that everyone else is doing and following, that’s not how you create a
whole new art movement, and it seems to be a much less useful approach in a
world that has changed so much. The world this side of the pandemic is far more
accepting that you can define your own place in the art world by being your very
own kind of weird.There
really is no point in simply trying to fit in. Do that and you will blend into
the background along with everyone else. Follow your weird and stand out
because as an artist, that’s your mission, to be honest, it always has been.
That’s how much the art world has changed in the past couple of years, buyers
are being less safe in their choice of art and someone has to feed their newfound appetite for different. In fact, I’m not even sure all that much has
changed in that respect, maybe what has changed is that buyers are more
accepting of not following the current trend or the most well-known name.You
also have to put the hours in…In
knowing your place you also have to look beyond your talent and just get on
with putting the work in. That’s how these superstar creators are suddenly
building tribes. They’re figuring out that the world changed and people are
more into making deep connections with other people today than maybe they ever
were before. Hey, we’ve all been mostly locked inside for a few years, now we
yearn for that human interaction again.These
creative rockstars are suddenly working out that relationships matter. Be it by
email or on social media, there is less of a distance between the buyer and the
creator. More than that, these creators know that building relationships are
not only the key to bringing people on board, they understand that any
relationship is better if it is built on trust, and that takes a little time to establish.Look
through the comments on social media, through the interactions in the creator’s
online presence, the creators are talking directly to the buyers, more
importantly, they are responding and respecting that someone has given up their
time to engage. What you will also notice is that tribes are talking to each
other, there’s way more interaction than there was before.What
these rockstar artists are more aware of is that they are competing, not with
other artists, but for peoples time and attention. They are competing to be
heard and noticed and not to be drowned out by all of the noise. They’re listening
to their tribe and they’re telling their story, and if they’re not telling their
story, they’re at least telling people how and why they’re creating what they’re
creating. They’re absolutely talking about the ‘why’ their art exists.Adrift Under a Neon Sky by Mark Taylor – Available on a wide range of products, even jigsaws! Image copyright Mark Taylor 2022 That’s
something that feels completely different in the new world, this engagement alone is as much a part of the
art as the art itself. The art is only half of the conversation the artist is
trying to have with the world. If we were to simply post our latest creation and
then move on without saying a word, I’m not sure at that point we can even say
that the artist matters. The art could have been created by a robot, and it is
being noticed by buyers more than ever before.Many
buyers are going to the exact same places as they did before, but now we have
new buyers who might have discovered art for the first time during lockdown.
They’re certainly still looking in the traditional places, especially where
those places exist online, but they’re also more accepting that great art isn’t
exclusive to a gallery, and they are most definitely finding out that the most
unique art is rarely, if ever in a gallery.More
and more people I talk to have been mentioning just how much they’re looking
for unique works through platforms that might not have been front and centre
pre-pandemic and one of those platforms is Patreon. It’s a whole new way (that
existed before) of engaging those who are moving away from the traditional
transactional process of acquiring art.Back
in the day when artists were artists, and the plague ran rampant throughout the
world, artists would have patrons who would support them so that the artist
could spend their days creating masterpieces and they would be fully funded to create
whilst taking steps to avoid catching the plague. What a time that must have
been.Okay,
not much has changed really, apart from fewer artists today can rely on a
traditional patron funded art career. Where traditional patronages exist today,
they’re also a lot different to patronages of the past, they often come in the
form of residencies, or through brand collaborations, and that also means that
the artist tends to now have to do a lot more than simply focus on creating.What
you can do today is crowdsource a group of patrons to cover your costs and fund
your art career using the power of modern technology and a platform called
Patreon. If people like what you do, they can each pay a small (or large) sum
of money to support you and in return, they will claim rewards for backing you.
Patreon
is something that as an artist, I can get behind because it takes art back to
its very roots in society. This is how artists would be more typically funded
at one time. Today we tend to focus on the artist who creates the artwork but
during the renaissance, for example, it was the patron or a collective group of
patrons who would dictate the cost, materials, size, location and subject
matter of the artwork, the artist would be almost secondary.Mountain by Mark Taylor – This is one of my older works, it’s also my best selling work ever! Copyright Mark Taylor 2015 – 2022 Today,
artists are mostly in control of the entire creative process, Patreon doesn’t
take any of that benefit away from artists. The creative process is still mostly
owned by you, you determine what you create, but your backers will generally
only back whatever resonates with them, so you will need to take their lead.
They can pick and choose what and who to back, and that’s the key, whilst the
creative process is entirely your own, you will need to keep backers hooked.When I
mentor new (mostly younger) artists, setting up a Patreon account is often one
of the first things they think about doing, and this is where I always advise a
little caution. Namely, that Patreon is just as uncertain as any other sales
method, until such time that it’s not.You will
have way more flexibility to be able to build direct relationships with
collectors rather than irregular or casual buyers which in itself sounds like
any artists ultimate dream, but the keyword here is relationship, and Patreon
requires you to build and nurture relationships over the long term. It’s not a
five-minute fix to fund your previous or current poor life decisions before becoming
bored with the whole thing and moving on when the money doesn’t flow in
immediately. Think of it as sowing a seed in the spring, it could very well be
next spring before you see green shoots.Patreon also isn’t something that should be taken lightly. Supporting different tiers
of donation requires you to do something other than just create art, it
requires you to invest time in making sure that any rewards are indeed rewarded
to those who have shown support for you and your work. You will also need to
make sure that rewards reflect the level of contributed funding. If I’m
pledging five bucks a month, my expectations are that my reward should be
something worth less than five bucks, if anything at all other than the
creative output and knowing I have supported a creative. If I’m pledging a
thousand bucks per month, my expectations might be a little different, it’s
subjective, it depends on the audience. Some backers (as in, few) will be happy
to pay a thousand bucks a month for little to nothing other than a feeling of
support in return, others might expect a vial or two of blood.If you
don’t have enough time or think you won’t have enough time to fully commit to
Patreon or any other service just like it, don’t do it, or at least limit what
you do with it until you can support your supporters properly. You will need to
go into any Patreon activity in a position of being prepared. I know of far too
many creators who have signed up to the platform, suddenly gained traction, and
then had no plan at all to deal with rewards and it has turned out to become an
unmitigated disaster with plenty of disgruntled backers deciding not to back
you at all.A Perfect Day by Mark Taylor – Available on a range of archive-quality print mediums, and now, as a jigsaw too! Order from my online store today! Image: copyright Mark Taylor 2022 Patreon
is also not some golden panacea to riches either, I can’t stress this enough. It
takes an insane amount of effort on your part to set up and own a process that
backers can trust and find value in, and an insane amount of effort to fulfil
rewards once you start to build up the number of backers. You might even need
to think about outsourcing some of this work down the line.It
doesn’t at all, negate the need to carry out marketing which will be a bit of a
blow to those who already struggle with the work involved in surfacing your art
in front of potential buyers through more traditional approaches. It’s also worth
being mindful that any serious level of income is not likely to happen
overnight. Patience is itself an art.When
setting up your Patreon campaign, never, ever, over-promise, and never
underestimate just how much work is involved in making sure that rewards are
sent out in a timely manner, particularly where a physical process is involved
in delivering physical items.Just
in terms of shipping, you will want to make sure that you are not spending more
money on getting a product into people’s hands than you earn from the campaign because that would mean that you become the backer of your supporters, and
that’s also not how it’s supposed to work. You really need to have the mindset
of a CEO to create a successful Patreon campaign, and that means being
realistic, robust, resilient, and willing to put in a heap of effort for
any level of reward, small or big.That
latter point might sound blindingly obvious to most folk, yet there are creatives
on Patreon, even today, who can’t possibly be making more in income than they
spend on outgoings. This doesn’t surprise me one bit, humans don’t much like
planning, and fewer still like to get to grips with how to run a business
before they begin to run a business. Top tip here too, learn the basics of
business before you start any journey towards selling your work, in whatever
way you sell it, you should even approach Patreon with a business-first mindset.You
should also never underestimate the sheer amount of work that is involved in
organising the logistics of any physical shipping method. Patreon is a global
platform and as such, your logistical issues become global logistical issues as
soon as you go live. You also need to ask yourself some very probing questions
such as, how do I scale if it takes off, what’s my plan B, and am I exerting
way too much effort/funding/energy/will to live, for what I get in return, and
if so, can my energies be refocussed on doing something else that has a better chance
of reward.1 UP – A classic retro-inspired vintage gaming technology artwork by Mark Taylor – Copyright 2021 – 2022 Can it
pay off? I know of a growing number of creators who now solely generate their
entire income through using Patreon and some of them live very well on the
model, some can even afford to live in proverbial palaces in the Bay Area of
San Francisco, yes the rewards can be that good.This
is a model that has the potential to replace the nine to five and the
traditional sales process, even with as few as a couple of thousand patrons
paying you the cost of a cup of coffee each month, but don’t expect it to be
quite like a regular nine to five. It also scales really well, with the only
single point of failures being in your ability to keep creating and your
ability to keep on top of getting the rewards out on time.While
it can pay off, you will need to take a cautionary approach to thinking about placing
all of your creations (eggs) in one (virtual) basket! Never think that the
amount that has been pledged will be what you actually receive, you will need
to pay fees from anything you make.Another
cautionary note is around the level of fall off in supporters you might
experience with what is essentially a slightly adapted subscription model.
There will never be any guarantee that someone who pledged this month will
pledge at all next month or ever again. So, as a single source of income, it can
be unpredictable, but in fairness, that can be the case with any sales process.
What
you are doing with these types of platforms is betting on the subscription
model staying in vogue in some of the most uncertain economic times the world
has probably ever faced. What you are doing with a traditional sales process is
betting on that exact same thing.As a
platform, it remains only a single piece of a larger puzzle, you still need to
have other elements in place such as somewhere to physically live online so
that you can host content and go deeper than the platforms allow and you need
somewhere where you can focus on building relationships with your supporters.
If you see Patreon or any of the multitude of services like it as the only
piece of the puzzle that you need, it might be more prudent to find a simpler
jigsaw.At
its simplest, these kinds of platforms are recurring payment systems. They essentially
collect rent in return for managing payments. Signing up doesn’t give you a
ready-made audience or extend your reach further than you already have it,
those elements still need you to put in the marketing work to make it happen,
but these platforms will make the backers experience way simpler, and that is
really, really, important. Backers are looking for the kind of simple that you
most likely don’t already offer.Having
said that, despite the work needed, Patreon is a platform that is well
recognised but never plan on it lasting. Hopefully, at some point, you will
outgrow it and be able to stand alone with your own business model and your own
patron base. You do have to be mindful of the fees, some of my peers who have
found success on the platform are paying monthly fees in the high four figures,
but there’s no gain without at least a little pain as they say.Pool Party by Mark Taylor – One of my best selling works that promises to add some tropical fun to any space! Image copyright Mark Taylor 2022 Art
collectives are becoming huge, simply because they generally offer some of the
most unique art from the most unique artists but without the overhead, you would
find from a premium high-end gallery. I have been a champion of art collectives
for what seems like forever, where a number of artists share the workload, the
fee’s, and ultimately, the buyers.That
latter point might seem like a real rub, but there are multiple models that
make sense for collaborative efforts. Online exhibitions, online auctions, even
art rental, but it only ever makes sense if each and every creator is signed up
to the same playbook and they actually contribute an equal amount of effort
too.There
are things that you will need in place to be able to do this, firstly, you will
need to form a collaboration with like-minded artists who all share a common
goal. Next, you will need to decide on a model that each of you can run with,
or at least live with, and finally, everything has to be done with the utmost
transparency.The
difficult part is in finding a collaboration that works for everyone. Sure, it’s
easy to find artists who say they want to collaborate, it’s quite another thing
to find a bunch of artists, all equally as committed to pouring their art and
soul into a collective effort. In my experience, collaborations stem from
existing relationships that have been built around mutual trust and respect,
and even then, it all needs to be formalised in writing, even if you are
working with your best friend. Think of it as a pre-nuptial agreement, money
can become quite divisive, especially if the contribution of effort has been
lacking from one or more sides of the collaboration.Storage Wars by Mark Taylor – Another vintage technology inspired artwork that documents computer storage media from across the decades – pre-1970s to the present day. Image, copyright Mark Taylor 2022 – Available to order from my online store! Art
rentals are a great way to keep art moving, but you will also need to consider
the arrangements under which the art is essentially rented. There are
logistical issues, insurance, cleaning and maintenance fees, and the cost of
replacement work for works that have become damaged or lost. It happens more
than you would think, especially in hotels (it gets stolen) and in public
spaces (it gets kicked).You
also need a constantly evolving inventory, but the joy of this model is that
you can find repeat income from the same work. My rental works are provided
under a collaboration of six artists, each of us committing to produce a
certain number of new pieces each year, and we also offer a final rental price
which means that the longer the art is rented, the lower the cost of outright
ownership at the end of the rental. The rental covers the added costs of
insurance, hanging services, cleaning, and replacement.Print
materials are always at the premium end of the quality scale, not least because
that reduces the ongoing replacement costs, but also because premium materials
attract a premium price, and very few businesses will be inclined to have a
dollar store quality print hanging on public display in their reception,
neither will they want something so small that it has little to no impact so you do
have to think big. You also have to justify the price you set, surprisingly,
the image alone can’t do that because it’s the same image that might also be
available as a dollar store print.The
downside to this model is that the upfront costs can be high, you’re
essentially paying wholesale prices for your own work on top of the cost of
creating it, and that’s before you earn a dime. But savvy businesses are keen
to have truly never before seen work hanging on their walls rather than a
costly reproduction that’s also on display in every other hotel room and in the
new world, they’re super-keen to switch things around without the feeling that
they need to sell an existing piece before they replace it.The
point to remember with a rental model is that you really cannot skimp on
quality, even at the beginning. It takes a little time to recoup any
investment, I tend to place work for between 6-12 months before I see any
kind of profit so you will need to factor in an immediately high outlay, but at
some point, it will, or at least should, become a reasonably passive income and
you should then have time to focus on other things.You
will also be approached by artists who want to join the rental scheme and offer
their work. Think of this as the equivalent of someone buying into your
business, (most are put off when they realise there are costs) and it will water
down any income if it is equally shared. Only encourage this if you need more collaborators
who will collaborate and be part of an overall collective of artists sharing
the work/costs equally.Tun it Up by Mark Taylor – Another classic piece that will transport you back to decades gone by! Available to order from my online stores! Image, copyright Mark Taylor 2021-2022 Art
auctions, both physical and online can also work well for an artist collective
to engage with, particularly where those auctions also support wider community
causes. Whilst there is nothing stopping a solo artist from going down the route of
auctions, it does become a richer experience for the buyer if they are able to
see and select from a wide range of work created in different mediums, at
different price points and from a selection of genres.The
shift towards homemade, quality and local…Maybe
because we couldn’t travel for a couple of years, but the pandemic and the
associated lockdowns began to drive local trade, the search for unique quality
products, and a realisation that people are putting way more thought into
sustainability.Community-based art projects that raise local awareness of issues and initiatives can be
a vehicle, as an artist, you are not only in a position where you can
visually document what’s important in your community, you can become a vehicle
of change within your community, raising your own artistic profile on the way. Bear
in mind that community projects should be more community, less you.I have
said this many times over on these very pages, but if you are not engaging your
local community with your creations, you are missing out on one of the best
sources of exposure, repeat business, and gaining recognition for what you do
which may then be more widely recognised further afield.Artists
have been at the heart of communities for centuries, yet in the 21st
Century it seems easier to find yourself serving a global market than a local
one, and that could mean that somewhat ironically, you are missing out on many
more sales.That
too might seem counterintuitive, but to compete in a global art market is
difficult. Despite the relative ease of entry, given all of the online tools
artists now have at their disposal, the act of working in a global space makes
everything more challenging, not least in the amount of more nuanced,
hyper-focused marketing effort that you need to put in.Your
target market might be similar in other territories and regions but the
marketing message will very likely need to be different to match what
geographically disparate cultures respond better to. If you’re struggling to
find sales with the odd scattering of social posts, here, there, and everywhere,
in the hope that anyone and everyone will see and respond to that post while making
your message resonate with twenty different cultures, you need to be mindful
that sending a coherent marketing message that resonates in each community, is
going to be a whole new level of character building.The
point here is, if you had any sense of dislike for marketing before, try doing
it properly across multiple territories. Despite the saying that goes something
along the lines of, the art will sell itself, yep, no, it doesn’t, even if you’re pretty darn close to being the next Matisse. Art will sell itself, is just
about the biggest myth there is beyond, your creativity will be discovered very
quickly.Pisces by Mark Taylor – Like a fish out of water, this work is also available from my online store! Copyright Mark Taylor 2022 I
think, we truly are witnessing a seismic shift in the behaviour of buyers, we’re
certainly seeing a democratization of the art world and we are finally seeing
independent artists find the level of success they deserve. There have been
plenty of creatives who have proven throughout the pandemic that it is possible
to generate a good living from their creative endeavours by embracing change
and adapting to have a much more entrepreneurial spirit.I so
often speak to independent artists who feel like they are running on the spot
and getting nowhere fast. Art has always been a long game, especially for those
artists who are chasing the unicorn we call, ‘getting discovered’ as if that in
itself is some kind of golden ticket. What the pandemic has shown us, is that
the art world that the majority of working artists create within, has embraced
some seismic changes and it is entirely possible to have a successful art career
without the pursuit of stereotypical discovery, but you will have to be willing
to embrace difficult and challenging and put your business front and centre of
what you do. You are not selling out by making a living.When
you talk to or read about those previously unknown creatives who have found a
level of commercial success throughout the pandemic, the one thing that you
might notice is that their attitudes towards running their art practice as a
business have been a departure from pre-pandemic times where waiting to be
discovered was their primary objective. Top tip here, no one gets paid to wait around.Now,
those creatives are more like CEOs of startups, embracing entrepreneurship and
actively doing things that get them noticed, things that we’re not all that
comfortable with, and things that make you get up at 5am, the difference is
that you will want to get up at 5am if you get it right.Those
creatives are also more likely to have a plan, and they’re more likely to spend
time searching for things that will make them stand out rather than searching and waiting, for the golden ticket that is discovery. They are being discovered
in a totally different way, and more importantly, on their own terms. That my
dear friends sums up just how much the art world has changed.Glow Over A Dry Stone Wall by Mark Taylor – one of my favourite paintings that I created a couple of years ago. Also available on jigsaws, and the ultimate in luxury, museum-quality acid-free prints! Copyright Mark Taylor 2022 Hopefully,
this post has got you thinking about how the world has changed and given you a
few new ideas about how you might want/need to engage with your market in the
future. It’s difficult to predict with any degree of accuracy what might happen
this time next year or even next week and less so in the art world, but there
is little doubt that buying behaviours have changed dramatically and we really
need to respond differently.There
are so many marketing guides out there on the ‘tinternet’ that have been
written by marketing gurus and huge organisations who will all readily share
most (but never all) of their secrets to success. They’re often brilliant, even
genius, and tell you exactly what you need to do to get results. Except, they
don’t really tell you anything that is relevant because you’re not playing in
anywhere near the same space. A giant corporations marketing budget is likely
to be more per week than most working artists make in a year, so following the
corporate master plan is more likely to frustrate rather than help.I come
to this from a lived experience perspective. Three plus decades in, there’s a
heap more I probably got very wrong than I got right along the way, and I never
once followed the fail-fast method of learning. I often failed slowly, frequently,
painfully. What has though become more and more obvious throughout that time,
is that when your market changes for whatever reason, you have to change, adapt,
and embrace it.About
Mark…I am
an artist and blogger and live in Staffordshire, England. My days are filled
with art, dog walking and Teams Meetings, while still being stuck somewhere in
the eighties. You can purchase my art through my Fine Art America store or my
Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.com and you
can purchase my new works, special and limited editions directly. You can also
view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.comIf you
are on Facebook, you can give me a follow right here, https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia
You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia -
Collecting Art on a Budget in 2022
Collecting Art on a Budget… Every artist was once unknown
until the point they earned the badge we call, discovered. Of course, some
never do quite reach the heady heights of discovery no matter how hard they
work for it, and that’s a real shame because the world is really missing out on
some great art by ignoring the small businesses run by the many independent
creatives who are not only contributing so much to the arts but supporting
local economies too.If you are thinking about
becoming an art collector on a level that’s a little more than just a casual
buyer, it’s often said that you will need a keen eye, a budget that you are
able to stretch on demand, ideally a few spare walls and an expectation that
once you step on to the art collecting path the bug for collecting is likely to
bite you very hard. It’s at this point that the budget will have to stretch even
more.From experience, that advice
is probably good advice. You can become hooked on collecting and spend an
insane amount of money feeding your newfound passion, but collecting art doesn’t
have to break the bank. If you don’t mind missing out on hanging a genuine
Matisse on your wall, there are much more affordable ways to collect great art on a budget that most people can probably afford, even when economies shrink.
That’s the real joy of art, there’s something literally for everyone to enjoy.
Circuit – One of my most recent releases and one of the most challenging abstracts I have ever created! I am a big believer in making
art accessible to everyone. Art isn’t something that should only ever be
enjoyed by the world’s most affluent people, it should be enjoyed, cherished,
and celebrated by anyone and everyone who wants to either produce it, collect
it, or support the arts in general.So, this week we will be
looking at some of the options you have to not only build up a great collection
on a budget but also make sure that what you are collecting is way more unique
than you might find if you were purchasing mass-produced prints from the big
box stores or even original works from one of the many mega-galleries that seem
to have become more about corporate than they are about art.We will also take a dive into
the world of art collecting a little more broadly. There’s a great deal of
information that you will need to know even when you are collecting on a budget
and with a little homework you can avoid many of the pitfalls that new collectors
face. Working out what’s marketing hype and what’s worth collecting can be
challenging to the uninitiated, but the good news is that learning to avoid the
pitfalls isn’t at all that difficult.It is, as they say, all
relative. Whether you are spending a Million plus on a Banksy or a hundred
bucks on Etsy, the same principles, issues, and challenges can often apply. It
is all relative to what you can and can’t afford to lose, and ideally, if you
follow some simple steps and carry out your own due diligence, you shouldn’t be
losing anything.Before you decide on
collecting anything or even coming up with a budget, it’s worth spending some
time working out firstly, why you want to collect art, and secondly, you need to
figure out what you love. You also need to decide whether an artwork’s future
value will be a determining factor in your collection, or whether you can live
with the likelihood that finding a bargain Matisse at a yard sale is a lot like
your chances of winning the lottery over and over again.I can answer this in a single paragraph.
No. Art isn’t generally a good investment if you are collecting it on a tight budget,
or looking to get rich quick. It’s not even a great investment when budget isn’t
an issue. Art is a risky business where prices can be swayed by a single critic
review.You can make a successful
investment in art, and there’s little to no love needed towards a piece of art
if the outcome you want at the end is purely monetary. But, art is mostly, and for most people, a
really bad investment if you want to get rich quick or get rich at least
anytime soon from the proceeds of the art alone. Personally, I have never been
convinced that collecting art with its future
investment potential at the front of your mind is a great reason to collect art
at all, even if you can afford top tier artworks from the world’s most elite
galleries there is never any guarantee that you will see any kind of financial
return on your investment.The value of art is based on a
very simple model of supply and demand. It’s also a model which also brings
with it, huge swings upwards in value at times, and equally and more likely,
huge swings in a downward direction too. That can be the case if the art receives
a bad critic review or when there are downward shifts in the economy, although
the economy is often less of a factor.If you want to fully
understand whether art is a good or bad investment, you only need to look at
the number of art galleries that have shuttered their doors for the last time
in the past decade. About ten years ago, I remember asking a gallery owner
friend of mine if they would set up another gallery if they could start all
over again and the answer was a resounding no. It had never dawned on me before
then that galleries are essentially making continued investments either in art
or artists that may never sell, whereas collectors are purchasing the work because
they want it and don’t necessarily want or need to sell it on.For wealthy investors, art is
perhaps more of an alluring investment opportunity, particularly if art is just
a single strand within a much broader investment portfolio where you are not
too dependent on one particular investment opportunity coming through. With some artworks from some artists, there’s
much less of a risk that the artwork will depreciate in value over time, but
that kind of art tends to already be at the upper end of the scale when it
comes to its value.Art at the tens of thousands
to million buck plus level is less likely to lose money than art that is more
affordable to the masses but that doesn’t always mean even at this level, that
the artwork will always increase in value. A critical review from a
professional art critic can make or break an artist’s career and the value of a
collection, as can a misstep by the artist or any number of other factors.Art isn’t like the stock
market, it can increase in value when the financial markets are performing at
their worst, so for some people, it makes sense to diversify their portfolios
by adding in a pricey art collection to their portfolio in the hope that it
increases in value. Very little about collecting art at this level is really
about collecting art, it becomes more about managing risk. It’s all about
scarcity, supply, demand, and knowing when to make a move.When it comes to collecting
art at the level where you are talking about spending tens of thousands or
maybe millions of dollars or pounds rather than buying a small original from
your favourite Etsy seller, your budget will need to also stretch to caring for
the work. That care will most likely need to include things like having to have
temperature-controlled environments with detectors that measure humidity
levels or making sure that any lighting doesn’t create harmful UV rays that
could make the paint fade or crack prematurely. As art ages, it becomes needier and needier.This is a level of art
collecting that can quickly become more expensive than owning and operating a
private jet, in some cases a fleet of private jets, and oh, don’t forget the
insurance, management fees and the team of preservation experts that you’ll
need to have on call. If you then want to move the art from A to B, you might
also need a team of specialist art movers to take care of things. If you think about
the cost of sending regular parcels around the world, think about sending
multi-million dollar works on an aircraft in a temperature-controlled container
along with a team of experts who know how to look after work in transit.The simple fact that we can’t
get away from is that art collecting can be expensive, but for those of us who
are unable to drop down eye-watering budgets of between $5000 and $500,000, or
possibly even more, art collecting tends to be something that won’t necessarily
make you mega-rich in monetary terms, but it will certainly make you richer in
culture.Risks to artists can be just
as high as they are for collectors, art is generally expensive to create and
there are very few guarantees that anything created will sell. It’s not uncommon
for many artists to always have a collection of their own work on hand, and
that goes for some of the most prolific and popular artists too.There was one piece of career
advice I remember getting from my mentor when I first started creating art
professionally and that was to never become an artist. Instead, he told me that
there would be way more financial benefit if I became one of the supporting
cast. I had no idea what he was talking about until my first gallery gig when I
handed over 50% of the sale to the gallery, after spending 30% on art supplies,
and giving 20% away to the tax office. It is though, the one piece of advice I
am glad I never took.
Out of Order – A follow-up work to Circuit – Mark Taylor (2022) Art is filled with jargon, so
understanding what some of that jargon really means is perhaps one of the first
things you need to get on top of. Art is either sold in the primary or
secondary market, regardless of who created it and where it’s purchased from.Primary sales of artworks are
sales that originate from the artist, their agent, or the artist’s studio or
publisher. There is a link back to the artist in the primary market so if you
buy through this route, it’s a safe bet that the artist will receive some level
of benefit or payment. But never assume that the artist will receive the bulk
of that benefit or payment, most of what an artist earns will go immediately out
of the door as soon as it lands in their bank account.The secondary market is
usually a sign of a growing interest in an artist’s work where work is resold,
usually through secondary galleries and art brokers, and even at auction
houses. The artist doesn’t usually directly benefit from secondary market
sales, other than those sales solidifying the artist’s worth and adding to the
artist’s sales record. Things might change as we progress towards blockchain
technologies becoming more mainstream, but we’re a way away from that right
now.If you are serious about
collecting, even if you are on a budget, it’s worth understanding the
differences between primary and secondary markets, and it’s also worth noting
that prices on either market are not
always lower or higher than the other, you can pick up art on the secondary market
sometimes for considerably less than the price it would sell for on the primary
market, equally, you could pay significantly more. This is where it all starts
to get really complicated.The secondary market can be a
really good indicator of potential future value and often defines the true
value of the work as prices are driven directly by market forces rather than
galleries, or even artists. Any art is only worth as much as whoever wants it,
is willing to pay for it. Of course, that’s also true of the primary market, no
matter how many conversations an artist has with themselves about what their
art is worth, it’s the market who will decide what to pay.It’s worth pointing out here
that artists don’t always have the option of setting the initial price,
especially if they are represented. That might be the case for some artists who
work in the print on demand space too, their prices are usually a combination
of production and material costs, shipping, and usually only a smaller
percentage goes back to the artist in the form of a commission.If you are buying from a
secondary market, discounts are rarer than unicorns. The market decides what
any particular work is worth and if you are not prepared to pay what someone
else is, you won’t be able to secure the work. Galleries, art brokers and even
artists might try to influence this, but ultimately the buyer decides. However,
if you regularly purchase from the primary market, discounts are less rare.
Many galleries will look after regular collectors and might offer discounts of
between 5% and 10%, but it’s also worth remembering that this discount isn’t
usually available from an artist directly if they are represented by a gallery.
Any professional artist will
never undercut the gallery they are signed with. It makes little to no sense in
discounting the work and jeopardising any future representation from the
gallery, but if you are buying enough works via their gallery then don’t be
afraid to ask the gallery if a discount is available on works sold through the
primary market. It’s not unusual to find galleries that will offer some
significant discounts on complete collections, and this is something that is
often agreed with the artist before the work even goes on sale.
Fractured Peace by Mark Taylor If an artist offers to sell
you work at a discount on the premise that you don’t say anything at all to
the gallery, it should be seen as a red flag and you should buy a new pair of
sneakers and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.Any artist who undercuts the
gallery isn’t thinking about their existing collector base, and nor are they
protecting the investments of current or future collectors. If a work is for
sale in the gallery for $10,000, the artist suggests they will cut a deal for
$5,000 if you keep the sale quiet, the art at that point has lost 50% of its
value.You might think you have a bargain but what the artist has essentially
done at this point is to halve the value of previously collected works that
were purchased for the full price. New sales rely on the price of previous
sales and future demand and if you remove value via a discount, generally all
sales, past, present and future could be put at risk.It’s worth pointing out right
about here that the art world, even the art world that doesn’t come with
high-end price tags, can be a bit of a minefield when it comes to placing value
on works. Flipping is a word that you will need to be on the lookout for. This
is when art is purchased and then resold in the secondary market for higher
prices over and over. The result is that the work looks more popular than it
really is and therefore it appears to be more valuable than it really is, and
yes, it happens a lot. It’s an unregulated market and whilst it’s a legal grey
area, little can be done to stop it while people continue to buy the work.The idea is to create bubbles
of speculation in the market to heighten expectations for a particular artist.
As with most dubious practices, the bubble can, and eventually will burst as
the market corrects, not only diminishing the value of the work but also
seriously harming the potential worth of that particular artist in the future.Shill bidding is something
else that you will need to keep an eye open for and this is something that
doesn’t only happen in prestigious auction rooms, it happens every day on
platforms such as eBay. This is where fake bidders place fake bids in order to
escalate the value of the work and the ultimate sale price. You might also find
shill reviews or even just comments naming the artist placed strategically
online to ensure the artist appears to be more relevant than they really are.Be wary of private auctions
where this is more likely to happen in the art world. The best auction houses
will have already vetted potential bidders before the sale so as not to run
foul of the many new laws that have been introduced in recent years, but that
doesn’t at all mean that the practice doesn’t continue to happen, it happens in
any area that attracts buyers and collectors regardless of whether the item is
an artwork or not.I frequently buy retro and
vintage computers and recently even video games have been subject to some
dubious practices of late. A sealed copy of Super Mario Brothers sold for a
million dollars, albeit a graded copy. This suddenly puts a game cartridge
available unsealed for less than sixty dollars in the same league as a genuine
work of art from an old master. The only rare element is that the game was
sealed in shrink wrap which will probably never be opened.Unlike other investments where
there is often a level of protection when things go wrong, art is an
unregulated market. Buy a fake and you are generally on your own with a crater-sized hole in your pocket and an art sized gap on your wall. What you get with
art is at best, something beautiful, and at worst, an unregulated asset that is
illiquid and that also happens to come with high running costs and financial
performance that only ever pays out when you sell the piece on for more than
you paid.Just one more thing about
fakes and forgeries without going completely down that rabbit hole, never think
that fakes and forgeries are exclusive to those pieces with high-value price
tags. Believe me when I say that a good proportion of print on demand works
will find their way onto the market from third party cushion covers to poorly
reproduced prints which are then sold by rogue sellers on online platforms, and
mostly without the original artist ever being mentioned, in most cases, the
original artist will be totally unaware that their work is being distributed
this way.Some of my work has been available
for a number of years from unscrupulous sellers and there’s very little that can
be done when the sellers remain unidentified and uncontactable for anything
other than a sale. They mostly originate in countries where British and US laws
have little to no reach. The responsible marketplaces are usually great at
taking products down and blocking sellers from their stores, but they reappear
often within minutes with the same products available from a seemingly
different seller. Those HD wallpaper websites that turn up in Google searches
are filled with digital prints, the prints usually being scraped from official
online channels with many of them still bearing the watermark of the official
seller.
Fence Panel Mountain is a follow-on work to my earlier ‘Mountain’ artwork which is still my best selling work ever! Mark Taylor (Copyright 2022) For digital work which is
arguably the easiest work to copy, blockchain and NFT (Non-Fungible Token)
technologies will begin to make things more difficult for the bad players, but
for now, the technology that has the potential to mitigate some of the risk isn’t
mainstream enough, or anywhere near as accessible enough for busy working artists
and a majority of their collectors.Vanity Galleries…
I don’t particularly have any
issue with so-called vanity galleries, physical spaces where the artist often
pays to place their work in a bricks and mortar retail environment. It can be a
useful marketing exercise to sell into local markets or to gauge public
perception of your work as an artist, but there are differences that are worlds
apart between the good ones and the bad ones.Where I do have a problem is
with vanity galleries that offer no form of curated experience, or those that
have been set up to take advantage of local artists without providing anything
other than wall space.Let’s cut to the chase here, there
are many vanity galleries that are simply in place so that artists can pay to
display with little to no ongoing support or marketing available to the artists
who are often putting everything into a model where the only real winner is the
person who collects the rent.This pay to display model takes
money from the artist rather than the buyer, if the art doesn’t sell, the
artist still has to make rent and that’s not good for the buyer or the artist.
As a buyer, you will certainly discover some great art, you might also discover
a lot of not so great art, but finding the good will be a challenge as most of the good pieces will be buried beneath the bad.It’s worth being clear here
that there are other models that might initially look like pay to display
models, but there is a difference between an artist’s collective or local art
group and a corporation basing their model completely on funding directly
coming from the artist.You’re now aware of at least
some of the risks so we can now have a think about what we want to collect. Knowing
what to collect very much depends not only on budget but also what you like
and what you can realistically afford. I would love to collect original
Banksy’s, my budget is more original Etsy.When you are collecting art
you should be collecting something that you can live with and maybe for a very
long time. With that in mind, it is worth taking some time before you even
begin collecting to work out what kind of art resonates more with you. You
might already have a subject or style in mind and that will certainly make
things easier, but if you are after something that isn’t generic, something
that’s a little more unique, and something that will provide a talking point,
then it’s definitely worth exploring the wider art world and also look at
genres, mediums, and subjects that you might not have thought about before.Many people get into collecting
art only to become quickly limited in what they can then collect. Popular
genres and subjects are a safe place to start particularly if you intend to
sell them on fairly easily down the line, but if you’re after something that very few
other people have hanging on their walls you might want to consider looking at
more niche subjects and mediums and even sellers.You could also start with
collecting small works or prints from well-known names but that too can quickly
become limiting, not least in that you might fast run out of affordable options
to continue collecting and once again, well-known artists are already being
collected so if you are after that more unique talking point to hang on your
wall, the work of these artists is going to be a lot less unique than something
from a relatively unknown artist.Your art collecting might be
to create a more aesthetic space rather than it being a collection that needs
to provide a return on your investment down the line, and there are plenty of options that
will allow you to change the décor without changing the art. My advice is to
take in and research as much art as you can regardless of the subject, medium,
or artist, and take some time to discover what you are drawn to (excuse the pun).If you look beyond the safe
options that everyone else is collecting you will find artworks that just work
regardless of the setting and if you are looking to fill limited space with
artworks you could consider something like a gallery wall of smaller pieces.
This will allow you to grow your collection without having to consider that all-important other kind of budget that you will need, which is wall budget.If you only have a small space
for your collection, think about periodically resting some works and swapping
them out for new additions to your collection, or go with a single signature
piece surrounded by lots of smaller works.
The Retro Collector by Mark Taylor (Copyright 2022) Available from my online stores! It’s worth pointing out at
this point that buying the work of an unknown artist or at least work from an
artist who hasn’t got anywhere near the same provenance as artists with a long
track record of sales, doesn’t make the work any less of an artwork. What it
does mean is that you might just be at the forefront of discovering that artist
and there is a possibility that your new work will indeed increase in value at
some point in the future if the artist eventually goes on to earn that badge we
call ‘discovered’.There is practically, as much
risk in collecting works of unknown artists in the hope that they will one day
increase in value as there is in collecting anything else, but these risks are
heavily mitigated in comparison to buying big-buck collections. You can
mitigate the risk a little more by buying from artists who you can see are
working hard to develop their provenance and career, checking out whether they
are active on social media channels, whether they are involved in any art
communities, and by listening for online chatter. I would be less inclined to
base any collection on the merits of online reviews, just as I would if I was
spending money on art from any mega-gallery where I am being steered towards
what the gallery want or indeed, need to sell.There is also an opportunity
to collect outsider art, although it is a term that is used in multiple ways, it’s
generally thought to describe work from self-taught artists or those who have
no formal touchpoint with the art industry or are naïve to the nuances of the
art world.Art Brut is another term often
used interchangeably, yet there are exhibitions specifically for outsider art
and it would be completely disingenuous to describe every currently unknown
artist as an outsider in the context of thinking them to be naïve or from
outside of the art world. If you fall in love with a piece of art then it
shouldn’t matter if the artist was self-taught, many of the very best artists throughout
history have never attended a prestigious art school.When I speak about unknown
artists, some may be self-taught, some might not attend every exhibition or
turn up to the opening of an art world envelope, yet there are thousands upon
thousands of unknown artists who are probably more alert to the nuances of the
art world than many established artists are.There will be many, many,
unknown artists who might never quite find their way to wearing the ‘discovered’ badge,
and many who might not find the moniker of ‘discovered’ until after they’ve
passed. None of this means that they won’t ever be discovered, many will, nor
does it mean that their art is any less. This is a group of artists who often
work even harder than many of the most well-established artists, and maybe often
produce dare I say it, at times, much better art.It’s worth remembering that
unknowns are usually at least a little known too! There are many unknown artists
who are well known within their own niches, geographic areas, and on platforms
such as Etsy, eBay, or any number of print-on-demand services, all good
examples of platforms that are filled with work that regularly sells, and some
of these artists might already have a significant following within their own
creative communities. Yet to those outside of those circles in the wider art
world, these artists are unknown. An unknown is often almost anything but, so maybe
a better term for these artists might be, not yet fully discovered.You could throw your money
towards emerging artists, artists who have maybe a number of sales and shows
under their belt, some of whom might have been newly signed up by galleries,
but bear in mind that at the point of emerging, the value will be on the rise
and the more budget-friendly pieces will have long ago been sold.It’s a sort of middle ground
between buying from a completely unknown artist and an artist with provenance,
an established career and a high price tag. In my experience of being
previously (I still think, incorrectly for that moment in time) labelled as an emerging artist, this is where the high-end
hype also starts. Sometimes for good reason, other times the hype is
self-driven by an inexperienced ego or as a product of a carefully crafted
marketing campaign.There is no defining moment
when an artist officially gets to wear the emerging artist badge, many artists badge
themselves with this label without any provenance to back it up at all. You only need to look through Instagram and
other social channels to see how egos are crafted on a web page and you might
still end up paying over the odds for work that has zero provenance. Word to
the wise, make sure you carry out your own due diligence.If you are looking for a truly
emerging artist, my advice would be to look towards artists who are just about
to graduate from art schools. Most of the schools will exhibit the work of
their students and this is often where you will be able to pick up work that
could potentially have some significant future value. Art school exhibitions
are frequently attended by professional art critics and these shows can be
incredibly important to the artist’s future career. It’s an ideal opportunity for
those collecting on a budget to maybe find something that will have some level
of potential for a future financial return.Another mistake many first-time
art collectors make is in collecting works that will match existing home décor.
That works if you need to find temporary art that will only be relevant while
your walls are painted a certain colour, when you eventually change the colour
of those walls or change the carpet you will then probably want to change the
art. Collecting to match a colour scheme often means that the art becomes as
temporary as the next home décor trend.Whilst you might not be
collecting with any future value in mind, you will want to at least protect
your initial investment and make sure that the art that you purchase isn’t just
a fashion statement for the here and now. There’s little to no collectability
value in doing that even when prices are low. If your hope is that the value of
the collection increases over time, here and now trends are sold in volumes
that automatically diminish investment potential because everyone else is
following the same trend and buying the same art.
Eight Bit Eighties by Mark Taylor (Copyright 2022) Available Now! Considering price and
available budget…It’s easy to think that the
art world is the one place you can rely on to see sales figures that look more
like telephone numbers than price tickets and generally, that is kind of all we
will see in the media. We never, or at least very rarely get to see any news
about independent artists who could very well be contributing more to the local
economy than the not quite so local mega-gallery. An artist making a living out
of one hundred buck prints is much less interesting to read about than a Banksy
work shredding itself, but look towards the artist’s story and you might find
something even more compelling to read about.In part, the media bias is because
the small numbers involved in many local sales, of which there will be
thousands every day, simply don’t make great headlines. The media has been at
the forefront of portraying the art world as a single, often exclusive, market,
when in fact, the art world as a whole is made up of many components.It’s not just the way the
media like to do things, the mega-galleries and large auction houses also like
this approach because it keeps the focus on them, but it distorts the view that
we don’t have a single, flat, global art market.If we identified and included
the other markets such as the local Etsy seller and the multitude of other
sources of art sales such as the artist who sells from the wall of their local
coffee shop, or the artist who sells through an independent retailer, what we
would see is an art world where the big numbers suddenly stop looking quite so
big. More art is sold in the non-high-end markets than is sold on a Tuesday
night in auction houses around the world and every day in the mega-galleries.My advice to any new art
collector is to start small. If you have a limited budget, starting small means
that you’re not putting your all into something that you might find you want to
change fairly early on in your collection. It also means that you can quickly
build up a collection before committing more budget to more valuable pieces.Rather than scrimp and save,
buy good quality works from lesser-known artists rather than buying something
that just about falls within your available budget or even stretches it beyond,
just so you can own ‘something’ from a more well-established artist. A second
rate work from a well-known artist is going to limit what you can collect in
the future if the artist’s other works are more valuable, and that’s if they’re
available for sale. Besides, you can find a heap of satisfaction in supporting
the next generation of artists.Consider starting out with
prints. An art collection for some people can be a collection of original
Matisse and for other people, it can be a collection of comparatively low-cost
prints. If it is about having art on the wall, there’s nothing at all wrong in
going down the route of collecting prints, there are a multitude of options
available from exceptionally budget-friendly right the way through to archival
quality prints that can in themselves become highly sought after, especially if
they’re limited editions or signed by the artist.Even some open edition prints
can become highly sought after, especially if you do your homework on the
artist. In the print on demand space, it tends to be everything or nothing.
Some of these print on demand services print thousands of copies of the same
work, others might only sell in very small numbers and in some cases, the
artists will retire works rather than have unsold pieces in their online
portfolio. If you are looking for work that no one else has, especially when it
comes to prints, then print on demand is where you are more likely to find
those kinds of works.What that means for the savvy
collector is that as crazy as it sounds, you could find yourself with an open edition print that’s way
more exclusive than an artist’s limited edition. If you are looking for an art
collection that very few other people have on their walls, doing your homework
in the print on demand space could see you landing a collection that is very
unique for a very wallet-friendly price, and if you can get the artist to sign
the print, it could even increase in value. Remember, print on demand means
that whilst there may be the option of unlimited prints, it’s quite rare to
come across prints only available on that platform available in significant
numbers, prints are only produced to order.Keep an eye open at special
events too. My all-time best bargain buy was an open edition Disney print
purchased from Disney World but signed by the five animators responsible for
creating the image. Maybe not quite as valuable as the original cell would be
if it were to be signed by the animators, but in this instance, they never
collectively signed the original cell and they only signed two open editions by
mistake. Just over twenty years later, that twenty buck open edition is now
worth four figures and I own both of them.If you are starting with
prints it’s probably best to avoid the box store variety and look beyond the hype
of editions. Some limited editions are so huge that an open edition would sell
fewer works, and in some cases, a limited edition might even mean a limited
quantity available in a specific size, other sizes might be selling in their
thousands.Buy good quality prints. The type of medium the work is printed on will not only make a difference to the price, it
will also make a difference to the longevity and quality of the work, and even
its future value. An archival quality print in a quality frame can still be an
amazing focal point for your collection many years after you buy it.It’s worth remembering too
that quality art prints are usually crafted by master printmakers and at this
level, prints become their own medium. As such, in some cases you can expect to
pay a considerable amount of money to own an archival quality work that has
been skilfully put together by a master printmaker, usually working alongside
the artist who will be overseeing quality.If you are buying editions,
unless you are buying a very early print from a copper plate, don’t fall for the
lower number is more valuable sales pitch. A long time ago prints would be
created from plates that would eventually wear out meaning that the later
print runs would be significantly poorer in quality.Today, where print plates are
used they tend to be created from steel-plated copper, meaning that the plate
doesn’t wear out like they once did and all prints in the edition are generally
the same quality. Numbering of these prints is rarely issued in print order,
the last print of five hundred pieces could be numbered 1/500 or 500/500, and
it makes no difference at all to the value.Another thing to look out for
is when the work has been signed by the artist, but not created by the artist.
Some artists will use assistants to create the work in the artist’s style,
usually overseen by the artist but that is the only interaction that the artist
will have had with the work. You are less likely to see this in the independent
creative space.
Insert Coin – Mark Taylor (Copyright 2022) Every element was painstakingly hand-drawn using digital mediums, including each strand of the woodgrain! Some of the best work I have
picked up for my personal collection over the years has never seen the inside
of a typical gallery, it was discovered hanging on the walls of a coffee shop
or a seaside gift shop selling the work of local artists alongside seaside
souvenirs. Some of the works I have picked up over the years have been from
artists who have since been through their own emergence and have now been
discovered and there is simply no way that I would be able to afford some of
their more recent work.Keep an eye open for local
events where you are more likely to come across local artists who have a wealth
of artistic experience. Many of these artists might also be working in other
spaces and using the local market as a way of supplementing their income from
other art sale sources. There are bargains to be had even for great quality
work and for a lot of people, it’s not the collection that drives them to
collect art, it’s the hunt from potentially picking up a real undiscovered gem.Supporting a local arts scene
with independent artists who for whatever reason, don’t typically follow the
traditional gallery path is where a lot of the most unique work will be found.
For me, a collection isn’t so much about monetary value, it’s the emotional
patina that comes attached to a piece of work that has been created by someone
who is the lifeblood of a local community.When you purchase from an
independent artist you not only help them, you help their local economy. As I grow
older (or more mature – because that sounds so much better), I have a very
different mindset to the one I had as my younger self who would yearn for an
original Hockney. If I invest $300 in a mega-gallery, I am going to get the art
that they want me to own, (and not very much of it for that kind of money). If
I invest the same in a local artist, I’m going to be looking at a piece of work
that has that uniqueness and emotional connection to the artist that I want
hanging on my wall.I’m likely to also get a lot
more from the art, not necessarily on the canvas, but definitely in terms of
knowing that the $300 went towards feeding the artist’s family and a portion of
it was probably spent in their local economy supporting another independent
business. I will have also given an ‘unknown’ artist a real boost of
confidence, probably much needed for those who work around the clock for less
than a living wage, and I might have encouraged them to carry on creating art.
I don’t feel as if I get anywhere near that level of value add from a
mega-gallery, although one of them did offer me a free cup of coffee once in
return for a few thousand dollars that I wish I had never spent.Not only that, the $300
artwork is more likely to create a bond between the buyer and the artist who
created it, and in some cases, a lifelong friendship. At any level, you’re
never going to get that kind of value from a mega-gallery but you will nearly
always get it from an independent creative. For $300, I can feel valued as a
buyer, I can be taken seriously as an art collector who collects art, not in
the hope of future resale value, but in the hope that the artist goes on to
forge a career out of doing what they love.
The Silicon Shop by Mark Taylor (Copyright 2022) is available now. This is a nod to advertising in print media during the 80s when a specialist computer store would fill magazine pages with ads that kids would read as eagerly as the rest of the magazine! Notice the cardboard boxes stored underneath the bottom shelf! In no particular order, the
ten most valuable lessons I have learned from more than three decades of
creating and buying art are:If you like a piece of art,
buy it, regardless of what anyone else thinks or says. Learn to trust your gut
feeling when it comes to selecting work, it will be more attuned to the art you
love than listening to a sales pitch.It’s not always possible to
build a relationship with the artist when you are buying from a gallery. It is
the gallery, not the artist who owns the relationship with you and I can tell
you from experience if they can keep you at arm’s length from the artist, most
will. At best, you might be invited to a meet and greet, but there’s little
chance of developing the relationship further because the artist will have
signed a contract with the gallery that puts the power of the transaction in
the gallery’s hands.If you want to connect with
the artist and where their contracts with galleries allow, most artists will be
more than delighted to talk to potential collectors or even people who are just
interested in the work they create. Reach out to artists on social media, send
them an email, speak to them at shows, and get to know not only them but how
they work. Many will come back to you, but be mindful that some artists will
have a team of people running their social accounts and they might not get to
see your email, but that shouldn’t stop you from reaching out.If you do intend to buy work
from a gallery, support a local independent gallery, they’re less likely to
push you into buying work they need to move so they can inflate sales for the
next big show. You are also more likely to have meaningful interactions with
their artists, and many independent galleries put the artist front and centre
of their operating strategy and from experience, not all galleries do this.
Snake Pass by Mark Taylor – Copyright 2022. This was originally created as a commission. The snake is almost leaping out of the canvas! Frames don’t just look pretty,
they’re invaluable aides in protecting your investment for years to come. A
good quality frame that protects the art can also add significant value, take the
work from so-so to wow, and well-chosen frames can bring your collection to
life. Even cheap prints in a quality frame can suddenly feel and look much more
expensive.Use a mount that is the same
colour as the paper or any exposed canvas, this will protect the art even more
especially if placed under glass, and make sure that the frame itself doesn’t
become the artwork. Keep it simple so as not to distract from the content of
the work and think about tones that match and complement rather than distract
from the work. Professional framing can be much more expensive than shop-bought
mass-produced frames, but think of a frame as additional insurance and as much
a part of the investment as the artwork itself, good quality frames can pay
back over and over in time.I’m not sure if I have ever
met a collector whose tastes haven’t changed as they have become more exposed
to more art. It’s a natural part of the process involved in becoming a
collector. The great thing about collecting alternative subjects, mediums and
niches is that you have the unique ability to be able to afford to swap works
out when they ebb in and out of favour, and they will.Right now, my Disney
original cell collection is resting while I enjoy computer and video game
ephemera, a collection of curiosities from rare arcade game flyers to even
rarer point of sale materials used for a short while in retail environments
which were originally destined to be thrown away after use. The design aspects
alone are a snapshot of the eighties and are rapidly on the rise in collector
circles. Remember, art adorns other
things aside from a canvas so if your budget isn’t quite at the level you need
right now, look at alternatives.You have to set some ground rules
when you begin collecting art and you also have to set an immovable budget
because art collecting will suck you in. If you are buying works that need to
be shipped to you, remember to include shipping costs and taxes in your
calculations and you may have to pay more for home insurance. Always let your
insurer know about the value of any work you collect as you might not be
covered if anything goes wrong.As I said just now, tastes
will change, but you will want a solid foundation on which to start building
your collection. Take as much time as you can looking at all sorts of artworks
from all sorts of artists, subjects, and mediums and learn about what you like.
Bedroom Coder by Mark Taylor – a nod to self-taught coders from the 1980s of which I was one! My CB Radio handle was Mr Wimpy, you can see the eyeball badge on the desk! Alpine Soda (we call it pop in the UK) was delivered by truck every Friday to every street! Particularly important if your
intention is to eventually move the art on in the hope of making a decent
return on your investment. If it has been written down, there is one rule, it’s
important. This might include obvious documentation such as sales receipts,
press cuttings, work in progress photos, and general documentation that
supports the provenance of the artwork back to the artist’s studio, but don’t think
that the documentation that might come with a print is any less important than
if it had come with an original work.Sales records and anything
written about the work will add to the significance of an artwork and its worth, as will
certificates of authenticity, although these are often a source of frustration
with some being worth little more than the paper they are written on.Before you embark on a
spending spree it’s essential for the health of your bank balance that you
carry out some research and figure out the market. This is especially important
if you are buying from the secondary market. Sadly, there are unscrupulous dealers
who love a newbie arriving on the art-collecting scene and they’re mostly
willing to sell at inflated prices. It not only benefits them to escalate a
price, it also drives up the value of other works from the same artist.Take a look through past
auction catalogues, online galleries, and websites, especially those that have
forums that the community can engage with, you will learn so much about
everything from after-sales service to the artwork itself by ignoring the
mostly fake reviews that litter the online space and going straight to the
people who are buying artworks every day.Another useful piece of
homework that could inform your collecting is to visit multiple galleries or
other venues that sell the kind of art you might be looking for and you can do this without you
needing to spend a dime. Just observe
what other collectors are buying, and how much they are paying and get a feel
of what is and isn’t popular. This should give you a much better sense of what
holds the most value now and what’s likely to in the future.No one should enter the world
of art collecting without having formed at least a small number of relationships
within the art world first, and at whatever level you are collecting. If you
make visits to local galleries, especially the independent ones, gallery staff
and curators will often be more than happy to impart nuggets of wisdom or
explain a piece of artwork and its history. It’s worth visiting museums too,
they will have many connections that could help you navigate this complex
business we call art.It’s a good idea to join local
art groups in your community too, they will often have arrangements with local
galleries and museums to offer special tours or experts will come along to
events to give insightful talks. These events are useful not only for the
information you will gain, but you can often be amongst the first to preview
new exhibitions or benefit from some of the best offers on new artwork. Even
aside from those benefits, the biggest benefit will be in the relationships you
can build, some of these local art groups have vast swathes of useful
connections.If your intention is to
collect works that might increase in value in time, it’s definitely worth
knowing what makes the artwork more valuable. It’s not always about who painted
the work, although that could be a determining factor in any future investment
potential, it’s about a whole collection of things that are not always obvious
to the new collector.The story of the artist is just
as important as the art. If an artist has a captivating story to tell, buyers
will buy into the story as much as the art in some cases. Popularity of an
artist really links back to the fundamental model of art sales, it’s all about
supply and demand. Popular artists will generally be more collectable than
lesser-known artists, but as I said earlier, a lesser-known artist of today
could very well be tomorrow’s Matisse.The medium of a work is a
factor that you will need to consider, it’s not the case that works on
canvas will always be worth more than a work on paper. Canvas will indeed be more
expensive for some artists, but where an artist produced almost all of his or
her work on canvas and very few pieces on paper, the collectability of the
paper-based work could have quite a dramatic impact on its value.The subject matter of a work
could also have an impact on the value, either making the work more valuable or
less valuable. A good example is that a far higher number of my retro works
have appeared on the secondary market over the past few years, whereas my
landscapes tend to be sold more often than not through the primary market. This
is due to me only having recently made my retro works available through print
on demand, previously they were sold directly to the buyer.Right now there is an uptick
in the number of people buying into retro but if I think back to the years
pre-2010, artworks depicting vintage technology really were very niche and
there was a much smaller demand for them from anyone other than hardcore retro
collectors hanging on to the nostalgia of their childhoods. Today, I sell those
works to people who would historically have only purchased my more traditional landscapes.The point is, looking beyond
the usual subject matter in an artwork could turn out to be another great
investment opportunity, although as with any artwork purchased with potential
future worth in mind, this is still a strategy with baked in risk and you
really do have to carry out your own due diligence just as you would with any
investment.Art history is filled with works
that were once considered too niche to be desirable to collectors and investors
but later went on to become highly sought after.There’s an important point
here, never dismiss an artist who suddenly veers from one style to another
thinking that the change will significantly reduce the value or collectability
of any of their work. Art history has taught us over the years that swapping
genres, styles, or mediums, doesn’t always have a negative effect on the
future value of the work, and it might make some works even more desirable. If
you think about Jackson Pollock, his drip-style probably springs to mind, yet
his works in other styles will be much more attractive to some collectors.
Ordered by Mark Taylor (Copyright 2022) Another new abstract work that will give a sense of bold to any space! I think it is fair to say that
with the majority of working artists not working in the space we call the
high-end fine art market, there is inherently more of a risk in securing a work
that will go up in value. There’s simply a lot more work from artists working
in this space meaning that there’s less of a supply and demand issue overall.
That doesn’t at all mean that you will never potentially see a return on your
investment, it does however mean that you are less likely to see an upward
return on your investment unless you happen to come across an artist who is
suddenly in demand.I also think it’s worth taking
some time to carefully think about why you want to collect art though, art
collecting isn’t and shouldn’t be all about flipping a canvas to make a profit.
You can grow a culturally valuable collection that will provide you with
enrichment rather than riches and especially if you are buying from a local
independent artist.Their art can give you a real sense of value in helping to
keep an artist’s career alive, you might also help the local economy, and above
this, you will be contributing to an area of the arts that is consistently underrepresented, and massively underfunded. You’re helping a small business at a
time when small businesses need all the support they can get.For me, there’s as much, if
not more value in doing that if you are passionate about the arts. The arts
aren’t all about the mega gallery, the huge shows that attract billionaires in
private jets, the arts have firm roots on the complete opposite side of that
world. It’s a world that for centuries has existed as much in the shadows as it has in the light, it exists on
print on demand, or Etsy, or your local independent gallery, it exists all
around you and what you might find once you realise that the arts are right
there in affordable touching distance, are works that are filled with passion,
uniqueness, and dreams, and those are the very things that are definitely worth
collecting.Sorry to those who have missed
me over the past month or so, I have been literally inundated with work and I’ve
been working on a series of e-waste art commissions. Hopefully, things might
become a little quieter over the next few weeks and I can get back into the
habit of writing more regularly!And a big thanks must go to
everyone who has been continuously supporting me by purchasing works from my
new retro-inspired art collection, and a really special thanks to those of you
who have been sending me computer and video game magazines from the eighties
and nineties so I can continue to pictorially document the dawn of the home
computer age that made today’s technology possible. It has been brilliant to
discover some of these old magazines from the USA too and how very different the
tech scene was in the States compared to here in Blighty! Not only that, I am really enjoying being transported back to my favourite age, so please don’t throw any of your old magazines away!On that note, look out for a couple of special features where I will be deep-diving into the technology that has been supporting digital artists for years and I will also be exploring some of the digital art disciplines already using the tools of the future such as Unreal Engine 5!
About Mark…
I am an artist and blogger and
live in Staffordshire, England. My days are filled with art, dog walking and
Teams Meetings, while still being stuck somewhere in the eighties. You can
purchase my art through my Fine Art America store or my Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.com and
you can purchase my new works, special and limited editions directly. You can
also view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.comIf you are on Facebook, you
can give me a follow right here, https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia
You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia -
Technology and Artists
A guide to buying technology for artists and creatives! How many times have you become
frustrated by the ever-growing complexity that technology brings to your
workflow as an artist? I have been using technology as far back as I can
remember, maybe even longer and there are still times when I think it would be so
much simpler to just use a regular paper notepad instead of this device that
always needs an update.This week, I am hoping to give
you a little respite from some of the frustrations which as an artist you might
encounter from using technology in your process of creating art. Whether you
are using a computer to keep your paperwork up to date or creating digital
images, as an artist you can’t really avoid using digital tools, they are as essential
as a paintbrush for most creatives. The problem is that technology often gets
in the way of our creative flow.So, in order to keep your
flow, flowing, I will also be sharing some tips and tricks to keep both your
wallet and your sanity secure!From Windows updates to
understanding cables and getting the most out of your existing phone camera,
this week, there is so much to cover. We will also be looking into the classic
SD Card scam, and I will be giving you some useful pointers to make sure you
buy the right tech at the right time to make sure you can squeeze the most
value out of it. If it’s technology, I have you covered!I make no apologies for the
depth and detail included in this feature, everything is becoming exponentially
more and more expensive and when you are a small business owner, which many
artists are, it’s unwise to spend money needlessly or on the wrong things when
it comes to buying new technologies to support your creative practice, the
world is expensive enough.
Fractured Peace – one of my latest abstracts and seems relevant when we talk about technology! Technology is undoubtedly expensive
in regular times, even more so when you are using it in a professional capacity.
When it comes to using technology to create digital art, depending on your
creative process you could be talking about costs that begin to look more like
telephone numbers particularly when it comes to buying technology that often
needs some level of ongoing subscription to support it.Even if you are only using
digital tools to support the creative process rather than to perform the
creative process, there is also a global chip shortage and a post-pandemic
slump in manufacturing output that is adding to the expense that we are seeing
in technology today. That’s aside from the rising costs associated with all
manner of subscriptions that seem to have become a way of life in the 21st
Century. We have transitioned from owning technology to essentially renting it
but without the usual benefits that traditional rental models would bring.If we believe the marketing
hype we would immediately think that technology is an enabler that makes life
easier. Technology is certainly an enabler, but it doesn’t always make your
life easier. It’s not just you, we professionals, even the ones who write the
code to make things happen get just as frustrated with it as anyone else.Technology, no matter how
great it is, has to have inbuilt frustration, it’s the law. Technology also has
its own mind and there’s nothing you nor the greatest computer programmer in
the history of ever can do about that because no matter how dumb that dumb
terminal makes you think it is, it is actively thinking of new ways to provide
new versions of stress for you to endure.As a primarily digital artist
these days, I rely on technology for almost every aspect of my workflow. Beyond
that, those who know me will know how heavily I am involved in the retro computer
scene and in high-end enterprise IT and cyber security. In my spare time, I
relax in front of anything from a vintage Commodore 64 home computer from the
eighties to a modern-day PS5, so it’s not unusual to see me in person and think
that I followed a different evolutionary path and developed mobile devices in
place of hands.I literally use and rely on
technology from morning to night and my frustrations with it can last just as
long. I eat, sleep, and dream technology but occasionally that dream becomes a
nightmare as I am greeted with either a message that translates to computer
says no, or I sit and scream at a screen that is technically known as the
screen of digital death.Technology is just like a
toddler, you have to give it attention and feed it with expensive food and it
will still throw a tantrum while you are walking around the grocery store.I don’t think I know of any
artists today who never have to use at least some form of digital technology in
the business of creating art. Even artists who have never created a work of ‘digital
art’ won’t have been able to avoid using technology somewhere in their workflow.
From using social media to making a sale, writing up your artist bio or
accessing your online sales platform or website, every road will lead back to
some level of digital touchpoint.Technology is a critical
component in the process of artists who probably thought that they would forever
be able to get away with only a brush, some pigment and a canvas. For hybrid
traditional/digital artists like me, there’s absolutely no way to avoid it. Having
used technology since the late seventies, a time when computers came in kit
form, there hasn’t been a day since at least 1980 when my fingers haven’t
touched a computer even when I have been creating non-digital work.Because we humans as a species
have such a dependency on technology, it also means that there’s very little
you can do to change the inherent frustration lovingly/sadistically delivered
by almost every device. If you want a life where you never have to update your
computer you will need to go back in time to the eighties and get your hands on
a Commodore 64 or any of the 8-bit home computers of the time in a pre-internet
era where the useful life of a computer was often measured in multiple years.Whilst the technology back
then had nowhere near the level of capability that it has today, computers
tended to only be upgraded when newer models were released, and then only if
you could afford it. There would always be a legacy of users hanging out from
the last generation to ensure the systems continued to be supported and there
was almost no yearly upgrade cycle with any technology. The expectation today that
tech is re-released annually with only minor iterations and advances is a
relatively new thing.In the eighties and well into
the early millennium, manufacturers took time between generations of computers
to develop newer models whilst building excitement in the market for the next
new thing. Imagine if all of the new features found in today’s annual upgrades
were stacked and then released every two or even three years with modern
technology, the small iterations we see between models of anything that has an
annual upgrade today would seem so much bigger and it would probably sway those
who usually sit on the fence to buy into the upgrade.I think we can all agree that
technology is tedious and that’s coming from an all-out technology geek, but it
is also essential. Despite levels of frustration higher than a hippy at
Woodstock, you can take steps to reduce the number of hours you will need to
spend with your head in your hands as yet another update needs installing.
PCB by Mark Taylor – This almost industrial work is a nod back to the early days of home computing, when technology was easier, simpler, and could do less… If you use a Windows device as
part of your workflow you will know just how many updates need to be applied
each month. These updates are essential to making sure that your device is
protected from cyber risk and the many bad players who prey on the unpatched
masses of the population who think updates are for wimps or because they simply
don’t have the time. If you think the time it takes to apply an update is too
much, think about the time it takes to fix the problem from not applying the
update and the lost creative time that you will never get back.You need to think about updates
in a similar way you would think about life support. If you turn it off there
is a good chance that your device will die a slow painful death taking your
digital life with it in the process. You might notice that your devices begin
to run slower, it might start to generate more errors and in some cases, it might
display a blue screen suggesting that your device ran into problems and needs
to send a report to its master and then restart.Technology then slips into a
never-ending loop. From the first update it becomes a perpetual cycle of
shutdowns, restarts, and more updates and it still won’t ever be quite the same
as it was when you first took it out of its box.In the good old days, most of
the speed issues experienced by computers could be easily solved by
defragmenting your hard drive but with modern devices which use solid-state
drives, the process is a little different and is called optimisation. Modern
solid-state drives work very differently from the mechanical drives of the past
and they need a completely different life support care plan.However, optimisation alone
isn’t some golden panacea to speeding up your device and solving every error,
it is just one more thing of many that will contribute to a range of other
things that work together to keep everything ticking along, or at least until
they don’t. All you can do with technology is try to stay in sync with the
updates because you will never find yourself in the position of being a step
ahead.Even keeping everything up to
date doesn’t give you any guarantee that the update will fix every glitch. The
applications you use may contain bugs and will themselves need updating
frequently too, and more often than not, updating an operating system will mean
that you then have to update all of your apps. Life is one long process of
updates and restarts and mastering the art of patience.We also need to add new
features into the mix, apps and operating systems rarely stand still. Even if
you only want the latest features to make life a little easier, keeping
everything on the latest version will usually give you the best experience. I
say usually because day one releases are rarely perfect and may need another
update or three to get anywhere close to working as expected.Updates are rarely without
issue but sometimes it’s not a technology thing at all that prevents something from working, it’s the human that sits between the chair and the keyboard and the
problem usually stems from something technically known as being impatient.Sometimes updates fail. If you
are using a Windows-based device you will want to be aware of something called
the update connectivity measurement. This essentially means that your
device will need to be connected online for much longer than you think in order
to guarantee a successful or at least, an almost problem-free update. I say
almost problem-free with a caveat that assumes the update actually fixes a
problem in the first place.Even though a computer goes
through a restart process, the process isn’t usually over, the computer only
makes you think it is. The entire update will often require somewhere in the
region of two hours to download and begin the initial update process but this
will be dependent on your internet speed, two hours is really a minimum even
with really fast internet. Apparently, it’s not the size that matters.It will then take at least a
further six hours or so to successfully apply the updates and add any new
features. During the entire eight hours or so that the process is running, your
device should remain connected online and powered on. Most of the time you can
continue to use it during this time but always make sure that you are regularly
saving any work as the device could randomly restart at any time.
Retro Peripheral by Mark Taylor – from the Tank Mouse to the floppy disc, this work just pops. Each element has been created as its own artwork and then juxtaposed with an industrial twist. There will also be updates
that rely on you to have previously installed all updates before them. If you
take a manual approach to update your devices then you will risk missing out
on important updates and more vitally, critical security updates that help to
prevent bad threat actors from taking over your PC and ruining your day.It’s not just operating
systems that have a reliance on the internet, antivirus tools have an
insatiable appetite for being forever connected too. Bear in mind that having
an up to date antivirus tool on your PC is only a small part of the bigger
picture that helps to keep your computer alive. Antivirus packages are
absolutely essential even if you only use a computer occasionally but once
again, they need to be used in conjunction with lots of other good practice too
and they have to always be kept up to date.Antivirus programmes are
completely reliant on having access to the internet for real-time updates with
some antivirus packages checking almost by the second to ensure they have the
latest threats identified in their dictionaries along with a fix for them. Most
of the time these updates will be seamless and will run in the background, but
be wary because even a small operating system update could upset the
equilibrium of an antivirus package and turn off any protection that you
thought you had, without you lifting a finger.Just as you would check the
tyres or fuel level on your car before you embark on a long journey, it is
worth checking at least periodically that everything is running as it should
be. Take a few seconds to open up your Windows update settings to make sure
that everything that should be updated has been downloaded and installed correctly, and
also open up your antivirus application to make sure it is actively working and
up to date.This is a must-do following
any update of the operating system because updates can play havoc with your
antivirus package. You can never guarantee that the computer will always notify
you when something is amiss and you certainly can’t guarantee that your
computer will automatically turn the antivirus back on. Remember, in-built frustration
is the law.
Please Stand By – By Mark Taylor. I wanted to create something both familiar and almost uncomfortable, with added glitches! Automatic updates are great,
but they don’t really work like you think they do. They are automatic, they’re
just not always automatic immediately. A great example of this can be seen on
Apple devices whenever you have auto-updates from the App Store turned on. You
might find a new update is available and despite you having auto updates
enabled, the update might not actually have been downloaded and installed on
your device until days or sometimes even a week or two later after it has been
released.There’s nothing inherently wrong
when this happens although some updates are going to be more critical when it
comes to security and you might want them a little sooner. Manufacturers who send out updates like to
control deployments in stages so that millions of people don’t suddenly
overwhelm their servers all at the same time trying to download the latest
version of the operating system or the update that promises seventy additional
emojis, because new emojis are really what it’s all about.Everyone connecting to the
upgrade servers at the same time would be extremely problematic for the
manufacturer’s hardware to deal with, so if you want the latest and greatest
sooner than the auto-update delivers it, you will need to manually request it.
You can still manually request updates even if you leave the automatic download
settings in place.Delaying updates isn’t always
a bad idea if you can hold out for a day or two. The first iteration of an
update can sometimes break more things than it fixes and a new update then gets
pushed out sometimes even within a few hours of the original update going live.
In other words, initial updates can be bug-ridden examples of bad coding that
only dummies like me make sure are downloaded within seconds of them going
live.With non-critical updates, it
is usually worth hanging back for a day or two if you can because more often
than not, updates will need to have glitches resolved fairly quickly and if
this is the case, holding back a day or two will limit the chances of you being
unable to do what you need to do because some bug stops the thing you need to
do from working.As for all of those additional
emojis and half-useful extra features that you get excited about when any new
update comes along, chances are that you will completely forget about them
within a few days and then you will rarely if ever use them. Features such as emojis and other quality of
life improvements to the software are usually added a few days or weeks and
sometimes months after the primary version of an update has been released. This
is so that the initial version can be quickly fixed if it contains any bugs.
When the initial update goes live, it’s very rare that it will be the finished
product as developers will still be working on iterations of that version often
for many more weeks.The other reason that these
fun elements are added later on is to keep you engaged with the upgrade process.
Minor iterations of an update will appear between major updates and these are
more likely to contain the fun, quality of life features that you might have
been expecting from the initial release.If a minor update contains a
benefit that you are more likely to use, you are more likely to download it.
Everyone using the exact same version of software makes life considerably
easier for the developer and adding these additional features in between major
releases encourages people to remain on board with the upgrade process. In the
eyes of the developer, they want everyone on the same version of the same thing
because it makes their life so much easier with fewer support calls and it
makes for a more consistent experience for everyone.
Pixel Art by Mark Taylor – The irony of this work is that almost 300 floppy discs would be needed to store the original file of this work! If everyone were to use the
exact same version of a software release, it would make the experience better
for everyone, but the world doesn’t quite work like that so we have differences
to contend with even from devices using the same platform.Android is a good example of
multiple versions of what seems to be the same thing. When you purchase an
Android mobile cell phone it might tell you that it is up to date, in truth its
probably not. The issue is that the advice it gives you is predicated on
whether or not the manufacturer of your device is up to date.The Android operating system
is constantly updated but it then has to be seeded to the hundreds of
manufacturers who create Android devices who then have to run their own testing
before allowing owners of their devices the opportunity to download and install
it.In some cases, especially if
you are using a carrier-branded device, you could have two of the exact same
devices with only one of them being able to receive an update. With
carrier-branded devices, the carrier will also need to carry out testing and if
a feature is made available that is incompatible with either their network or
their business plan, the update is less likely to appear or will appear much
later than release.To add to that, any updates
that do make it onto carrier-branded devices might also have to have further
work carried out if, for example, the carrier is using their own proprietary
user interface. This can also add to the time delay in getting updates out.It’s quite possible that you
might not get the update at all in some scenarios, or it might take weeks or
even months until you see that an update has been made available. What this
means is that some devices are more likely to reach their useful and usable end
of life prematurely despite other devices carrying the exact same specification
and model number having a little more life left in them. Life expectancy can be
more to do with the cellular carrier than the manufacturer in some cases.My advice, regardless of
whether you decide on the Apple/Android or another eco-system entirely is to
always go for the most recent and most well-supported device you can afford
from a major brand and be a little more cautious about purchasing carrier-branded devices. Before signing up for a cellular plan with a carrier-branded
device, ask questions about the frequency of updates and make comparisons with the
devices that originate directly from the manufacturer.There’s usually very little
that’s different between the manufacturer’s original device and the carrier-branded device that is based on the same model, other than maybe having the carrier
branding etched into the casing, and maybe a slightly different user interface,
although the carrier branded device could cost a little less. Checking out the
onward differences such as update roadmaps could save you considerably more
cash and pain in the long term.
1984 by Mark Taylor – I wanted to create a sense that technology is always watching, it sees us but isn’t like us, nor does it understand us. I cannot for the life of me
tie a clove hitch knot but all of my cables can. Throw two cables up in the air
and they will magically tie themselves together and multiply into four. The
same thing happens when you place a cable behind the TV, no matter how much
cable management you use cables can be a huge frustration and especially when
you are a digital artist. They can seriously get in the way of your creative
flow.Cables really matter when it
comes to digital art and video editing but they can also be a source of
frustration and just when you think you have got to grips with them, standards
change and new capabilities are added to both the cables and the devices they
plug into. I know, most people will find it really difficult to find any level
of excitement from a cable, but some cables really are game-changers.The problem is that many
cables look exactly the same and their descriptions often suggest they serve
the same purpose, but not all cables are anywhere near equal and understanding
cable technology could save you a lot of money down the line.It feels like only yesterday
when we needed to change the HDMI cables that plugged into our shiny new 4K
TVs. They needed to be faster than those used in standard high definition TVs,
they had to be able to carry much more data more efficiently and more
expediently. Whilst every HDMI cable will look identical other than maybe being
a little cosmetically different, they’re nowhere close to always being the
same.If you are in the market for a
new TV or monitor for your creative workflow, knowing the latest cable standards could save you a considerable amount of money in the
future. Whereas not too long ago we might have been influenced into making a screen
purchase by the number of HDMI ports on the device, today we also need to
consider how fast those ports will work.There’s a risk that by saving
a little money on buying last year’s model of TV or monitor you might find that the device
you are buying might not be compatible with the latest HDMI standard which is
now HDMI 2.1.With previous iterations of
the HDMI standard we didn’t see the sudden technology leaps of anywhere near
the scale that has since been introduced with this new standard, and whilst it
might not be all that important for your workflow today, it will be very soon.4K TVs might seem like a
recent upgrade but visual technology is quickly heading towards 8K resolutions
as the standard. Right now, none of the streaming services provide content in
8K resolutions but this was also the case when 4K started to appear on the
scene too.It will only be a matter of
time before we see the likes of Netflix hiking up their prices once again and
offering us a super-duper-premium-plus-deluxe-plus option to take advantage of
the three shows filmed in 8K. It will then take approximately five minutes for
8K to become as mainstream as 4K is today and a further 2.6 minutes for Netflix
to then cancel the show.Whilst buying an 8K monitor or
TV is still overkill for today’s needs, by ensuring your new display has HDMI
2.1 capability you will be able to take advantage of the many other features that
the cable and the standard will bring. If your new device doesn’t have at least
one HDMI 2.1 port, you could find yourself changing last year’s screen model
sooner than you might have originally planned means that the small saving you
made on last year’s model will now need to be spent and then some on yet another
upgrade. I’m all for saving money when it comes to technology, but making the
right choices at the right time is the only way to continue saving.Before we go on to the
benefits of HDMI 2.1 it’s worth noting that if you are considering upgrading
your display, not all displays labelled as being HDMI 2.1 compatible will offer
all of the benefits that the standard can bring. In terms of the benefits, the
primary benefit that comes from the new standard is around resolution and
refresh rates. In theory, HDMI 2.1 can handle resolutions up to 10K at 120Hz,
incredibly detailed, blisteringly fast, but nowhere even close to becoming
mainstream maybe for a decade or so and it may be a while longer before they
are affordable outside of specialist commercial use.What HDMI 2.1 will bring you
out of the box today is 4K resolutions at 120 frames per second or 8K at 60
frames per second which is brilliant news for digital artists and gamers. If
you aren’t sitting in either of those camps, life just started costing a lot
less because you will most likely find that slightly older technology will be
good enough for a while longer unless you absolutely must have that not yet very
content-filled experience that 8K currently brings.The new standard also allows
VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) which means that the display will seamlessly
transition between display resolutions depending on what’s happening on the
screen. This allows a much more detailed output by changing from a slightly
lower resolution to full resolution on the fly, and of course, HDR will be able
to be displayed at the same time. In simple terms, it just looks great and
keeps everything flowing at the best resolution and speed available and you are
less likely to experience shearing on the screen.The numbers above might seem
over the top for creating digital art, but if your process includes creating
output for screens such as video game art, concept art, or high-end
illustration and animation, HDMI 2.1 is now the absolute minimum that will
become the defacto standard within the next couple of years and within eighteen
months it will almost certainly become your default choice when buying a new
screen.HDMI 2.1 also upgrades the
audio experience meaning that you can move away from systems such as Dolby
Digital and utilise systems such as Dolby Atmos. If your HDMI 2.1 device also
happens to have eARC capability, then you will find an enhanced audio return
channel for connecting things like soundbars and home theatre systems. The
downside, of course, you will need a compatible audio system too.No matter what manufacturers
say on their marketing hype, for the average HDMI 2 cable there is very little
discernible difference between different makes of cable, and in most cases, no
difference at all for most users, even between discount and premium brands. You
might experience a little noise with some cables if they’re not well-shielded but
it’s not always the discount cables that have the problem. If you are using a
certified cable you are less likely to see any difference between brands.Cables always come preloaded
with marketing hype but to officially meet the HDMI 2 standard, they have to
actually meet the HDMI 2 standard which unlike HDMI 2.1, is much more common on
today’s screens. There can be a huge difference in price between HDMI 2 cables
but it’s just not worth paying over the odds for the exact same thing that
already meets the exact same standard and does the exact same thing. Unless you
really are only spending relative pennies on a cable, they’re all much of a
muchness at this level.HDMI 2.1 on the other hand is
a very different story. The speeds are much higher than previous HDMI
standards. HDMI 2 maxed out at 18Gbps, the new HDMI 2.1 or 48G cables max out
at 48Gbps. In simple terms, the new standard is exponentially faster and can do
more things at the same time. A certified HDMI 2.1 cable will be able to get
the most out of the HDMI 2.1 port, and there are already some differences in
quality emerging between manufacturers. The new cables can still be used with
HDMI 2 but they won’t really make that much difference to the older standards
output, they won’t, for example, turn an HDMI 2 output into HDMI 2.1.
That Eighties Thing by Mark Taylor – Depicting standard definition in high definition – what a decade the 80s was for innovation and invention! If you want to save money on
your next display purchase, save it on the right things. That means looking for
devices which offer full HDMI 2.1 capability rather than saving a hundred bucks
buying last years model which may only have the standard HDMI 2 or limited HDMI
2.1 capability. In two years time you will probably need to upgrade again if
you go with an older model now with the intention of using it in your
professional workflow.When it comes to cables it
doesn’t matter all that much which HDMI 2 cable you go for, this is an area
where you can save plenty of money. With HDMI 2.1, make sure that it is fully
HDMI 2.1 compliant and check out reviews from reputable sources before you make
the purchase because there is very little money to be saved here and a good
quality HDMI 2.1 cable is still relatively expensive, compared to its older
variant. It will take maybe three to four years before we begin seeing quality
lower-cost options in the HDMI 2.1 arena.When it comes to network cables,
the quality of the cable can make a huge difference not just to your pocket,
but to your internet speeds too. You might have heard the terms, Cat 6, Cat 7,
or even Cat 8, and they can all be useful if they’re used in the right places.
Previously we had Cat5 and Cat 5e, but these are now fairly limited in their
use and the cost difference between Cat5 and 6 is negligible.These are the cables that
usually provide you with wired access between your device and your internet
router, they’re also the cables that are hidden in walls to provide network
ports in an office.With network cables, they’re
not all close to being equal. Cat 6 cables will provide you with 1Gbps speeds
over a distance of up to 100 metres. In practice, I would never use it for that
kind of distance, mostly I would recommend a total run length of a maximum of 60
metres to ensure your speeds are more consistent and less if your cable needs
to go around corners as crazy as that sounds!Cat 7 cables offer greater
speeds to your device from your router, but both Cat 6 and Cat 7 can be
affected by noise, hence there are specific rules that mean these cables have
to have a certain number of pairs (wires inside), and they must be shielded to
prevent signal loss from noise.Cat 7 provides 10Gbps of speed
across a similar distance to Cat 6, although again, I would recommend using
fibre optics if the total length of the run is greater than 60-metres. It’s
also surprising just how long a cable needs to be, even in smaller homes.Cat 8 is the fastest, allowing
blisteringly fast speeds of up to either 25Gbps or 40Gbps, but these cables can
only be used for distances less than 30-metres before the signal degrades to
almost being unusable.There is often very little
difference in price between all of the categories of cable, and depending on
what you want to use the cable for there would be far greater benefits in using
Cat 7 as a standard or ideally, if you only need the cable to cover a short
distance, Cat 8 because that will save you money in the future. For most
smaller networks where distance is less of an issue, Cat 8 will become the
standard soon.I recently upgraded my home
and studio network to utilise Cat 8, each run was short enough to allow this
and I also began using a short Cat 8 lead to connect my devices to Cat 8
enabled network sockets on the wall and suddenly, I was getting almost the
entirety of my gigabit internet connection available on my MacBook Pro and my
PS5 despite having more than 30 other devices connected on the same network.
Everything from printers to game consoles and a power-hungry Mac Pro which
looks more like a cheese grater than a computer. With the previous Cat 7
cabling, I wasn’t getting anywhere close to this speed.Quality does matter with
network cables and especially when you begin to look towards Cat 8. Some cables
will be able to be used both internally and externally and having a weather
proof cable means that they’re less likely to be affected by changes in
temperatures, some of these cables will be more robust if you do plan to use
them outside. If you pay a premium you can even have armoured cabling
protecting you from the other issues you typically get from using external
cabling.Whilst many people will be
relying on Wi-Fi for connectivity, the benefits of hardwired connectivity will only
become more evident in the coming years as devices become hungrier and hungrier
for faster bandwidth. New Wi-Fi protocols such as Wi-Fi 6 promise faster
speeds, but you have to take into account that faster speeds rely on signals
travelling over much shorter distances than they would have done with earlier
iterations of Wi-Fi technologies which were slower but had a wider range.
Ordered by Mark Taylor – the chaos of Wi-Fi signals maybe? It’s worth thinking about just
how your internet works too. Slow Wi-Fi often gets confused with slow internet
and upgrading your internet service provider’s speed is never a guarantee that
your Wi-Fi will be better, it could even turn out to be worse.The same factors that slow
Wi-Fi down will still be there even with a faster broadband line. Wi-Fi and the
internet often get conflated as being one and the same thing but the
differences are like chalk and cheese. Wi-Fi is not the internet, which most
of you will already know, but you would be surprised at just how many people
swap their internet packages for faster ones only to find no difference in
speed at all when they connect wirelessly.It’s also worth remembering
that your internet speeds or more specifically, the speed you load web pages is
often dictated by the website you are trying to reach, not by the size of your
pipe! Slow speeds don’t always mean that there is an issue with your internet
package or your Wi-Fi. Slow speeds can be caused by many, many things, and
figuring out exactly what’s slowing everything down can be like trying to find
a specific needle in a haystack of needles.You can have a 1Gigabit
internet connection but if the website is only serving content at 20Mbps, in
very over-simple terms, that’s the very best speed you will see from the
website although your internal speeds between your router and device will be
faster although this will make only minimal difference to the experience, so minimal you might not even notice.If you regularly check
broadband speed websites, remember that these are served from the exact same
internet as the rest of the content you see so they will be affected by the
exact same problems. This means that speed tests are often an estimate at that particular
second rather than being a definitive and exact speed.Real network bandwidth monitoring is carried out using other technologies and some complex maths. For most home users, there is an expectation that it will all just work. If you do utilise one of the many speed test services you need to make sure that it is one that is less inclined to give you erroneous results. Netflix’s speed checker is one of the best with minimal overhead. You can find it here.
When you run a speed check, make sure you carry out tests over multiple days and at multiple times. This will provide you with more consistent results than a one-off test could bring.
Eight Bit Eighties by Mark Taylor – some artistic licence with the technology of the eighties. We even had 16-bit technology in the early 80s but it was never what it seemed. The industry was brilliant at making numbers look more powerful than they were. They still do that today! So far we have covered a great
deal of the many things that can frustrate your creative flow. Slow internet,
error-prone updates, getting the best display experience from your screen, and
for the most part, these are things that you can easily put right. What you
might be able to do less about are scams and as a professional creative, you
could be more susceptible to scams than most.This is probably one of the
most underrated, yet vital aspects of digital art and photography, and the
following section is detailed because it is the one area that I am asked to
advise on all of the time. It is also an area that affects artists who rely on
having SD Cards on hand to operate their business.When I began to utilise this
new fangled flash memory the world used things like Compact Flash cards which
were huge, yet stored only a minuscule amount of the data compared to what can be
stored on a much smaller SD-Card of today.Compact Flash cards were also
very, very, expensive, unlike today when you can buy almost a hundred SD Cards
for the price that would have been charged for an older and exponentially
slower CF card when they first came out. In short, SD Cards today are a bargain
at whatever price you pay and you really shouldn’t scrimp on quality for the
sake of saving pennies when it comes to trusting something the size of a
postage stamp with hours of your work.SD Cards are truly amazing
little things, and with the most recent versions having gigabyte capacities on
something smaller than a stamp, it’s almost like witchcraft, I mean what a time
to be alive! However, and just because the world is the way it is, even memory
cards can take front and centre place in scams designed to take your money and
leave you without any way at all to access possibly hundreds of hours of work.At one time, the biggest
middle-class problem you would have had with these things would be that too
many modern cameras didn’t include dual memory card slots meaning you would have
to swap out full cards on the fly. It’s a huge problem for some people who rely
on capturing millisecond-by-millisecond photos of events, but it’s really not a
problem for those who can wait for a few seconds.The problem today is that
there are now way bigger problems to contend with when it comes to memory cards
and you need to be switched on to the pitfalls of buying cheap because it could
cost you more than money in the long run.Photographers and digital
artists often spend the GDP of a small country on SD Cards, despite their
relatively low cost and coupled with the sheer number of them that most
professionals will use, it’s easy to see why this is an area that is looked at
when you are looking to save a few pennies.SD Cards are an area of technology
that can bring unexpected problems in the form of fakes. Even buying from
reputable retailers is not always a guarantee that what you will get is what
you originally paid for. If you are anything like me then you might scour sites
such as Amazon for SD Card bargains but even those might not actually be
originals. It’s not at all that Amazon knowingly sell fake SD Cards, it’s that
they are a huge company that also allows third-party sellers to offer goods on
their platform and this is usually where the problems begin.I’m not singling Amazon out,
eBay, even Etsy, and a multitude of other services that allow third parties the
ability to sell anything can be unwittingly making scammers’ lives easier by
giving them a platform on which they can sell their wares. If you are thinking
of buying pre-used SD Cards, there are about a million and one reasons why you
should avoid doing that, but also in terms of the images that might have been
previously stored on them which could hypothetically at least, be recoverable
by law enforcement.In the worst case, it could
mean that you might suddenly have some explaining to do if illegal images are
found on your SD Card and proving your innocence might be difficult when buying
through services such as Facebook’s Marketplace where the transactions are
usually completed with cash.It’s also a problem for those
selling used SD Cards, even if the seller believes they have wiped them. Unless
that wipe process involved some complex, almost military-grade and multiple
write and wipe procedures to make sure any previous data had been fully
overwritten, it is often possible to recover deleted files which might include
personal information. It’s often cited that as many as two-thirds of pre-used
SD Cards hold recoverable data, how true that is I have no idea, but I would
suspect from experience that this is highly likely just on the basis of how
many traditional hard drives I have been able to recover over the years.
80s Music Technology by Mark Taylor – today, all of our music can be stored on a piece of plastic smaller than a postage stamp. What a time to be alive! (or at least it was in the 80s!) A five buck memory card is no
less likely to be a fake than a hundred buck memory card. This is because
smaller low-value scams are the new big thing and these low-value scams are on
the rise in other areas too. Unwitting buyers are less likely to return or make
much of a fuss about low-value items, instead, they will put the sale down to
experience and move on.It makes more sense for
scammers too, many of those who would once utilise stolen data sets to carry
out high-value crimes are turning to smaller scams in higher volumes and
they’re making more from them. A five buck scam carried out by someone who
lives in a region where five bucks is the average weekly wage, is a substantial
haul for the scammer who now faces less scrutiny from unwanted attention. This
is true of other scams too which are for the most part, happening online and
especially through social media.What you might see with fake
memory cards is that they often look almost identical or even the same as the original
manufacturer’s cards, in some cases, the cards might have even been produced in
the same production facilities. This makes it almost impossible at first glance
to determine whether or not you have a fake in your hands. To find out, you are
going to have to do something that I rarely advise anyone to do, and that is to
put it into a device to confirm either way, but you really should only ever do
this as a last resort.If you have any suspicion that
the device might be a fake, you shouldn’t put it into your device at all. In
some cases, it could be filled with viruses or ransomware, or even a small piece
of code that allows a backdoor into your system. Hence, buying memory cards,
USB memory sticks or any media that can accommodate the storage of code, you
need to ensure that you make the purchase from a reputable dealer and you should
in all cases, even with cards you trust, scan the card with your anti-virus
program before using it. Most AV applications will give you the option of
scanning removable media, always make sure that setting is enabled.It looks good and even the
packaging looks great, but that’s still only the surface detail. What you need
to find out is how well the card works in comparison to the specification of
card you purchased. Counterfeit and fake memory cards can be made to look and
perform just like the originals, even when you insert them into a device and
whilst they do a great job of acting just like the original card on the
surface, there are a heap of unknowns going on below.The mere fact that these cards
are designed to hold data also means that scammers can include their own data
which may or may not open up back doors. It is more likely that some scammers
will place small snippets of code on the card before you purchase them and
there’s simply no easy way to find out if you have a card that has been tampered
with.Looking for obvious signs of
tampering around the packaging is one way that could help you to identify a
card that has previously been used, although there will be cases where
legitimate cards are sold even without packaging or in very simple original
manufacturer packaging that is usually reserved for trade sales.Online adverts might even make
a thing about how the cards use OEM or even renewable packaging or that the
packaging will vary depending on the location of sale. They might even suggest
that the packaging is usually only used in certain stores or territories. The
problem is that this in itself is part of the scam and it is designed to make
you question everything a little less.
80s Pop Music Culture by Mark Taylor – forget Warhol, this is where pop culture is today. Often, they will advertise
memory cards with high speeds and high volumes of storage, and for very little
money in comparison to buying from elsewhere. When the card arrives you might
also see the same specification written on both the card and the packaging, but
this is where the similarity to the original card ends.Small scripts are added to
much smaller and much slower memory cards that make them appear to be what it
says on the tin. What you end up with is usually a card that is much slower
than the original, or has a massive difference in storage capacity. You are
more likely to see the latter on higher capacity cards so if you purchase one
of the ultra-expensive 1Tb cards for less than a competitors 128Gb card
thinking that you have found a bargain, what you could end up with is a
smaller, and much older, 32Gb card or even smaller that has been hacked to
display fake memory allocation results.The real issue with this is
not just that you have a much smaller card, the script used makes your device
think that the card has a greater capacity than it really has and so the device
will continue writing to it not realising that the script also deletes
previously contained data at the same time as it writes the new data, so that
the computer never displays a message informing you that the card is full
simply because the card can never be filled.The only time you will find
out about this is if you either expose the usually hidden script file, or you
realise that the work you had on the card from a year ago is no longer there.
Scripts are notoriously difficult to spot, and you really do need to know what
you are looking for.Many official cards contain
all manner of other legitimate files from the manufacturer to create encrypted
spaces for example, and it’s likely that any bad script has either been hidden
within the legitimate files or it has been renamed. Often, the script is
essentially telling the computer to only ever store the most recent files up to
the official capacity of the card and to delete anything older. It’s an easy
hack that even those without masses of technical know-how could probably pull
off after watching an online tutorial.Blisteringly fast says the
marketing hype, and the card even comes with sterling recommendations from
professional photographers, but not all memory cards are anywhere close to
being able to achieve the speeds that legitimate modern cards can achieve.When I create digital art I
rely on having fast equipment, deadlines for commercial commissions can be
punishingly brutal and every second counts. If I need to backup a digital
artwork or more frequently, many instances of the same work, I simply don’t
have the time to wait around for the SD Card to take longer than it needs to
take. In some cases, this can be significantly longer, by tens of minutes and
even hours which is time that I can’t always continue to use the device to do
other things.The scammers advertise higher
speeds and they will replace the original stickers or printed information on
blank SD Cards with stickers showing the wrong specification. Often, scammers
will purchase thousands of reject cards from manufacturers without labels and
then they will create new labels that exactly match the original. In some
cases, they omit to put any specification data on the label at all, and this is
a super-easy scam if they’re then selling onwards and using OM packaging which
tends to be very plain.You might have purchased a
card that suggested real world speeds of 95MB read and 90MB write speeds, what
you could end up with are cards that have 95Kb read and 90Kb write speeds.
Whilst that difference might sound extreme, you are certainly never going to
achieve anything like the speeds you were sold with a counterfeit or fake card.
When this happens, the only thing you can do is to carry out real-world read
and write tests on the card to find out if yours is fake but my advice, if you
have a bad card, treat it as a fake and return it to the seller, it’s just not
worth your time or the risk it brings in finding out.We’ve all heard that some of
the supermarket home brands are the exact same product as premium brands made
in the same facility, it’s the same with medications too. Whilst home brand
medications are easy to identify as being a premium product (by the special
codes on the packaging that contain the ingredient and medical information),
the same is not true of memory cards, it’s not always obvious by looking at a
card what it is.You should also be mindful
that premium doesn’t always mean premium. Some of the more reputable home brand
cards are developed to an even higher specification than an original
manufacturer might make available so it’s worth checking out reviews from reputable
sources and looking closely at any real-world speeds advertised with the cards.There’s real money (and risk)
in faked and forged art, but there’s just as much money in fake and forged SD
Cards, they’re low value and sold in high volumes but they don’t quite have the
journalistic grab that a good art heist will have. Even home printing today
makes it possible to recreate an almost perfect replica of the original label,
and because the label is placed on a relatively low-value product, it’s also
less likely to be spotted. Couple this with the fact that some manufacturers
produce different cards for different brands, and it becomes easier to think
about how faster, larger capacity cards might be switched at source or early on
in the supply chain, or slower cards are dressed up as faster cards.The same thing happens with
electrical equipment and particularly high-end networking equipment. I have
known major organisations save money on buying premium network switches only to
find that the switches have been mass-produced fakes that bypass the original
manufacturer’s high-end security features which prevent legitimate devices from
booting if certain conditions aren’t met.In my other life, I have even
found dubious practices that place backdoors into electrical devices so that
they are able to listen to the traffic passing through them and report it back
to a man in the middle which is usually a hacker waiting in the wings or at
worst, a rogue state. Counterfeit devices are ripe for hackers to attack and
compromise systems and yet the savings generally realised by buying fakes
aren’t always that significant, it’s just the same with the lowly SD Card.The problem you might have
beyond unrealised expectations and a loss of time, money, business, and data,
is that the supply chains for these things are murkier than a mud infested
river. I tend to split my purchases into business critical and non-business critical,
with anything needed to be purchased for business-critical jobs going through a
supply chain security test. This is something that in my other life I am able
to pass on to a whole team of people to support me, in my life one point
zero which focuses on creating art and design, the onus of carrying out due
diligence is solely on me.Checking the provenance of any
supplier is something that you can easily do without a team of people, making
sure that third-party sellers have a long history with the platforms that they
offer their goods on and also looking through reviews, although steering away from
reviews that exist on the same platform.You can also contact the
company before making a purchase to find out if their contact details are
correct, and if there is any suspicion that the seller might be a bad player
it’s simply a case of finding another seller. If I purchase on a B2B (Business
to Business) basis, I always carry out checks on high-value purchases and ask
for verifiable references, and if I am purchasing from a third-party reseller
of high-value items, I generally check with the manufacturer that the seller is
listed as a channel partner. These are low effort high yield things that anyone
can do with a few minutes to spare.This might seem over the top
just to purchase a memory card, so I tend to pay a little more for lower value
items to ensure they come from a reputable seller who I know and trust rather
than saving a few pennies and then having the headache of backed-up work not
being backed-up.For higher value items and
where the savings can be much more significant, twenty minutes of phone calls
and an email usually get me the information I need to have full or no
confidence in the supplier. In my other life, I would be making visits to
production facilities and distributors and would have a legal team conducting a
credit check. Now that might be overkill for an SD Card.
Eighties Entertainment by Mark Taylor – I really do miss the trips to Blockbuster, the VHS videocassette and my low-tech audio players. I miss my 8-bit computers more! Each element of this work was hand-drawn on a digital medium and then collaged into this single artwork! Having become somewhat of an
inadvertent expert on figuring out if a Warhol is real or fake and being asked
frequently to provide some insight when the odd gallery is about to make a
significant purchase, my eye for dodgy details has become more refined over the
years. I do the exact same thing with high-end electronics too.For the most part, fake and
forged SD Card packaging falls into two camps. It’s either very good and could easily
pass as the original or it’s really, really bad, in which case the contents of
the packaging are almost definitely going to be fake too. Packaging is
generally the first line of defence in spotting ropey SD Cards, but beyond this, you are going to have to inspect the SD Card for signs of tampering.The front label of the SD Card
will either be a sticker or more recently, it will be printed directly on the
card itself. If the sticker has been misplaced it would be a red flag that
something isn’t quite right. The labels are almost always placed on in the
cards with uniformity as the labelling process is often automated and the work
carried by robots who don’t usually place stickers in the wrong place!Check for spelling errors,
slight differences in the branding, and colour. Reds are usually much darker
than the official branding or they’re very washed out, colouring is notoriously
difficult to replicate with accuracy without the official colour profiles that
any brand would have.Any physical stickers should
be quite difficult to peel off, and there should be a serial number printed on
most cards from reputable brands if the cards are relatively recent as in being
produced certainly within the last four to five years. If the serial number is
the same on multiple cards it’s a fake. You also need to take notice of the
plastic too, good quality memory cards are almost always very stiff and very
difficult to bend, a fake can often be bent easily without too much force.Equally, SD Cards come with
storage limits that are predicated on existing technology being available, so
if a card is offering you a capacity that doesn’t fit with the norms usually
supplied by the manufacturer, it too is likely to be a fake. I have seen older
cards which had capacities measured in megabytes being sold in place of cards
that hold gigabytes. A 128Mb card is not even close to offering the capacity of
a 128Gb card and the size prefix can easily be overlooked.Surprisingly, fakes and
forgeries are big business and because of the low value of the originals,
they’re rampant on online market places. The major brands such as SanDisk and
Kingston have security features visibly present on their cards ranging from
watermarks to colorshift technologies, and the major manufacturers will almost
always have sections on their websites that go into detail about how to spot
fakes. It is the same with big technology companies who often have entire teams
of people actively working in this area to spot and shut down bad players.There are lots of steps you can
take before you insert the card into your device to determine if it is the real
deal or not, but generally, when a hundred buck high-speed card is being sold
for significantly less than a competitor’s lower-priced, lower specification
option, it’s a case of buyer beware. That’s not to say that some fakes are any
cheaper than the originals, if you see the same price displayed on every card
you see online the automatic assumption is that this must be an official card
so you do have to tread this path with some care.If you do find that you have
inadvertently purchased a fake, get in touch with the manufacturer. There’s not
much they are responsible for if you didn’t purchase the card directly from
them so any replacement will almost always be sent to you on a good faith
basis, but if you can provide them with purchase details they will usually do
their best to shut the bad players down.Most of the good manufacturers
will send you an official replacement, they see it as a good business practice to
keep artists and photographers coming back to their brand, I’ve even had
replacements of older, official cards sent to me when they have produced the
odd error even many years after purchase and that’s partly why it’s worth
paying just that little bit more.It’s worth being mindful that
it’s not always the seller’s fault. If they’re not intentionally scamming you,
chances are that they have had stock swapped out on route or they have also
been scammed. This happens with all manner of electronics, and there are some
quite complex scamming operations taking place that involve everything from
redirecting transport to having an inside source to make the switch. If you do
contact the seller, make sure you back it up in writing that the goods are
either fake or have been previously used, you might need that evidence later
on.
Floppy Disc by Mark Taylor – I still use floppies today! I have never used a punchcard though! Why the clothes pegs? They’re great for holding PCBs while you solder them and better than bulldog clips, every geek needs pegs! I get it, technology has
always been expensive and it is becoming even more expensive post-pandemic (I’m
still not convinced it’s over despite what Borris tells us…) and because of the
global chip shortage. Tech is in demand and there’s only a finite supply of the
good stuff in the world’s supply chains at the moment. That situation looks like
it will become slightly better towards the end of 2023 and that’s exactly when
you might even find an over-abundance of chips with prices that are starting to
drop back down closer to pre-pandemic levels. That’s assuming that the chip
manufacturers can actually resolve the current issues.To add some context to that
and to give an indication of just how bad things are at the moment, the order I
placed three months ago for a brand new dye-sublimation printer has now been
updated with a new delivery date and it should be with me sometime in early
2023. The long wait times for technology and the limited supply are also
currently driving an upsurge in demand for pre-used technology, meaning that
even prices for older equipment are currently going through the roof. This is
having a massive impact on businesses as well as consumers but it is especially
difficult for small businesses right now.In normal times, whatever
normal now is, pre-used technology with plenty of remaining life could be found
at considerably cheaper prices than it can be found today. The limited
supply and high demand have suddenly driven up prices and bargains are becoming more
difficult but not as yet, completely impossible to find.If you are in the market for
pre-used or pre-loved technology, there are a few things that are worth
thinking about before you make any kind of purchase. Firstly, it’s worth
bearing in mind that pre-owned technology that still has plenty of life
remaining is unlikely to be the bargain that it would have been had it not been
for the global chip shortage.More and more home users and
businesses are having to turn to the used market just to get their hands on
essential technologies that they need to either carry out their business or to work
from home. The difference in price over previous years is reflected by the
current demand and in some cases, some technology is now being sold for very
close to the original retail price and sometimes even more where brand new
technology is currently impossible to get hold of.There is less demand for older
technology which might still just be within the window where it can continue to
receive updates and patches from the manufacturer. Windows 10 for example won’t
stop receiving support from Microsoft until 2025, but what happens then?At some point in the
life-cycle of technology, the original manufacturer stops supporting older
devices. It makes sense because they will want you to invest in the latest and
greatest technology and much like mobile phones, they would love it if all of
their users were using the exact same platform with the exact same version of
whatever software is installed. They ideally want everyone to jump ship to the
latest model the second its released and in a perfect world, they would also
want everyone to apply every update on release too.Technology doesn’t happen that
way though and manufacturers set expectations much earlier than they once did
to inform users about the dates when support can be expected to come to an end.
This gives consumers and businesses time to plan for upgrades and it also gives
users an early warning about just how much life is left in a product and this
is really important for those looking towards the pre-used market.You also have a choice when it
comes to buying older technologies that you won’t necessarily get when buying
new. You can either go for pre-used or refurbished or reconditioned. Pre-used
devices generally come with an element of risk in that they will rarely be sold
with any guarantee. Refurbished and reconditioned devices are usually sold
either by the original manufacturer or retailer or a channel partner of the
manufacturer, although there are also quite a few independent suppliers who
have their own refurbishment programs in place.These refurbished devices
generally come complete with some level of warranty, with the major
manufacturers often giving a warranty that is equal to the one supplied when
buying a new product. The devices are often graded too, meaning that you can
pick up a device that shows very little in the way of wear and tear and save a
little cash in the process.If you are buying a pre-used
device say from a private seller who wouldn’t usually be expected to supply any
kind of warranty with it, there are some risks in doing that. Unlike buying a
second-hand vehicle, you won’t receive any kind of service record with it.
Technology can be tetchy at the best of times but with the second hand market
there’s not really any way to find out if the device has displayed some
intermittent fault previously that could turn out to be something more drastic
a little way down the line.On the upside, you can usually
find a bargain on the second-hand market as buyers tend to want to offload old
technology whenever they buy a new replacement and they usually want to offload
it quickly. The other significant risk about buying from any of these markets
is just how much longer will the device continue to receive support from the
manufacturer with device and firmware updates and more importantly, any
critical security updates that if not applied could leave you vulnerable to
bad players who are constantly looking out for weaknesses to exploit.By 2025, what you can expect
to see is a pre-used market flooded with relatively new-looking laptops
alongside a slew of older ones and desktop PCs for the simple reason that
Windows 11 is only compatible with devices containing a Windows 11 compatible TPM
chip unless you use Microsoft’s update which bypasses the need for it. That could, however, result in a severe loss of overall performance.Any device that doesn’t have the option of upgrading to Windows 11 will
be to all intents and purposes, at the literal end of its life with the only
remaining options being something like adding a Linux/Unix distribution but
that will have an impact on its usefulness as an artists tool for creating
digital art with traditional image editing tools. To go down this route you
will also need to master Linux which to be fair, you probably should be getting
to grips with anyway, it’s the future.Another factor that you might
want to consider is the age of the device which is not always apparent from
just looking at it. Manufacturers only tend to make slight cosmetic differences
to the external bodies of the devices between generations, but it is what sits
under the hood that really matters. The microprocessor for example might be
listed as being an Intel i5, a processor still very much in use and advertised today,
but the microprocessor in the device could very well be a first-generation i5
that was introduced in 2009 meaning that the modern-sounding laptop in the
advert could already be well past its best at 13-years old.In 2022, we are now on the 12th
generation of i5 processors from Intel so a lower cost but much more recent i3
Processor would be way faster and more capable. Another case of buyer beware.
Hello World by Mark Taylor – when hung on a plain wall, this feels as though the cables are leaping off the canvas. That’s the exact look I wanted from creating this. Again, every element has been hand-drawn and painted using only a screen and a stylus! Desktop computers, laptops and
tablets can be a minefield if you plan to purchase a pre-used device to create
digital art. Applications such as Photoshop CC just won’t run at all on older
devices or at least if they do, they will run like a legless dog.As the life-cycle of computers
has evolved so have the minimum specifications for serious applications such as
Photoshop and the other Creative Cloud applications. Even applications which
are now predominantly cloud-based still need to use local resources on the
device and will have minimum entry requirements to operate without issue.The hard disk and storage
capacities of older devices can also be a bone of contention when running
modern applications. As devices have become smaller, the need for storage has
become greater and for the most part, casual storage is taken care of using
cloud-based technologies so the relatively small storage capacities usually
included with modern base model devices are less of an issue if you are using
the device in a casual manner and aren’t reliant on having access to large
applications. Great for the office and school, but not so great for a digital
artist who needs to be at the pinnacle of the latest technology and who will
consume storage like it’s going out of fashion.For casual users who don’t
have to rely on technology to create digital art, this isn’t too much of an
issue. For professional users, things get complicated quite quickly. If you are
installing a package such as Creative Cloud, the package relies on local
storage being available to install the application on and as and when
additional updates are released, the need to have larger capacity local storage
becomes an ever-growing issue. Applications rarely become smaller in size and
especially as they are updated.Another issue with any device
that has limited local storage is that the device can perform sluggishly as it
reads and writes data constantly. As most modern devices are
non-user-serviceable it can also be problematic even to attempt to install an
upgraded storage medium. My Surface Book for example would need to have the
entire touch screen removed to get anywhere close to the on-board storage
device, or anything else that makes it work. A desktop PC in a traditional case
would have more options to keep up with any future demands placed on it.Modern laptops are just not
designed to be upgraded, they’re designed to be thrown away and that’s
something that’s not only environmentally problematic, when you are talking about
a $2,000 device it’s not unlike a subscription if you really think about it.
Having said that, if you are a busy user you could expect a laptop to serve you
well for 5-years or so on the outside if the operating system support is still
in place. Still, throughout this time the software availability at least for the
latest versions will begin to diminish over time.I still have a 2014 MacBook Pro
that continues to run the latest OS from Apple, for now at least, with none of
the keyboard issues that my recent MacBook Pro initially had. The downside is
that for anything other than general browsing, it has become massively more
limiting over the past year and the way overpriced Mac Pro is now taking the
heavy load of Creative Cloud while I am at my desk.
Eighties Innovation by Mark Taylor – the 80s had it all, from pocket TVs to low-cost computers. Then tech grew up and became both bigger and smaller at the same time. If you are buying a pre-owned
device you should check the power supply and cables. Inevitably, with any
device that is designed to be portable, users will carry them around often in
bags containing everything else you need on your travels.When the cables are
repeatedly plugged in and pulled out they tend to become worn over time and the
cost of replacing the power supply can wipe out any savings you made. Power
supplies are often bespoke to a specific manufacturer and in many cases, they
are specific to a particular device. Generic power supplies are available for
many laptops but they might not be suitable for all.It’s also worth checking that
any USB or display ports haven’t become loose too, for the simple reason that a
laptop is notoriously difficult to repair and it usually means taking it to a
specialist. One area you might not immediately think about is the battery,
again, unlike laptops of yesteryear, most modern batteries are built into the
device and are not user-replaceable.As time goes by the capacity
of the battery will diminish and suddenly you might find that the laptop needs
to remain plugged into an electrical socket just to power on or you will need
to replace the battery if it is replaceable. Built-in batteries usually require
an approved service centre installation, so again, you will need to be mindful
of any potential additional costs.If you are in the market for a
new device, it’s exactly the same as it is with displays and monitors. Older
devices from last years range might not have more modern USB C ports which are
faster and can carry more power, or their screen displays might be of a much
lower quality and resolution than the more recent models in the range. Small,
no-so-obvious details can make a huge difference to digital artists.This is an area though where
retailers can make last year’s models look like huge bargains as they will often
discount them heavily just before a newer model with an upgraded processor,
more memory and storage and an all-around better device is released. You do need
to be cautious with retailers, discounts are rarely what they seem especially
towards the end of a products first year’s sales run. Recommended retail prices
rarely reflect the prices that devices ever sell for yet the discounts applied
will always be based on the manufacturers RRP.I scoured various websites
when writing this article just to see how much of a saving could be made and in
almost every case with the exception of Apple devices, I was able to find that
the device was often at its most expensive since release and had never been
offered at the manufacturers recommended retail price, often it had been
heavily discounted and it would have been cheaper to purchase the device
sometimes 6-months earlier.I also found refurbished
devices selling for more than you could purchase a brand new and more recent
model in some cases once discounts had been applied to the newer devices or if
you shopped around for the best price.As with most technology
purchases, more often than not it can be a false economy saving a little upfront because you will generally need to upgrade much earlier than you would,
had you have spent a little more from the outset on a newer model. You really
do have to do your homework when it comes to buying any form of technology.Retailers are masters at
presenting bargain technology buys, but technology is too expensive for them to
have it sitting around for too long, they have to keep it moving to make way
for new stock or hit sales targets. That doesn’t usually mean that they will be
overly generous with discounts, resellers who supply the retailers and the
manufacturers just don’t have huge profit margins in technology, they make
money on the upsell, the software, the subscriptions and the services that you
usually buy alongside any new device, and it is usually these extras that almost
subsidise the true cost of the technologies available.I know that most channel
partners who supply the retailers are making almost next to nothing on the
devices and some manufacturers have been known to sell the technology at a loss
to the channel partner in order to grab a larger market share which they can
trade from. In short, if there’s already next to no profit, there will be next
to no real discount and retailers will be even less inclined to take the hit.
Technology is notoriously susceptible to paper-based values.
Insert Coin by Mark Taylor – Feels like I have been inserting coins in technology ever since the 70s! Again, each element has been created as its own artwork, hand-painted and drawn, then juxtaposed into a single piece of art. These works take between 5 and 80-hours to produce! Generally, new models of
electronic devices tend to be released in the early spring or in the fall. In some
cases you can pick up a discounted device just before the new model arrives,
but bear in mind that the device by that point will have already been running
the clock down on any future support and discounts aren’t always representative
of the best price the device has ever been sold for.Buying current generation
technology just prior to the release of newer generation technology means that
you could end up with a device that will need to be replaced a year earlier
than if you were to wait until the newer model is released and you spent the
same as the previous generations full price. Whilst most devices will continue
to be supported with newer versions of the operating systems and updates, that
support usually ends at least a year before the newer device.We rarely utilise all of the
features that our current technology provides, yet we are always keen to buy
into a new model so we can have even more new features that in all likelihood, we
might not use either.One of the main reasons people
upgrade their phones is to take advantage of the one big technological leap that
we have come to expect every year which is with the camera. Yet there are ways
that you can make your existing phone camera get a little closer to the output
of the new models camera if you understand how the settings for your current camera
application work.The differences between last
year’s model and this years are usually that the newer model might run a little
bit faster which you’re unlikely to notice if you are only upgrading from last
year’s model, the battery life might be improved but it will never be quite like
that old Nokia you once owned that only needed charging once a year, and the
number of pixels the camera can take photographs at might be a pixel or two
more.As most people who take
professional photographs will be using a professional camera, paying out a
thousand bucks to gain an extra megapixel which you won’t necessarily need if
you are never printing the image out, is probably more than it would cost to
purchase a reasonably solid entry-level semi-professional camera with much more
advanced features and better overall results. Sure, it’s less convenient to
carry around a camera as well as a phone, but the results will mostly always be
better.Technically, the leaps made
between this years technology and last years aren’t the kind of leaps that we
would see between generations of technology a decade or so ago. Mostly we will
get subtle upgrades here and there, a minor facelift or a millimetre shaved off
the size, but the general user environment and experience will often be the
same as the phone you are using today. The cost of an upgrade could in some
cases be a thousand bucks plus and that seems like a lot of money that could be
put to better use, especially when it’s almost always possible to get similar
results from the device you already own.One way we can upgrade our
phones, or more specifically our phone cameras, is to take a dive into the
settings. If we take an iPhone using the latest version of iOS, I was able to
produce better results from an iPhone 12 than I could get natively from an
iPhone 13 by following this settings recipe which can be used on any Apple device
running iOS 15 or iPadOS 15.Firstly, open up your photos
app and select anything that you think could do with a touch of added pizazz.
Don’t worry, the photos app on Apple devices allows you to create
non-destructive edits so if you don’t like the changes you can revert back to
the original at any time.Once you have the photo, click
on the edit tab in the upper right-hand corner. Now we are going to manually
change the settings rather than click the awful magic wand.Raise the exposure to 100
Raise the brilliance to 100
Everything should now look
like a car crash and you should have a very bright image with hardly any
detail, and that’s just fine!Next, lower the highlights to
-35Decrease shadows to -31
Decrease contrast to -33
Reduce brightness to -15
At this point your photo
should look truly awful, don’t panic, this is an expected outcome and you’re
doing just fine.Adjust the black point setting
to 11Set the vibrance to 9
Increase warmth to 11
Set the tint level to 46
Now we need to go back to the
start and set both the exposure and brilliance settings back to zero.At this point, you should be
amazed that your iPhone has produced an image worthy of a gallery exhibition,
or at least it should show so much more detail in your work in progress shots.
There will be a few photo subjects and colour combinations that will look a
little less refined, but you can tweak the settings such as tint and warmth and
see if that works slightly better.That particular combination is
just one of many you can find online, people literally spend their spare time
changing settings to see what happens and then they will publish the results,
and there will be settings hacks or recipes for most devices that will let you
push a little more from them.
Roller Disco by Mark Taylor – I absolutely loved creating this. I spent a lot of time on the stitching and leather detail, and probably more time than anyone should on creating rust! I did think about leaving this
tip on the sidelines and tell you about it another day, but this is maybe the
best time-saver that hardly anyone uses, although it won’t save you any money,
it will save you a lot of time!If you frequently find
yourself having to cut and paste on your PC, you are probably using the
keyboard shortcuts, CTRL and C to copy, CTRL and X to cut, and CTRL and V to
paste. It’s useful when you’re typing because your hands can remain in touch
with the keyboard and you don’t have to fiddle around with the trackpad or the
mouse. I have to say at this point though, if this is how you copy and paste you
are doing it wrong.Some Windows PCs will need you
to go into the settings and physically turn on your clipboard history, but
generally and especially on Windows 11, if you press the Windows key together
with V, you should be given the opportunity to turn on the clipboard history without
first going into the settings.And that simple key
combination is the shortcut you have been yearning for, probably forever. The
combination of the Windows key and V will bring up a history of the last 25 items
you have placed into the clipboard allowing you to choose exactly what you want
to copy and paste. If you regularly need to paste the same text into a
document, you can also pin it to the top so that it’s always the first item on
the list. This is really useful if you find that you are constantly having to
retype your email address or contact details.Having spoken to pretty much every
one of my handful of really close friends, none of them knew about clipboard
history, and that’s not surprising. Most of us will only ever use around 20% of
the features available to us from any gadget. It’s the same with Microsoft Word
too, there are hundreds of cool things
we can do with it, yet we mostly fire the application up, type what we need to
type and then get on with our lives.And the same thing happens
when we use our mobile phones but we constantly upgrade them because the new
version will allow us to do something else. Most of us will use our phones to
perform the exact same functions every day.If you are only using your
smartphone for messages, taking the occasional photograph, or browsing social
media, a faster processor doesn’t mean that you will be able to consume the
content you are looking at any quicker, it means that applications will open a
fraction sooner, or you could have two applications running at the same time so
you can save a few more seconds switching between apps. If you are not using
those features today, it’s unlikely that you will use them tomorrow on a newer
phone.If you use your phone to play
games, the processor might make more of a difference, but if you are paying a
thousand bucks to play Candy Crush a teeny tiny bit faster, that thousand bucks
would be better spent on a new generation games console or a Nintendo Switch if
you want portability.There is more of a reason to
upgrade when you use technology to work with digital imaging, graphic design,
or video editing, slight increases in processor speed will make a huge
difference to your workflow. But, if your professional digital demands only
stretch to completing paperwork or editing spreadsheets, chances are you are
not pushing any recent technology anywhere even close to its limits.
Do Not Feed The Seagulls by Mark Taylor – If you’re off to the seaside this summer, do not feed the seagulls! Yes, I still create landscapes and I love fish and chips! As I said at the beginning of
this epic tome, technology can be frustrating and modern technology not only
has in-built frustration, it now comes bundled with what is essentially, a
fixed date that you can expect it to stop working. My 40-year-old Commodore 64
8-bit home computer is still going strong and has never had any kind of update
so I do wonder just how advanced we humans have become in some respects.But you can avoid a lot of
this frustration either by giving things time to update or spending a little
more money now to save a lot more later. We haven’t even touched on the various
eco-systems that we become tied into, but as a professional creative, making
the right technology choices can make a huge difference to your creative
output. Not only can you save time, but buying at the right time can
potentially save you big money on your bottom line. As a small business, every
penny counts in such an uncertain economy as the one we are facing today.
Obsolescence by Mark Taylor – A retro collectors dream artwork filled with nostalgia and obsolete technology, because it all ends up being obsolete one day and all we have left are the memories! Hopefully you will be able to
get a little bit more from your current devices and hopefully I will have
busted a few technology myths for you too. Tech is a confusing world made even
more confusing by those who absolutely want to retain their God-like geek image
and not share tech’s inner secrets with you.Tech is perhaps the biggest
money pit there ever was but that doesn’t mean that you absolutely always have
to throw money into it, although there will be plenty who sell it who will
disagree with me.There are entire ecosystems
that spring up around new models of anything. Be it mobile phones and the case
industry, review websites that aren’t as bothered by you owning the new tech as
they are by keeping you coming back and contributing to ad-revenue, everyone
will tell you that you need to upgrade when you probably don’t. We buy into it
because we all have that inner fear of missing out. Personally, as much as I
love technology I would much rather spend my money on art.Understanding the basics that
the geeks who sell it don’t want you to know will make sure that you can focus
on your creative process and with luck, you might even have a little extra cash
to sink into that other money pit we call art supplies, and yes, I will be
sharing the secrets of the art supply money pit soon too because if there was
ever a bigger money pit than technology, it exists in the world of art supplies
and don’t even get me started on the Mega-Gallery, that can wait for another
day!I am an artist and blogger and
live in Staffordshire, England. My days are filled with creating all sorts of art,
dog walking and Teams Meetings, while still being stuck somewhere in the
eighties with no intention of joining the nineties.You can purchase my art
through my Fine Art America store or my Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.com You
can also purchase my work, including my limited editions, directly.All of the proceeds from my
Pixels and FAA sales contribute to continuing this website and ensuring you get
wholly independent tips and advice without any hidden agenda and without any
need to sign up to anything!You can also view my portfolio
website at https://beechhousemedia.comIf you are on Facebook, you
can give me a follow right here, https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia
You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia -
The Distraction of Art
Old School Art Advice from a
Non-Influencer
Old School Art Tips from a Non-Influencer It’s no secret that selling
your artwork is much more challenging than creating it, even artists as far
back as Van Gogh and before, realised this. Yet, we don’t have to make the
process even more difficult than it already is by jumping on every bandwagon
that promises to turn our paintbrush cleaning rags into riches.Let’s start with a warning. If
you are an influencer, thought leader, or you are a celebrity with an opinion
on stuff you really have no idea about, this ain’t going to be the most
comfortable of reads. Hey, you can read right?A month or so ago I started
writing a blog post about how the cost of art supplies had increased, it was
going well apart from the rising costs for everything and a feeling of sadness
as I realised just how difficult it is to be an artist these days. I even created the now mandatory list (because
lists are an internet thing) of cheaper alternatives that still accomplish the
same results for a lower cost and without compromising the quality. Today, that
article is a work in progress and as soon as I find that elusive thing we call
time, and I’m able to tick more things off some random internet list, I’ll get
around to finishing it off and because according to my fuel bill, we’re all
heading to economic Hell in a handcart real soon.By the way, the four horsemen
of the apocalypse are now known as, Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and Putin. I digress
but you at least now know where I’m heading with this.I like to research every
article I write, that’s why some of my articles are long, I never want to just
give you one view of the world. The art supplies article was about 80% done when
I decided to change track after one particularly lengthy research session when
I stumbled across some advice online that I honestly think couldn’t have been
any worse had it have been a photocopy of a photocopy of the most pointless
advice in the history of ever. It
mattered not, the author had absolutely nailed the SEO and that stuff really
matters apparently.
The Last Arcade by Mark Taylor – Available from Fine Art America and my Pixels store now! The advice in question was
that every artist must have a successful YouTube channel, must
be present on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, must network at major
shows including such gems as Basel, (good luck getting an invite), and must leave
comments with links on every blog and forum post you can find. Try doing that
here and you’ll quickly realise that my spam filters are going to deal with it
before I even see it.That’s the wrong advice
however you want to cut it and it sounds like a heap of work that will either
burn you out or burn everyone else out. As an artist who still believes that at
least some of your time in the profession should continue to be dedicated to the
noble act of creating art, I wouldn’t even begin to guess what compromises I
would need to make to fit that lot in. I’m exhausted with the little I do in
comparison, and that little I already do can easily consume 16-hours a day.The internet isn’t all bad
advice, scams, propaganda, and NFTs, I absolutely adore well written websites
from artists sharing their musings that come from experience. I can relate to most
of those and many of them offer some real nuggets of advice that could only
come from someone who has lived at least a part of their life in the art world
but even then, someone who has the lived experience of being an artist might
not have the lived experience of also being the teacher.So where should you turn to
for advice as an artist? There are plenty of artists and others who have the lived
experience of being inside the art world, you just have to look at that advice
and determine whether or not the advice they offer will work for you. Good
advice could see your business bloom, the bad advice or the advice that is only
applicable to businesses that are poles apart from yours, well, that could see
you fall over a cliff edge, or at best, forever run in circles which we’ll get
to a little later.
Spectrum by Mark Taylor The way I run my business
probably wouldn’t work for someone else with a different audience. I think I
have always been careful to point this out throughout the hundreds of posts I
have written over the years but what I do hope my posts achieve, is to raise an
awareness that you can decide if something fits into your business delivery
model or not, and to make you think about the uniqueness of your own art and
business and more importantly, where you and it fits.The real issue I have with
many of the generic business advice websites out there, some of which I am sure
are well intended, is they just don’t
provide the answers that have a good fit with the business of art, make you
subscribe to their Patreon, or they lack any sort of context.I can’t ever recall the last
time I sat down and drew a Venn diagram to demonstrate to my imaginary shareholders
how well I understood the lesson on Venn diagrams for diagrams sake. I tried
demonstrating this to my two dogs with one responding, he’s got my favourite
ball, make him give it back, – Yes, I know, but no one should think it’s odd to
have a full on conversation with two Shih-Tzu’s, they’re full of inspiration
and hugs but mostly the stubborn aloofness that only really small dogs can pull
off so well.That said, there are plenty of
websites written by artists and others who have been in the industry for some
time and who really do get the nuances of the industry, they understand that
they are sharing their experiences rather than imparting the absolute rules of
art, or they have a track record within the sector and they go to great pains
to explain how they went about making changes that worked or didn’t work for
them.There are fewer who can take
those experiences and present them as some kind of masterclass, they exist, but
they’re a rare breed who mostly have a really good grip on the business of art
and understand the difference between selling an artwork and selling a widget.
Anyone who says that selling art is no different to selling a widget has most
likely spent a little too much time puffing on a bong.The only advice I would stand
by for any artist is to develop a sense of being able to take any information
that you get and to carefully consider how that advice might or might not help
your business. Even advice from the greatest living artist of all time might
not be suitable advice for your art business. Honestly, if Van Gogh were alive
today, I’d be a little dubious of listening to his top ten fortune 500
companies to back because y’all just know that Buzzfeed needed another list.
Cable Management by Mark Taylor – available now from my Pixels and Fine Art America stores! I get it. The art world has
never been an easy career choice, sales can never be guaranteed, and because
there is no one size fits all master blue-print to follow we soak up all of the
information and advice that the internet can throw at us and then, at least for
a little while, we dabble with ways that we can better engage with our audience
in the vague hope that we stumble across a secret formula that will catapult us
quickly towards success as defined by the same con-fluencer who wrote the top
ten couscous recipes to make on a budget.That very definition of
success is different for every artist, or at least it should be. There is no
bar, nor flag, nor anything etched in some biblical stone to suggest that an
artist must achieve some level of greatness proven only by a solid sales record
or because of some, in the know contact written in an address book. This is
what the gatekeepers would once have us believe we needed to do and we would
all dutifully chase the mythical unicorn we call ‘becoming discovered’ so that
the gatekeepers would allow us passage through the gallery doors.When the internet met the art
world, the very barriers that would once prevent the majority of us from
pursuing our creative dreams would begin to ebb away. It was suddenly easier to
reach a global market than a local one and at the same time, the art world,
through this new found simplicity, became a little harder to navigate too.The internet soon became the
promised land of opportunity, sales platforms, direct access to the masses, gave
us some shockingly bad advice for everything and it introduced the birth of the
click-hungry influencer. It’s little wonder that so many artists fail before
they even begin.Along with the internet, the
accepted norm of the art world we once knew had now become disrupted where a
hive mind of twenty-something self-styled celebrity influencers collectively tried
to convince us that everything we thought we knew now needed to be relearned to
conform with the branding guidelines of their latest sponsor.
Cabled Up by Mark Taylor – Available now on a wide range of print mediums and products – this looks fabtastic on steel plate and acrylic sheets! For those artists who look only
to the internet to solve all of their problems when they struggle to sell their
first work, the click-winning whims of the influencers and so-called thought
leaders (whatever they’re supposed to be) can make us believe that we always have
to follow entirely new paths. Become a YouTuber, become an affiliate marketer,
read the latest top twenty ways to sell more art, and they make us believe we
need to do this at the same time as being our best selves when simply being
human is perfectly okay.Whatever the top twenty things
are that Guru Internet tells you to do in these constantly regenerated copy and
pasted generic lists, you absolutely don’t have to complicate the art world or the
business you conduct within it any more than it already is, not when there are
real artists and art world experts who frequently share their lived experiences
but who might not show up on the first page of Google.I’ve chased those unicorns,
tried every novelty trick in the book, bought the T-Shirt, even designed one on
Zazzle, and after the best part of almost four decades in the business I’ve
come to one conclusion, I get way more sales from spending time with my tribe
instead of spending countless hours editing video that very few will watch, or
chasing whatever this weeks version of the unicorn of success is.Heavily influenced by the
influencer, there’s an inherent risk that your creative process, your first
love, the very reason you are exploring the internet for new ideas, becomes
demoted to a secondary side hustle while you’re chasing the unicorns of sales, success,
and discovery.Copying worthy hashtags,
repeatedly checking your notifications, or any number of hashtag relevant
things that have been suggested by the pre-teenage master of marketing currently
trending and presenting 10 minutes and 7 seconds of footage that just so
happens to align with the required length of time favoured by the algorithm.
All in an attempt to reach, well, we don’t quite know who, with, we don’t quite
know what. There’s rarely any specificity that we can apply to some of this
almost random advice, they tell us what to do but never quite get to the point
of telling us exactly how to do it.Art, or what is now known as,
that thing which at one time really was your first love, has now become the
distraction that you no longer have time for. It has been replaced by the chase
and it’s a spiral. Let’s try this, okay that didn’t go well, so let’s try this
instead. Instead, how about let’s try something really simple.
Britain’s Best Bike – Although I never owned one which also makes me sad. You can order a print online from my stores. No one can argue that the
traditional way we once sold art has changed. We no longer only have the option
of walking through a physical gallery door, we can walk through any number of
virtual ones, or even alternative physical ones. Galleries are no longer
exclusive to galleries, they can even be found in the local coffee shop.No one can argue either that
video isn’t a thing, people consume everything differently in the internet age
and we’d be fools to think that they don’t. As artists, we need to respond to and
address these things but we also have to find a balance that allows us to find
our people while still having enough time to create whatever we create while
staying physically and mentally healthy, so we really shouldn’t be making it
more complicated than it already is.Instead, we need to think of things
like the internet, and in this day and age, dare I say it, even gallery
representation, only as tools in a toolbox. They are incredibly useful tools if
they’re used in the right way at the right time, but should we always reach for
a screwdriver to crack a walnut?The way people consume and
purchase art might have changed but the overarching principle that sells art is
just the same as it always was. Art sells when relationships are built, and it
is those relationships that turn people into buyers and buyers eventually into
collectors. That’s as true today as it always was despite the economic mess the
world is in, but you don’t have to become a slave to the online world to make
those connections.If you are looking for any
kind of secret formula, I think it could be that you really do have to build
relationships with people, whether they’re buyers, gallery owners, or anyone
else who takes a second or two out of their lives to give you a love, like or
wow. Now this takes effort, and building relationships and maintaining
engagement with those who you build a relationship with, is frankly, hard work.
Hey, no one ever said art was easy.Where art is sold might be
different today but the process of selling it continues to follow a very
traditional path, it really is all about the relationships that you can build.
Sure you can sell to casual buyers with little to no relationship, but this
will often be random, more often than not it’s unsustainable and those buyers
will quickly move on and that’s not great if you’re looking to build up a
collector base.Despite what we’re told, the Holy
Grail for an artist should never be gallery representation, neither should it
be some kind of temporary YouTube celebrity status, it should be being able to
have a direct relationship with the buyer, on your terms, where you can
absolutely keep inviting that buyer back.
London Pride by Mark Taylor – a retro view of Britain that still mostly exists today – aside from the iconic Red Telephone Box! The number of likes, loves,
wows, views, emoji’s, emotions, or even having a social post reach viral levels
of success, isn’t any guarantee that you will make a sale. This is where frustration can creep into the
business of art, or rather, the lack of business from your art. There’s a real
risk that by chasing the trends we begin to rely too much on specific things
that are ultimately only single tools that should be used alongside everything
else in the toolbox.We place so much effort into
creating a carefully crafted social post, a YouTube video, a podcast, or any
number of things that the influencers, advisors, or anyone with a passing
interest tell us we should do to raise our exposure, but unless we ask the
fundamental question of “who do we want our work to be exposed to”, any advice,
good, bad, or indifferent, is fruitless.This is something I often
discuss with friends and the many new artists I get to work with when they tell
me they have tried everything they can think of to market their work and close
a sale. That chase often includes setting up a YouTube channel and investing
hours into yet another venture that requires as much effort to market as
selling the art itself. I’ve been there in the past and all too often what seems
like a good idea at the time can frequently turn out to be another major drain on
that elusive thing we call time.The fundamental problem isn’t
that setting up a YouTube channel is completely wrong, it could well be the
very best strategy you can have, but unless you know exactly who the audience
is and what the audience wants, you are more likely to spend as much time
chasing the exposure unicorns to promote your YouTube channel as you’re already
spending chasing the other exposure unicorns to sell your work. That’s also the
one piece of advice that I wish I had listened to when I first stepped into my
career.Numbers often lie in the art
world. At best it’s a world that’s not overly keen on being transparent, and
just because some artistic leaning influencer is telling you that you could be
earning ten thousand bucks a month with a YouTube channel or posting on social
media, doesn’t firstly, mean that you can, and secondly, doesn’t mean that they
are making that kind of bank either. Hypothetically, anything is possible, hey,
it’s even possible that the ten bucks of ad-revenue I made in the first three
years of this blog will get paid out for finally hitting the threshold.Equally, it doesn’t mean you
can’t or shouldn’t, you could be one of the however few, in every one thousand
it is these days, who go on to find some kind of celebrity status funded by
masses of advertising revenue, but be warned, it’s exactly this chase for the
ad revenue that takes over the art, demoting your primary business to little
more than a hobby in the process.
Telephone Exchange by Mark Taylor – A retro inspired juxtapose of eighties communications – available from Fine Art America and my Pixels store! There are lots of things that you
can do to raise awareness of your art without having to go down every rabbit
hole, and mostly, the things that you need to do are the things that centuries
of artists have found to work before. Sure, there will be modern things that
you can do to help you find your tribe on the way.Fundamentally, the basic three
elements are always going to be the same three elements that every successful artist
has used before.The Hook, as
in the message that you want to communicate with your art.The Grind – how
you communicate the message your art is telling to your tribe.Your Health – not
just your business health, your physical and mental health too. The endless
chase to find the unicorn can play havoc with all of these.One thing you definitely don’t
need to do is to replace one set of complicated marketing efforts with another,
or worse, find you now have twice as many things to market. By all means, set
up a YouTube channel but be mindful that a YouTube channel is no different to
art when it comes to letting people know that it exists.Ask any successful YouTuber
what the early days of finding viewers were like and they will tell you it was
a grind that involved plenty of creative marketing, a heap of learning about
algorithms, and at least some blind luck. There’s a real risk that any
promotion of your new channel could become nothing more than a doubling of your
existing effort to market your art with the same level of little reward but if
that’s where your tribe hang out, that’s kind of where you need to be.If your strategy begins to
look at all of the tools available today simply as tools that can be used
either individually or in tandem with other tools, in the right place, in front
of the right audience, and at the right time, you are much more likely to start
seeing some success. If you mix those tools with tried and tested practices
that artists have relied on for years such as making sure that you build on the
relationships and engage with people when they engage with you, the chances of
success will exponentially rise.
Britain 1982 – The Protype – Home computer innovations of the 1980s – available from Fine Art America and my Pixels store! From experience, it’s worth
being mindful that exposure doesn’t always equate to sales, or at least
immediate sales. If you have been in the business of creating art for any
length of time you might very well of heard that line where the client says, I
have no budget but I can pay you in great exposure. No, mostly they can’t. I
was probably the original case study in the art of being duped by these
charlatans who then go on to produce T-Shirts featuring your work.Increasing your exposure has
to be a part of your business strategy, but it should never be a strategy
determined and set by others whose only interest is in obtaining free art.
Exposure is a slow burning candle that takes time to develop, and it needs to
targeted to the right audience where you can then deliver the right message,
not all at once, exposure needs room to grow over time and you need to be able
to sustain it.No one else knows your
audience like you do and after a while, you will instinctively come to know
what messages resonate with your people, so one question to always ask of
others who promise to give you this exposure they talk of, is whether they also
understand the message you are trying to convey. The only time great exposure
via a third party might work is if the third party has a similar audience to
yours and they absolutely have the ability to influence that audience.In short, it comes back to
that single question that answers so many things, you have to know exactly who
you are trying to reach with your marketing message, then you need to follow
that famous Aristotelian “triptych” – tell them what you are going to
tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.We’re artists not marketing
professionals…I’m not going to sugar coat
the next bit, but being an artist in the modern age means that you also have to
be everything else. Where you can’t find the spark to move into that place
where you need to be to wear the marketing hat, you might have to look towards
other options such as paying someone else to run that side of the business for
you because no matter what they say, art doesn’t sell itself.This marketing thing is
challenging for any artist, and one thing that certainly struck me in the early
days of my career was just how overwhelming it could all be. When I started out
I was told I needed to network but no one told me who I needed to network with,
or how I needed to network with them. Turns out that just showing up cold at a
gallery with a portfolio and an expectation that they would immediately
represent me wasn’t an acceptable networking strategy in the art world. I distinctly
remember the advice I got from one prestigious gallerist who suggested that I
might need to be careful on the way out so that the door didn’t smack me in the
ass. He later represented me but that was three years later.One of the things I did back
then whenever I hit such an obstacle, and something I regularly see new artists
fall into the trap of doing, is to go away and look for the next piece of
advice and then I would rinse and repeat until I either found something that
worked, or more often, something that landed firmly in my comfort zone. I later
realised that there’s really no such thing as progressing out of that comfort
zone if I would forever only look for excuses to remain within it.None of this is easy to
master, no one is born a natural marketer, neither is anyone born a natural
artist, these things are learned and mastered and the things we do and the
experiences we collect influence how we learn and master those things over
time.They often say it all comes
down to practice which in itself is a piece of advice that I have often
struggled with. If you want to learn to draw then the consensus of advice on
the internet often points to you protecting some time and drawing every day so
that you become better over time. What I really struggle with when hearing this
advice is how few people giving out that advice actually go on to tell you what
to draw, or the where, or the how and the when.The advice is often simply,
draw every day. The problem is if you are drawing circles every day for a
month, at the end of the month you will be brilliant at drawing circles but not
very good at anything else. Advising someone to practice drawing, practice
their marketing skills, well, yes absolutely, these things can only ever be
truly mastered through doing them, but the how, the process, the why, those are
all important things to understand too.
Great British Phone Box by Mark Taylor – mostly today these are listed buildings where they survived being sold off by the Telecoms companies, some are local lending libraries, some accommodate defibrillators, others are just for show. Available from my Fine Art America and Pixels stores now! The single best thing I ever
figured out, and in the pre-internet days before we even had dial-up and a free
America Online disc, was that you absolutely must figure out who you are
creating your art for. If the answer to that is everyone, as it sometimes is
with eager young artists, then you are doing art all wrong.If you can work that out, the
reliance on generic advice will lessen, the non-generic advice from those in
the know will become infinitely more useful, and you will also discover the
answer to so many other burning questions such as, how do I price my work. Art,
or the business of art then becomes, dare I say it, a little easier.
The British Payphone – the centre of the dial was in itself an iconic image from the 80s and before! Also, available now! When I started out in my art
career I made sure I found a mentor who had been involved in the art world
since, well, let’s say he remembered the last of the dinosaurs. But, here’s the
thing. I didn’t always take his advice. Sometimes, gut instinct can be your
very own inner influencer and you will instinctively know if something will
work for you and your vision of where you need to be, but it takes time to
trust your inner instinct.Ultimately, your business and
any decisions you take fall well and truly under the heading they call, your responsibility.
The internet really has become a self-styled promised land of advice for everyone
and everything and it’s easy to get swept along in the latest marketing trends
and get rich quick shortcuts that are anything but, particularly if the advice
describes a solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem you already have. We
humans have this uncanny ability to always listen to what we want to hear but occasionally,
we need to hear what we need to hear, but hey, the internet has always favoured
emotion over logic.The internet certainly has its
place, but unless any advice is actionable and is firmly rooted in already well
established art marketing practices, there could be very little benefit from
the additional chase that many of these trends suggest they will deliver.This doesn’t mean that setting
up YouTube channels, having a presence on social media, or any number of other
modern day things are a complete waste of time, if that’s where your tribe
hangs out then of course it makes sense to do those things but because someone
tells you that MySpace is making a return for hipsters and this is where you
need to be, doesn’t mean you have to have a presence there.
Electric Dreams by Mark Taylor – 1982 was the year that created bedroom coders who made millions or nothing! Available now from my Fine Art America and Pixels stores! Like so many other things in
life, running an art business is essentially a balancing act. You need to juggle
everything from creating your art to maintaining your health and you have to do
these things simultaneously. There seems to be quite the knack to this life
thing, extra points to those who figure it out.If you feel you can find some
value in following the advice of someone who expresses themselves purely in the
internets vernacular, then by all means follow it. The art of marketing and
selling art could never be conveyed in a single blog post or a ten minute seven
second video, less so if it’s written by an influencer who turned a hobby into
work and transitioned their opinions into personal brands, and bear in mind
that even ‘tone deaf’ has been turned into a brand by more than a few of these
so called influencers.As artists, we absolutely don’t
need to complicate the art world any more than it already is and as the
internet age matures even more, it’s likely that the future of the art world
for the majority of working artists will become even more complex to navigate.
That shouldn’t put anyone off from becoming an artist, as difficult as the
industry is, it also has a whole heap to give back to those who don’t
constantly chase the shortcuts.
Console Gamer by Mark Taylor – There was nothing quite like getting a new game cartridge and plugging it in, no massive day one updates, just fun, fun, fun! They say that any blog post
that doesn’t also include a top ten list of things to tick off isn’t worth a
read, so for what it’s worth I have assembled one and added an eleventh point
to tick off as a bonus. Also, the things on this list are in no particular order
but by ticking each off, you might just finally get a little closer to closing
that elusive sale!11… Apply
the human filter more frequently. If something screams too good to be true, it’s
usually too good to be true. Influencer marketing in the internet age can often
be mistaken for promises.10… Don’t
try to sand down complex marketing with trending hashtags – they only ever
trend for a limited time, sometimes hours or minutes, art is forever right?9… If you
are setting up a YouTube channel, set it up for the right reasons and find the
right audience. Never confuse attention for personal or business growth. Find
your tribe people!8… Remember,
you don’t have to be hyper-online, face to face communication and relationship
building can bear way more fruit than chasing ad-revenue unicorns.7… You
don’t need permission to paint. Remember that success can be fleeting
especially if you are seeking validation from online strangers.6… Are
you looking for alternative income streams to eventually replace your art,
because they might offer more longer-term reward, because you want an audience,
because on paper it sounds way easier, or because you can provide a value add
to your work that has a fit. Make sure that any additional side hustles aren’t
going to be another endless chase for unicorns and that you are doing it for
the right reasons. Be honest about why you’re doing these things and your
honesty will provide you with a much clearer direction of travel.5… Seek
out those with first-hand knowledge of the art world when you are looking for
advice rather than giving too much truck to the many generic articles written with
every business in mind, or at least copied and pasted from every other website.
Searching the internet for the gems isn’t something you can afford to be lazy about!4… Stop
asking the questions that you already have, or need to find the answer to. Unless
you can answer who you make your work for, no one can give you any real sense
of, A) whether there is a market, B) How much you should charge for your work,
C) what art sells best. For what it’s worth, the answer to C is landscapes and
nudes, and if neither are in your wheelhouse, don’t sell out.3… If you
can’t commit the same amount of effort/work/hours into the side hustle as you
put into your current art and marketing, you won’t make much headway. Unicorn
chasing side-hustles often require more than doing a little something on the
side!2… Never
lose sight of the value that going old school can provide when it comes to
communicating with your tribe. Contrary to popular belief, a small ad in a
local newspaper can provide you with more exposure than a social media advert
to that hard to reach local population – as surprising as it seems in the
internet age, physical newspapers remain the preferred choice for many. Leaflet
drops can work too, they’re less spammy and local newspapers still love to
cover a good local business success story.1… It’s
not a battle between becoming an influencer or the influenced. You can be your
own person, your own artist with your own style. In truth, that’s exactly how
art movements have been formed for centuries. The art world at every level
wants unique, well, unless the viewer has been influenced by the celebrity
influencer.
Fluid by Mark Taylor – an unusual return to abstract works, each grain was hand painted in the wood effect! Yes, I know I disappeared for
a while, unfortunately I was struck down with that dreaded bug after avoiding
it since the very start, and my eighties work took on a whole new pace that I
have barely been able to keep up with. In between, I hopped on a cruise ship to
take up a vacation that had been cancelled annually for the past three years
and had a brilliant time sailing the Norwegian Fjords, visiting what was
perhaps the most expensive coffee house anywhere, thirty Euro’s for three
coffee’s and a bottle of water. Talk about buyers regret, the coffee wasn’t
that great.For those of you who have
reached out to me to ask about the possibility of me creating a colouring book
of vintage technology, I am looking into it but who knew there were so many
different uncoated papers. If I do go down this route then of course I will
document the process and let you know if it really is as easy as they say it is
to self-publish these days!Until next time, I hope you
all have a brilliant and creative time and you all keep safe and well!Mark x
I am an artist and blogger who continues to live in
the 1980s. You can purchase my art through my Fine Art America store or my
Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.comAny art sold through Fine Art America and Pixels
contributes towards to the ongoing costs of running and developing this
website. You can also view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.comYou can also follow me on Facebook at: https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia where you will
also find regular free reference photos of interesting subjects and places I
visit. You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia because who even
uses Pinterest any more? -
Back to the Eighties Pushing Pixels
Back to the Eighties – Pushing
Pixels
Back to the Eighties – Pushing Pixels This time, we take a step back
in time to the 1980s, the decade that provides the subject matter of many of my
own artworks. It was also the decade where my life as a professional digital
artist began, one pixel at a time. In my latest discussion we take a deep-dive
into what it was really like creating digital art in the 1980s and why todays image
editing tools and modern equipment can never quite achieve truly authentic
retro recreations.Being what some would call, a
dinosaur of the 8-bit era, I tend to get asked more and more of late what it
was like creating digital art in the early days of home computers and whether
or not it’s easier today with all this new-fangled technology. I’ve been
surprised at just how many people are now taking an interest in a decade that
many of them were born way after, but it’s easy to figure out why, for a new
generation it’s just like a previous generations fascination for the 1960s.So to answer that question
about whether things have become any easier with all of this brand new
technology that can seemingly be made to do anything, in short, it is massively
easier to create anything today and do so with so much more precision but it’s
also massively more difficult to create digital art if you want to create a
specific or authentic vintage look. Sure, you can make a facsimile but that’s
not quite the same.So this time we will be going
on a journey through time. We will take a look at the early home microcomputer
market and how it gradually began to influence how the production of art would
make the transition from canvas to screen. We’ll also take a look at just how
much digital art technology has changed since the early 1980s. It’s a deep dive
for sure, but one that merits the three months or so that this article has
taken me to write because those early moments in tech-history are worthy of
preservation.We’ll also take a look at how
early digital art was created and why recreating authentic vintage style art
today for retro and vintage collectors is massively more complicated with
modern tools than it was back in the decade that also gave us Rick Astley and
Madonna. To top it all off, we’ll also be exploring the very reasons why so
many people are suddenly finding comfort in collecting pixelated memories from
their childhoods, a trend that continues to keep us original pixel artists busy.
Eighties Toy Keyboard by Mark Taylor – I think every kid had one of these, this one doesn’t make any noise! Everyone who knows me will
know how much I love the 80s. It was a decade that presented me with career opportunities
that would last a lifetime, or at least a lifetime up until now and I hope it
will continue for many years to come. The 80s was also the decade that handed
me a collecting/hoarding habit that makes my studio and office feel more like a
museum at times.I collect everything from 1980s
video games to the ephemera that came alongside them, right the way through to
early editions of some of the most iconic early computer magazines and of
course, I collect the artwork from the period. Much of that artwork from the
80s was inspired by The Memphis Movement, a style which defined the eighties
and is still used today. The eighties gave us a lot of history that we don’t
always necessarily or immediately associate with the decade and its importance
in society, art and design and popular culture.I probably need to be clear
here, I don’t view everything 80s through a rose-tinted lens. The modern age
has a couple of positives over the 80s, I was younger for a start. We did have
bleak times, plenty of them, and to an extent, we’re seeing some of the same
things happen again today that we witnessed happening back then.In the 80s we had stock market
crashes, the threat of extinction from a Cold War, general strikes and workers
just like today, were mostly disgruntled with the rising cost of inflation. So
I think there’s more than a direct comparison you can make with many of the events
taking place today. The world might feel different than it did a couple of
years ago for those who weren’t around in the eighties, but for those of us who
were around, I think we’re once again in familiar territory. Maybe the 2020s is
the 80s part two? Life was hard in the 80s but hey, at least we had great
music.
History Repeating by Mark Taylor – kids were oblivious to the political turmoil and stock market crashes of the 80s, but it could be bleak! The decade wasn’t all about
shell suits and pop music, technology was being rapidly miniaturised and we
would witness a technological revolution just as important as the industrial
revolution that took place between 1760 and 1840. The 1980s were pivotal in the
evolution of technology as the decade would go on to shape the technology we have
come to now rely on every day.
Dialling for Dollars by Mark Taylor – Innovation and turmoil, oh, and answering machines were a thing… We have to understand the past
to recreate it…I’m all about preservation. My
retro collecting habit is borne out of a personal need to preserve historic
moments that were mostly never documented at the time. The only experience we really
have of the decade today is the experience that was around at the time, and a
lot of that experience is fading away year after year.This need to preserve the 80’s
and especially the technical revolution is partly what has driven me to focus
more and more on my 80’s inspired works recently, although they have been a
staple of my creative output since the late 1980s when I would create commissioned
characters and supporting artwork often for fans of computer games.My landscapes and abstracts
continue but what many people probably never realise when they view the work
that most people know me for, is that whilst I’ve managed to scrape a living
creating abstracts and landscapes, my bread and butter has always been rooted
in my work in pixel art, retro-inspired collections and commissions from a
group of tech fans who have never lost their enthusiasm for the period since
the golden age of the eighties and the decades either side.
Kinetic Fields by Mark Taylor – my landscape and abstract works continue. We didn’t have wind power in the 80s, at least not like this, but many of us had bicycles with lights powered by a dynamo! My retro artworks all depict a
period of time through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, and this pictorial
preservation and celebration of history and innovation is becoming more
important too. The internet has grown exponentially and it has paradoxically
become smaller at the same time. We would once browse the web and explore the
new frontiers of the digital age, we could explore historic moments through the
lens of all those people who had set up their first websites using sites like GeoCities
and we were asking Jeeves for advice.Today we visit virtual shop
windows that have had their displays dressed specifically for each of us
through the use of tracking cookies and everything else that didn’t exist even
in the days of bulletin boards, ARPANET and a hundred free hours of AOL. Early
search engines searched through content rather than adverts, and the results
would often be returned in all of their neon glory.Today, the first pages, let
alone the first page of any search engine has become an advert. It’s next to
impossible to find useful information because we are now only served what the
tech giants think we want to see and we’re now at that place where they only
think we want to see adverts.Maybe this website is too
old-school to be cool, I never ask anyone to sign up for anything, I self-fund
the whole shebang, I don’t run adverts and I try to provide useful information
which is rapidly eroding from our searches and to an extent our first thoughts,
and when you do find anything that is, you know, actually relevant, it usually
exists only on the outer reaches of internet servers and no one has any time to
find it because we expect immediacy today. Hey, you know the cloud is just
someone else’s computer right?The subject matter during the
three decades that much of my work represents is broad, I paint everything from
skateboards (because they were cool yet dangerous) to the earliest electronic
gadgets, and for anyone else who lived their formative years during this time
or even younger fans of that time period in general, many of us remember exactly
how we felt when we picked up say an electronic game for the very first time.Hopefully my vintage-inspired art
triggers a memory or two for many who view it, but that’s not necessarily the only
point of it. I really wouldn’t want such an important period of our technological
history to be lost because someone couldn’t be bothered to document it!For those of us of a certain
vintage, we remember the emotions we displayed and the feelings we had at the
time and we even remember the distinct smell of ozone from new electronics, a
smell I never come across today but one I wish I could find again and bottle.
Eighties Entertainment by Mark Taylor – every new device had a great smell of ozone. I think it was great, I remember it well, I think I liked it, maybe my memory is filling in the blanks? We remember how the device
felt, how heavy it was, and how it made us feel. It was magical because no one
had ever seen anything quite like it before and there has never been a time
since when the same feelings have ever been replicated with new technology in
quite the same way. Today, we have come to expect innovation and I think we
take it for granted a bit too much.I even remember visiting a
store with my parents and seeing a home computer for the first time as if it
were only yesterday. The smell, the display, the excitement, the shelves and
shelves of games, and the ring bound manuals that would teach you how to write
simple code. Those memories were made at the same time I was in school so
subconsciously even that triggers further memories of friendships and times
when the responsibility monster wasn’t lurking around every corner.The rabbit hole of nostalgia
runs deep in many of us, but this wonderfully complex paradoxical experience
doesn’t affect all of us, at least in the same way.Nostalgia is a powerful form
of reminiscence that often takes the form of a first-person memory reminding us
of something, usually an event or experience when we were surrounded by friends
or family or we experienced moments of personal happiness. These moments can
become our anchors to happier times that can give us hope for the future.Nostalgia wasn’t always seen
so positively though. More than 300-years ago it was commonly seen as a
disorder of the mind that had potentially damaging consequences. It was seen as
a form of depression where the person experiencing it would be unable to live
in the present. A Swiss medical student coined the term after observing the low
morale and spirits of mercenaries fighting overseas. The word itself originates
from Nostos, which is Greek for homecoming and algos, which translates to ache.
When we experience nostalgic
recall, not everything we remember is a perfect replica of the time, the
moment, the thing, or the event. Our minds do a very good job of adding mental
edits that make the memory more appealing which is why sometimes we feel
slightly disappointed when we find out that something from our childhood either
hasn’t aged too well or isn’t quite how we remembered it.As time passed, the negative
connotations of nostalgia were replaced as numerous studies eventually linked nostalgia
with the human desire to reflect on happy memories of the past and some of
these studies have found that nostalgia is more akin to a coping mechanism,
often finding that this mechanism works
to counteract any feelings of depression. Rather than being a negative, today
nostalgia is seen as a positive.
Did you know when you order directly from me, each print is signed, has an holograph applied, and comes with a printable version of the file on a USB memory stick. Some of my editions also come complete with collectible art cards, certificates of authenticity, and all prints are expertly printed by Master Printers on archival quality materials. Many modern studies describe
nostalgia as something that helps us to reflect on better times rather than
specific things, and many of these studies have identified nostalgia as being
something that can help lift our moods and reduce stress and it is able to
boost feelings of hope and optimism and provide us with memories that provide
hope that better times can be repeated again. I think that is exactly the reason why we are
seeing such a surge in popularity around collecting retro right now.Some of these studies suggest
that it can even come to the fore as a defence mechanism but for many, nostalgia
I think, is mostly a force that provides us with an emotional experience that
can unify and unite. Certainly for me, collecting 80s memorabilia, culture and period
specific technologies, is as much about the surrounding community of
like-minded people who are collecting the 80s as well.Being a collector of all
things 80s has not only put me in touch with many people from all walks of life
who are doing the same, it has taught me more than I ever learned in art school
about how and why art produces such strong emotions in people. When we create
artworks, whatever subject they depict, as an artist, the ultimate wish is to
produce something that resonates with and connects the viewer to the work. It
doesn’t have to be vintage or retro inspired, it just needs to subconsciously
speak to the viewer.The art needs to take them
somewhere, remind them of something, it needs to trigger an emotion and
hopefully provide the viewer with a connection either to the artwork or the
subject the art depicts, art is from this perspective, exactly what we are now
seeing amongst so many retro collectors, what they are collecting is often a
connection to the past and better times.So alongside the need for
preservation, I always hope that someone can find some helpful nostalgic recall
and be reminded of the past to provide at least a glimmer of hope for the
future. Arguably, this should make the creation of art much simpler when
recreating memory invoking images of past times, but in my experience I’ve
found it anything but simple.Whatever work you create has
to hit the sweet spot of believability, just enough to trigger a memory so that
the mind can then take over and apply its own set of filters. That’s when it
becomes a little more challenging, if you add into the mix some of the most
discerning and authenticity seeking collectors that I have ever come across, you
will find that many of these collectors will have an insatiable appetite for
authenticity, so recreating past times on canvas or screen isn’t quite as easy
as you would think.
Eighties Rock Guitar by Mark Taylor – This is the guitar I really wanted back in the 1980s! With the 1980s pixel art style
becoming an increasingly-popular artistic trend, if not close to being seen in
the mainstream as a movement, the use of modern technologies to recreate
vintage graphics leaves those of us who lived through the 8-bit era a little
empty. Sure, the work is often a nod to the formative years for those of us of
a certain age, but for a real nostalgia hit I always find myself looking for
something well, a little more authentic than most of the recreated memories I
see hawked as being retro on marketplaces such as Amazon.When I say that pixel art and
retro more generally is becoming a trend, the reality is that in some circles
pixel art and that vintage aesthetic have been an artistic staple for as long
as I can remember, it’s certainly nothing new.Pixel art is now becoming more
popular in the media and certainly, the style is being increasingly used in
graphic design partly because the world loves nostalgia and it’s a great way for
a marketing team to build a connection, but looking back through the history of
digital art over the past four decades, I would say that pixel art has been a
legitimate artistic movement for a while, some of my own collectors have been with
me since the 80s.So why is it suddenly so popular, I think mostly that it’s just that the press
didn’t cover it quite like they do today, and some consumer products from the
decade are beginning to turn up in auction houses and fetching eye-watering prices
for stuff we often think we still have somewhere in the attic before realising
we threw it away when we last had a clear out. 80s prices can be a media frenzy
of shock and awe.Many of us original pixel
pushers have already made decades long careers out of creating this style of
art and many of the processes I use today are no different to the processes I
used back in the 1980s and 90s. Indeed, many of the commissions I get today are
commissions to do the same things I was doing in the 80s and 90s. To some, that
might sound as if my career has never moved on to doing something new, but that
couldn’t be further from the reality, there is always something new to do and
something new to learn about the three decades I cover.Whether it’s the side art for
a video game cabinet or pixelated assets used in a retro-inspired video game,
or even recreating the ephemeral content that was packaged with 1980s products
and games, I can’t really think of anything that I do today that is all that
different to when I first started out, except I’m now doing more of it, with a
far greater appreciation and understanding, especially now there are an
increasing number of people looking to collect everything 80s and 90s.
Geometric Emotion by Mark Taylor – an 80s colour pallet and he mainstream introduction of Polygons at the back end of the 80s and early 90s was the inspiration for this piece. If you are serious about
creating retro/vintage-inspired works, you really do have to convey a sense of believability
for the work to resonate with the viewer. I’ve been painting 80s life and have been
involved with 80s technology since the 80s and I have to say, creating vintage
style art with any level of authenticity with modern tools can be challenging
because the tools we have today are simply, too good. We didn’t have the
distraction of 8K BS, we had fuzzy and noise and overheating power supplies.The equipment used to create
this type of art and graphic design in the 80s was minimalist compared to
todays technology, and by minimalist, that’s a massive understatement I think. This
creates a challenge for any artist who wants to create truly authentic looking
work with modern technology, it’s not even on the same level. Nowhere even
close.So much of the pixel art that
is created today looks brilliant, it’s clean and crisp, usually very colourful,
and it mostly has a very distinct look and feel. But what it doesn’t have is
any authenticity at all. This is fine for many casual fans of the 80’s genre,
it nods back to a period in time, but if your collector base is built from
vintage, rather than retro collectors, (there’s a difference we’ll touch on
later), this modern approach and the look of modern day 8-bit graphics feels
too much like an abstraction and it can fail to connect those harder-core
vintage buyers who are looking for authenticity.Just to clarify and recap very
quickly from one of my earlier retro articles, and I will paraphrase here for
brevity, retro is a modern interpretation or recreation of something of
vintage, though the terms are often used interchangeably. Collectors of retro
computer games for example are really collecting vintage games if they are the
originals, they would be collecting retro games if they were made more recently
to look or act like the originals. Generally, in the collector world,
everything comes under a retro heading just to confuse and bemuse!There’s one thing I have had
to learn over the years and that is, to persuade buyers of retro and vintage
inspired works to choose one work over another, is that you have to add that
believable layer of authenticity to the work. What I’ve generally found is that
buyers are usually buying it to add to a collection of similar works from the
period they’re collecting, or they’re buying to provide a period specific
aesthetic alongside a retro or vintage collection.Something else I have learned
is that dedicated vintage collectors are willing to pay more for authenticity
which is pretty awesome as an artist, but that does bring a level of complexity
that might make it more challenging for some artists to serve that particular
market.Vintage, as opposed to retro
collectors are also a very vocal bunch when it comes to this ask for authenticity.
Ideally they would be buying genuine work from the period in time but that’s
not always possible. That might in some cases be down to the often
over-inflated expense of buying almost anything vintage, or down to scarcity.That’s not to say that most
things from the 80s are in short supply these days, you can easily find almost
any technology from the era, but finding mint condition examples is difficult
and when you do find a good example, there are plenty of people willing to sell
so long as you also pay what has become known as the retro tax.The media hype around retro
has made collecting anything vintage, trendy. What you will see as a collector
today is that there will be many people scouring their garages and attics to
dig out items from the 70s, 80s and 90s, and then they will promptly upload
photos of those items to eBay and describe them as super-rare. Honestly, there
is very little from any of those decades that is super-rare when it comes to
technology.
High Density by Mark Taylor – The floppy disc evolved and became less floppy by the end of the 80s. They were inexpensive but just how much plastic did they use to create them? The 80s was a very disposable era. Those same people then apply
what we hardened collectors call the retro tax, a premium that doesn’t always
come out of demand and supply, but out of media reports telling everyone that
everything is more valuable than it is. There is then the media hype when
something seemingly once popular but is actually an especially rare example
such as a prototype or something that is factory sealed in original condition
sells for an eye-watering amount at auction. Made in the eighties isn’t a label
that also says it’s automatically rare or valuable.Case in point, I continue to
use cathode ray tube TVs and monitors to create some of my retro and vintage
work on and I still use them whenever I exhibit my retro/vintage works as part
of my display. I can buy a good quality, working CRT TV for less than twenty
bucks quite easily, Facebook Marketplace is full of them, but as soon as the
seller calls it a retro CRT and maybe adds a line that suggests the TV is ideal
for use with old computers, the price can jump ten-fold, and there will be some
unwitting individuals who will buy into the hype.If you are recreating vintage
work for collectors who are collecting an aesthetic trend rather than anything
more authentic, the modern-day abstraction/representation created with modern
equipment is usually going to be fine. If you want your work to appeal to a
much more niche collector base, and a collector base that will happily pay more
for that added authenticity, you need to be firstly become much more creative
in how you produce the work, and secondly, you often have to think beyond the
use of modern-day equipment to achieve results that the more niche collectors
will be happy to take over an original item.I’ve had the same conversation
with many artists over the years about collectors of period specific work. From
experience, buyers of this work can usually be split into two very distinct
camps. The first camp is made from collectors who, like I said earlier, are
looking for the 8-bit retro aesthetic, it’s a trend, a nod to an age, it
provides a flavour of the past, and the second camp is looking for an exact and authentic look.This is no different to
collectors of other art genres, there will be people who will be happy to own a
poster and others who only want the original work and a few who will be happy
with a compromise in between or at least a really good fake, not that I endorse
fakes, in my ephemera recreations I state on the images that it is a facsimile
of the original or a recreation, but mostly what these collectors are looking
for is an authentic recreation that provides the same kind of detail found in
the original.
Old School Math by Mark Taylor – you might not immediately notice the level of detail in these pieces, below is a close up of the LED matrix on the screen. 
All LED screens will have some level of visible matrix – it was very noticeable on 80s technology. 
This shows another method used in 80s LED screens, this is another artwork asset I created and it appears in a number of 80s works! Gaussian Blur is applied between layers using a luminosity brush and the LEDs are slightly offset from the lines as the artwork nearly always appears at an angle… this is what you would see on the original device. There is also a small level of motion blur applied here too. The critical difference for
collectors who are interested in the 1980s is that the 1980s, and even the 70s
and 90s, were very disposable decades. Sure, you can buy almost any technology
from the time, as I said, none of it is really super-rare and it might have
been built at low cost at the time but it was usually built to last, hence I
still use 40-year old computers today. The ephemera on the other hand, the
boxes, the stuff that came packaged with the thing you are buying, most of that
stuff was thrown away.Another case in point here, if
you take video games from the 80s as an example, most kids would take the game
cartridges out the box and throw the box and the instructions away. That’s
exactly why there is such a huge market for recreated boxes and packaging these
days. Last week I found an original box for an early home computer without its
contents on sale for £400 (UK), the computer that went inside was available for
£80 (UK) unboxed, and I have little doubt that someone made the purchase of the
box, now whether they will get the whole £480 back if they were to sell both
together is another story, collectors of vintage technology tend to hold on to
it rather than sell it.A recreation of a Colecovision
video game cartridge box will probably set you back thirty bucks or more in
some cases and that’s without the game cartridge or any manual included, an
original empty box for the console, and one that’s in nowhere near pristine
condition can set you back at least a hundred bucks, if it’s pristine or a very
good recreation then you can expect to double or even triple the value
depending on your location.As an American console, here
in the UK the Colecovision console box could fetch considerably more in mint
condition because the console wasn’t as popular over here, I did own one and
regret selling it on every day. A recreated console box with polystyrene
inserts can cost just as much as a console, often more, and these things sell.This is the level of
authenticity that the more niche collectors will be looking for. Most artists
who recreate vintage packaging are now having to place customers on wait lists,
I’m even having to do this at the moment for some items of my recreated
ephemera, especially manuals where the wait list can be even longer if I need
to track original reference copies down.If you are looking at art as a
means to provide you with a living wage, there is a living to be made from
nostalgia. I know a number of artists who make a healthy living creating the
aesthetic look and feel of the 80s using modern technologies, but if you are
prepared to put the work in and, at this point I have to say you do really have
to have a passion for the period, the real living to be made is in the more
niche market of vintage collectors who are looking for that certain level of added
authenticity and products that enhance the collectability of products they
already own.This is the retro world’s
equivalent of the high-end fine art market, where a pristine and factory sealed
example of a mass produced and hugely popular video game (Super Mario) can set
you back upwards of a million bucks. Although, I’m not convinced that the
market for that game wasn’t well and truly played a little here. We’re now in a
time when video games can be graded and encapsulated in the same way we might
grade rare coins.I would also probably add that
unless you have a real passion for the eighties, you might not ever find any
real level of traction with the high-end 80s collectors unless what you are
offering is above and beyond what’s already available. If you are simply
looking to create art that sells in volume, the retro aesthetic might be as
good as it gets, it’s still a tough and crowded market to enter but there are
plenty of buyers. If you are looking to engage with more serious collectors, it
becomes less about the money and more about the art and recreations that you
create and your knowledge and passion of the period they are collecting.It’s also worth bearing in
mind that creating 80s vintage works isn’t just about recreating images from
video games or the technologies of the day. The eighties was responsible for
the Memphis Design movement which continues to be used in many retro-inspired
designs today, and I suspect in many cases, it is a style that is used without
any depth of knowledge about the movement itself.That’s not to cast any
dispersion on the ability or skill of the artists creating it, it was a look
that defined the 80s as much as anything else and there is nothing that screams
1980s louder than the patterns used in the MTV logos used throughout that
period in time. But, it was a relatively short-lived style that is too often
only remembered for its visuals rather than its origins.Today, it’s a design style
that is often used in the wrong way on the wrong products, but understanding
how and when Memphis Design styles were used can make your retro-inspired works
and recreations much more appealing to collectors of period works.Memphis Design began with a
gathering of architects and industrial designers in Milan, Italy, in 1981. They
were dismayed at how creativity had stagnated and become corporate and uniform.
They looked back to the works of Kadinsky, the abstract shapes and colours of
cubism, De Stijl and Harlem renaissance art and the pop-art movement of the
1960s, and they then incorporated elements of popular low culture into a very
distinct style which was of liberation and joy, yet today it is often
associated with rebelliousness.After the inception of the
style there was an exposition of these
gaudy, outlandish works and in a parody of high class culture it caused massive
disruption in the design community and even its haters found it difficult to
avoid this new artistic trend of neon pallets and swirly patterns. It was intentionally
created in bad taste to fit in with a decade that gave birth to glam metal and
shoulder pads, and was in sharp contrast to the austerity of the Reagan
administration in the USA.The Memphis group closed its
doors in 1987 after Black Monday but its colourful style persisted well into
the 1990s where it gained even more traction after being integral to TV show
sets such as Saved by the Bell.As an artist, there’s a fine
line in creating anything from the period with any authenticity and creating something
that just looks either dated or too modern. This is why as an artist it is
important to make sure that you do your homework and pay attention to the
detail.Research is a very useful
skill to develop which will help enhance your historic knowledge of whatever
period your work depicts. Having that knowledge will make your creative process
much easier and your creative output will stand up better to what I like to
term as, collector scrutiny. The details as I’ve mentioned already really do matter
to high-end collectors, I can’t stress that enough.
Life in Stereo by Mark Taylor – Those headphones were great… at the time. Today, not so much but they are still popular on eBay! When I look at old technology
I distinctly remember its subtle nuances, but technology has changed
exponentially and many of these nuances have been lost through iterative innovation
over the years since. To a collector, it is those tiny details that can make a
wealth of difference in triggering memories and evoking any kind of emotion for
times past.Pay attention to the detail as
an artist and this can negate the negative comments on social platforms and it
can be the difference between collectors selecting your vintage-inspired work
over someone else’s. Whilst there is a lot of great work already out there,
very little of it drills down into the level of period specific detail that high-end
collectors want.If I could offer one piece of
advice to any artist looking to create retro-inspired works and vintage
recreations beyond creating retro-themed designs that have more of an aesthetic
rather than collectible function, that advice would be to get your head
completely in an eighties (or any other period specific) space.For retro works that depict
the output from old technology, such as recreating those pixelated 8-bit images
that have become so popular, it’s worth understanding how much different the
technology in the 80s was compared to the technology we use today.
Understanding the nuances of 8-bit graphics compared to something you could
produce on a modern PC with Photoshop will help you to recreate some of that
authenticity that is often missing and with a little period knowledge, it’s not
especially any more difficult to create a more authentic piece of work.I think to an extent, it’s
also worth understanding how the industry operated too. Many of the graphical
styles came about as a result of how the machines had been built. They were usually
to retail at a low price point, and partly, due to the businesses practices of
the day which focussed on pushing product out in the shortest possible time
frame. This often had an impact on the quality of the visuals meaning that more
often than not, you really don’t have to overthink some of this type of work. The
detail is often more about what’s missing rather than what’s there.Magazines of the period are
interesting in that the screen shots they would print would usually be of
moving images that couldn’t be paused. What the magazine photographer would
need to do is to build a dark housing and use a traditional camera, capturing
multiple shots to hopefully capture the shot they are looking for.In some magazines, they would
build contraptions where the camera could be operated with the foot as the photographer
played through the game, so anything published was usually published not as
clearly as you would expect from a magazine today, but with added noise, maybe
a few light trails, and certainly never at the resolution we might expect to
see in a magazine today.My professional art story began in the early
eighties not too long after I received a home computer from my parents as a
Christmas gift. The year was 1980 and the home computer I was gifted one
Christmas morning arrived under the tree as a kit that needed to be built. Once
assembled, it connected to the TV and well, it didn’t do very much. If I had
been thinking that it would compete with my Atari VCS and allow me to play
video games and listen to the exciting beeps and well, beeps, I would be
mistaken.There was no sound, there was
no colour, it displayed text, often not very well, it had way less oomph than
the Atari console which by then was woefully underpowered itself, (it was
purposely underpowered on its own release day) but the excitement came from
being able to do something other than move abstract pixelated representations
of stick figures around in a video game.I was finally able to create these
abstract representations, well, sort of. I was able to place characters on a
screen and interact with them and as a naïve child, that seemed to me to be the
future. By now we were still only a few steps beyond the original Pong video game
that made history during the 70s, but it was the control given to the user that
took it to a new level.Exactly a year later I found
an upgraded computer under the tree and this time it had been assembled in a
factory, it didn’t flicker on and off each time a key was touched, and I say
touched, this was touch well before we had touch screens.The keyboard was a plastic
membrane with printed keys for the keyboard, just like the last one but with a
little more added oomph that had been missing a year earlier. It still had no
sound and it still only had two colours, either black or white but it had a
whole 1Kilobyte of memory. (Yes, 1024 of those kilobytes are needed for a megabyte,
which is still not enough to store a music track). Thinking back, I can’t even
contemplate how we even managed to fit so much in so little, an entire game
could run in less than 1 kilobyte, 16 or 48 kilobytes if you were lucky, you
had no choice other than to be efficient at coding and so often that efficiency
wouldn’t leave any room for overly complex images to be displayed. There would
be no work for digital artists in this arena for at least another couple of
years but that didn’t stop us from pushing the pixels around.
Sinclair ZX81 Keyboard – Touch before touch and slightly ahead of the chicklet style keyboards often made from rubber or small plastic keys that hardly moved when pressed. Note the BASIC commands could be entered by pressing a single key rather than typing each command in manually. The endless loop of 20 GOTO 10… Not wanting to raise too many
expectations here but that added oomph still seemed to be less than the Atari VCS
which had been released in around 1976. The earliest home computers by around
1980 technically had more power, but they didn’t have cartridge based software
where the cartridges would often have additional components included that would
provide added functionality and more power to the console.So whilst the early
microcomputers were technically more advanced they were also often less capable
and more limiting, rarely displaying their output in colour and they frequently
had no sound. But they did have a keyboard and a programmable language, and
that was all that was needed back then.It was these limitations that
drove the initial creativity in the home computer industry and those very
limitations taught me and many others some very early lessons in efficiency
that would lead to forming the foundations that would later introduce me to a
wide range of programming languages, BASIC, Forth, Fortran, PASCAL, and 6502
and 6508 Assembly. Bear in mind that early digital art wasn’t created in
packages such as Photoshop, each pixel on screen was programmed in using
whatever code the computer understood. At first this would be something like
BASIC, later it would be assembly, today we just fire up Photoshop or we’ll
turn to AI.Getting to grips with any of
these early and simple programming languages would be useful to understand the
languages in use today. When coding in HTML or C or any other modern day
programming language, having a grasp of those early languages has been
massively useful as it is those old languages that underpin pretty much every modern
programming language of today. If you are about to learn C or anything else,
grab an emulator and learn BASIC or Assembly, the modern language will be way
easier to get to grips with!Maybe what’s more remarkable
is just how much you could do with 1kilobyte of memory. Today, modern coders
are nowhere near as efficient in their programming because they have the luxury
of almost exponential power. If more RAM is needed then it’s a simple upgrade
using relatively cheap components, back in the 80s, we would have no option
other than to become really creative in how we got the machines to carry out
instructions so that the need for additional and expensive RAM would be
negated. Contentiously, I’m going to go there, modern programmers have it
almost too good and that makes modern code generally pretty sloppy and
inefficient.Today, my process frequently involves
setting limitations and working within them. Of course, it’s not always
possible to do, we have higher resolutions, different display technologies and
we don’t all have access to working vintage technology on which to create new
vintage works, neither would that be entirely practical for most artists to do.
But setting limitations around colour pallets, resolution, and even brush sizes
will bring you closer to achieving a more authentic look.By 1982, things had changed
and technology was in comparison to at any time before, almost abundant in
supply, massively more inexpensive than ever, and the missing oomph had by now
been included. The game (literally) began to change in every conceivable way,
especially when it came to pushing pixels around the screen. The beeps had
matured to beeps that could vary in pitch and duration, and by the end of 1982,
we had powerful on-board sound chips that would sound almost orchestral.Today there is an entire
demographic who buy chip tune music tracks, tunes created on an early computer,
mostly the Commodore 64 with its phenomenal SID chip and the Commodore Amiga.
The US really missed out on the Amiga through some bad business practices made
by Commodore at the time, yet it is a machine still used by many DJs and digital
artists even today, not least in part due to Andy Warhol’s mid-eighties works
created on the Amiga 1000.This leap in technology wasn’t
the same story everywhere though. Small home microcomputers that were wallet,
and relatively user friendly might have been popular here in the UK where
almost every week a new model would come to market, but elsewhere and
especially in the US, Atari still dominated alongside Apple.Despite new home micro’s being
introduced the same kind of buzz for microcomputers across the pond was
somewhat different to the buzz for home micro’s here in the UK.
Hot CoCo by Mark Taylor – broadly compatible with the UKs Dragon 32, which was built in Wales. The CoCo was pretty epic for its time and available from Tandy/Radio Shack – the artwork was inspired by the CoCo! Apple and a few others such as
Tandy’s Color Computer (CoCo) were steadily making inroads into the market. We
did get the CoCo here in the UK alongside the Dragon 32, a Welsh computer
broadly compatible with the CoCo, at least until Dragon was acquired by a
Spanish company. Apple with the original Apple and later the Apple II were
mainly focussed on the US markets.The Apple II was a powerhouse in comparison to
most other machines, as was Commodore’s effort with the Commodore 64 a little
while later, and even its predecessor, the VIC-20 and Commodore PET, but then
the gloss fell away from a saturated US video game market and the industry
seemed to flounder for a while between 1983 and 1984. Business computers didn’t
have quite the same fate, but those marketed for the home became less popular
for a while.Video games suddenly lost
their cool factor in the USA between 1983 and 1984, but we limped along quite
well in the UK and Europe, in part because the market was awash with affordable
home micro’s and there was a relatively strong academic program supporting the
use of computers in schools here in the UK. We also had an abundance of budget
video games available from the likes of Mastertronic, everything remained affordable.When we talk about the great
video game crash of 1983, the crash was mostly confined to North America, we
certainly didn’t see it here in the UK or indeed in Europe more widely. It was
an especially vibrant time for the industry outside of the USA and much of the
retro-influence we see today isn’t always predicated on what would have been
popular in the USA, but elsewhere in Europe. Many of today’s retro aesthetic
works are very much of a European influence.I’ll take a quick opportunity
to digress here, just as a point of reference, the UK and Europe influenced
much of what we see today in part due to video games such as Grand Theft Auto
and Tomb Raider being developed originally here in the UK. Even Nintendo would
use a British developer to produce historic classics such as Goldeneye on the
Nintendo 64.A UK video game company, Rare,
was chosen by Nintendo to work on multiple titles and was based not too far
away from where I live today but they would be known before this as Ultimate
Play the Game. They were seen as a leader in developing titles for early
British home micro’s that are more and more in demand these days in the USA
where the vintage computer collector base is becoming massively focussed on
British home microcomputers of late.Digressing over and back to
the 80s when Atari took most of the brunt for what is now known as the great
video game crash. More specifically, the crash is often wrongly attributed to
the poor job and oversupply Atari had done with the release of their ET game, a
game that became almost folkloric in that twice the number of game cartridges
were produced than the number of consoles owned. Added to that, Atari sent the
overstock to a desert landfill, although the real story is a little more
complicated than that.Here’s the thing. It wasn’t ET
being labelled as the worst video game in history that paused the market in the
US, neither was it Atari, it was a combination of oversupply from dozens of
manufacturers joining the silicon gold rush alongside some ropey industry
management practices and sketchy quality control within the sector as a whole
and the emergence of many, many, new platforms, too many that would quickly
become unsupported or would bankrupt the manufacturers when coupled with all of
the other poor management decisions being made at the time.The ET game had been developed
in five weeks so it was never going to be a triple A title, but hype and Steven
Spielberg together sold silicon. As a game, it wasn’t completely terrible and
it does retain some fans even today, but let’s be clear, Atari’s ET game was
made into a scapegoat that just so happened to take the focus away from the
real issues in the valley.Today, the Atari ET game
cartridge can be picked up for small pocket change, the box on the other hand,
that’s a different story and again this has presented many modern-day artists
with a revenue stream in recreating the ephemera and packaging and much of the
retro work that is seen today is often based on the look of the graphics that
were made famous by Atari’s late 70s and early 80s games consoles.That said, there was no
industry blueprint for anyone to follow in the 80s, least of all those at the
front who were introducing new technologies to the world. It was an era of
digital pioneers when no one really understood the market and the market was
struggling to truly understand the technology. People were literally making
things up as they went along.Consoles would eventually revive
the US industry with Nintendo’s introduction of the N.E.S (Nintendo
Entertainment System). Every American friend I had at the time and have spoken
to since seemed to own the N.E.S, to the extent that I did ponder for a while
if it was part of some government program that gave them away.But these consoles were not
user programmable computers which had remained popular in the UK and Europe. We
didn’t get sight of the N.E.S here in the UK until a while later which gave British
and European brands such as the likes of Commodore, Sinclair, Acorn, Oric, and
later, Amstrad, some room to breathe.The US did get to see at least
a couple of these brands but in the case of Sinclair, it would have been known
in the States as Timex following a deal that had been done with the UK brand
owned by Sir Clive Sinclair. This didn’t change the fact that home micro’s were
nowhere near as prevalent in the States as they were in the UK and Europe
during that time and as a result, pixel art in the States was a little more
complex and somewhat less accessible and massively more unaffordable to create than
it was in the UK and Europe where affordability played a major role in selling
home computers and encouraging users to become creative.
Three Point Five by Mark Taylor – another work featuring the 80s calculator – the detail here includes detail on the page, my signature appears in the text on the page! When I say that in the UK
things were vastly different in the home computer industry, that doesn’t mean
that things were necessarily always better. We struggled in the UK and Europe with
oversupply, poor quality, and bad business practices within the industry just
as much as anywhere else. Possibly more so as everyone was suddenly in the
business of supplying software that was often rushed and publishers desperate
for new IP would lap it up and pay for almost anything so long as you could
keep supplying them with code.In truth, they would take
pretty much anything and place it on a store shelf safely in the knowledge that
someone would buy it. I know because even I created a game for one of the Atari
8-bit micro’s that never really went anywhere commercially, hey, I was about 14
when I wrote it. It wasn’t a great game even for the time on reflection, it was
rushed, it took me around a week in the evenings and it didn’t particularly
sell very well even though publishers never shared sales numbers with the
creators.Yet the game I created, along
with a rudimentary image editor, a basic inventory tool which had originally
been created for my father’s business and another small game written entirely
in BASIC had all ironically sold a little better than the game written in a
much faster assembly language.Some people were earning some
significant sums of money from generating some pretty rubbish code, others were
earning slightly less for better quality, but what I had produced at the time
still gave me enough to pay for a car in cash when I was 18 years old. Financially
the rest of the world was in turmoil but in the 8-bit world of microcomputers,
I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. If anything from the 80s
could magically happen again, I would have to say I would hope it would be the
8-bit gold rush because plenty of us were making bank for creating small 8-bit
images and coding very simple games!What seemed to happen in the
UK and Europe was that a different direction had been taken than the one being
taken everywhere else. Very few of the home micro’s were being marketed as
games machines instead they would be targeted towards an education market, and
much of that was simply down to the government recognising that computer science
should become more established in early years schools. Yet those schools never
taught people how to create digital art, that was just a side-benefit that
happened out of necessity, games needed graphics, and programmers slowly
learned that they weren’t artists.There seemed to be a different
view in the UK around how computers could be used for creativity. That’s not to
say that the value of the computer was not recognised elsewhere, MIT for
example gave birth to some of the most prolific coders of any generation before
or since. US developers were prolific in their support for the early Apple,
Atari and Commodore computers as well as the huge arcade industry born in the
USA.Inadvertently, the arcade
industry helped to shape the creative industry by bringing art and technology
even closer together. That multi-million dollar industry that would be fed on
quarters spawned a whole generation of artists who would mostly remain
anonymous for many years. In the background they would work on graphics for the
arcade games in an ultra-competitive space, but they would also be instrumental
in designing the arcade cabinets and side art, most of which would be silk
screen printed.Here in the UK, I was
beginning to establish myself as a creator of digital images, but for the most
part, artists were never really an absolute requirement in the home computer or
video games industry. Coders tended to create their own art, usually badly, and
it wouldn’t be until the 90s that digital artists would really begin to come to
the fore and at least occasionally get some kind of mention in the credits.My entry to the art world has
been documented before so I won’t reexplore it fully here, but suffice to say
that during the 80s I had begun the transition from creating art on traditional
mediums to pushing pixels around on a screen, and with the innovation we
started to see in printing technologies, having the ability to sell prints of
that work meant that I was able to turn what was once a mere childhood hobby
into a fully fledged business.Remember, this was the very
early eighties and even way before Warhol had touched the Commodore Amiga home
computer and recreated the Campbell’s Soup Can in a digital form. Yes, people
did create digital art before Warhol, he was simply way better than anyone else
at grabbing peoples attention.It would be another three
years beyond 1982 and another couple of microcomputers before I took on my
first paid commission to produce digital art, a genre so new that we had really
only just started to call it digital art in a mainstream sense, although
earlier digital art goes back to the early 1960s and even a little before.
Neither did we call it pixel art as it is sometimes referred to as today.Looking back, even though the
term digital art was being loosely used what we were doing with computers
wasn’t really recognised as artistic, certainly not in any meaningful way or
even close to being recognised in the same way that digital art is recognised today.
Very few people understood what digital art was and others would dismiss it as
non-art.Only recently, and maybe even
in the past five or six years has digital art become more ingrained and
accepted as art in the mainstream and there are still those who continue to
hold out that digital works cannot be art. This might surprise many people but
despite digital art’s long history even before the birth of the 80s home
computer market which would make it more accessible to artists, it’s often seen
as something new that requires little to no skill to achieve, which couldn’t be
further from the truth.Commercial digital art was by
and large, even in the mid to late 80s still very much a traditional and mostly
manual process of laying things out on paper. Image editors were still few and
far between and professional publishing applications were rare and expensive, and
they weren’t that great compared to todays applications, they would only really
be used in the high end media industries and the press until we started to see
releases such as Delux Paint on the Commodore Amiga.
Atari Box Art 1980s – Copyright Atari – These boxes are in demand today and recreations are available! Amazing artwork on every one! Before the digital art
application, if you needed an image to appear on screen, you mostly had to
learn how to program it either through early programming languages such as
BASIC or you would need to learn assembly language which was specific to each microprocessor.
Few programmers would take their work to the next level and design their own
image and sound editors but by the mid-80s, I had fallen in love with Delux
Paint on the Commodore Amiga, a machine that was completely misunderstood
outside of the UK and Europe, but one which now has thousands of users and fans
around the world.Mostly, pre-Commodore Amiga, we
were dealing with 8×8 blocks of pixels and trying our very best to make that
small area pop with colour, mostly the same colour, and we were also trying to
be as photorealistic as possible which was impossible with the technology we
had, but like I always say, eighties kids had the best imaginations.Nothing we could do with the
technology we had was even close to being photorealistic back then, all we had
were pixelated structures with jagged edges, it was a look that defined the
video games scene of the eighties and well into the nineties, but still a step
beyond the earlier consoles such as the Intellivision and Atari Video Computer
System, and with this new-found power, digital art was beginning to emerge in
its pixelated glory.Chunky pixels were the only
option and would be until much later when we saw the introduction of 16-Bit
computers and later PCs, but it was never the intent of any of the original
pixel artists to be pixel artists, we were just creating pictures and artworks
with a purpose, the purpose usually being to convey a message to the viewer or to
provide a playfield or character whilst all of the time trying to make the
images not look like they had been created on a computer.There was a graphical leap
forward in the 90s and this made things easier and graphically, closer to
photorealism. For a while developers had been stitching together four unique sprites
to create bigger animated characters and manufacturers had begun to turn to new
technologies such as graphic cards for the PC and alternative graphic modes
such as mode 7 on the Super Nintendo.In most cases where cartridges
would be used, additional chips would be included – pushing the price of the
cartridges up in price, but by the end of the 90s consoles began to utilise CDs
which saw the introduction of 3D environments, probably way too early for most
developers who found it a real struggle with some of the hardware to produce
anything convincing in 3D, but that’s what the paymasters in the industry
thought the world wanted.64-bit technologies would
become the game changer that 3D needed but the underpinning CD technology was
still considerably more expensive than the floppy disc or even the compact
audio cassette that had been used for much of the 8-bit, 16-bit and in the
early days of the 32-bit era.In the 90s, 128-bit
technologies were being explored by some manufacturers but this would put the
technologies that took advantage of it out of reach for many and when higher
bitrate technology was introduced in the popular hand held devices of the time,
it would come at the cost of battery life making them less portable because you
needed to remain tethered to a power supply.Graphically at the time,
128-bit wasn’t always as good as the earlier and lower bitrates for graphics. Developers
really struggled with the complexity of the systems and creating 128-bit
graphics would need even higher end development systems putting them out of
reach of most developers. As a graphic artist, I certainly couldn’t afford to
make the move to 128-bit systems on my own, so larger teams would be parachuted
into development houses and development costs became eye watering.By this time we were beginning
to see advances in rudimentary graphic tablets that had been used before,
although for 8-bit artists, the TV screen would become the tablet for a while
as a light pen could be hooked up with the aid of an expansion card plugged
into the computer in most cases. Graphically, I never gelled with the light
pen, TVs were always upright meaning that they were just not conducive to
creating art. So what we did see at the time was that most programmers and by
now, a handful of dedicated digital artists who would continue to create art
using either a joystick or later in the 80s, a mouse. Still on 8-bit, 16-bit or
occasionally 32-bit systems.The introduction of graphics
cards pushed the boundaries of creating digital art, but the downside was that
there were really no agreed standards. Game developers had a difficult time
optimising their code to work with the literally dozens of differing
technologies available, but we were by now beginning to see digital art that
was far beyond the limits placed on earlier work by the technology.Today, retro art is a movement
but it’s not really vintage…There’s some level of irony in
that modern digital artists strive to recreate that 8-bit, retro, vintage,
pixel style. In the eighties it was a style we couldn’t wait to move away from,
yet today I see so many artists painstakingly setting up grids in Photoshop or
Illustrator in an attempt to achieve the same kind of look that we once had no
choice other than to use.The challenge we have today is
that the modern way of creating pixelated images in a retro/vintage style
doesn’t quite achieve any level of authenticity when directly compared to
vintage pixel art that runs natively on an original 8-bit or even 16-bit
microcomputer. To start with, there was little use of dithers that would allow any
kind of gradation of colour until a much later period in time.In the eighties, any gradation
between colours firstly had to be done with a very small colour pallet, usually
either 8 or 16 colours and mostly if 16 colours were available it would really
only ever be an 8 colour pallet with dimming turned on or off to give the same
hue a brighter appearance. Now that’s
how you market the same thing twice.
ZX Spectrum Colour Pallet – that was all we had! For those unfamiliar with
dithering, in short, it means that an applied form of noise is introduced to
the image to approximate a colour that is not available from a mixture of the colours
that are available. By the time that the early home microcomputers of the 1980s
came out, dithering was already being used, it was even used during World War
II for bomb trajectories and navigation, and also in comic books and colour
printing which overcame the limited pallets available on earlier printing
presses.Dithering really came into its
own on the early home micro’s but to create
any form of dithering was often a manual process as opposed to using an
algorithm to apply noise as we would do today.Today, dithering is an
essential tool in the creation of many digital works, it’s also used in many
printer models to reduce the cost of printing. The inkjets spray microscopic
dots on the paper or print surface and even monochrome printers use the
technique to overcome the limitations of using only black ink. Dithering is
also the reason why you can still make out the detail of a colour photograph
when printing in monochrome.Dithering is also massively
useful on the web even though most of us will have vastly more bandwidth today
than at any time in the past, the technique means that fewer pixels are needed
to build up the image so there is a reduction in the bandwidth used which means
that images can load much faster from a much smaller file size.Even if you are taking
advantage of modern tools, what makes a lot of modern pixel art look too modern
to be totally convincing is in the simple things such as restricting the colour
palette. On vintage 8-bit computers and even early consoles, pallets were
limited as I intimated earlier, and it also depended on whether those pallets
were being displayed in a PAL or NTSC format so whatever format was in your
region would determine the output and the colour that you would see.
Monochrome Pallet ZX Spectrum – Also demonstrate how dithering would work. Bright and dim colours on a
machine such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (Timex in the USA) and other micro’s
with limited palettes would be achieved by altering the voltage input of the
video display. On an NTSC video output you would also find that some machines
would display black only as a dark grey. Another factor that would change how
colours were output would be the actual display screen the image was being
output on, and the method with which the display screen was connected.Output display resolutions and
technologies were vastly different too. There is simply no way that an original
eight by eight pixel character would have any impact today on modern 4K or even
8K displays, each pixel would be far too tiny to see and it would look like a
speck of dust on the display, it’s even problematic on a 1080p HD display or
even the lower HD resolution of 720p.Today, images have to be
upscaled or stretched to fill a high resolution screen and mostly, they look
pretty horrible unless the effect of a single pixel is recreated with multiple
pixels and scaling up is quite challenging. Increasing the resolution would,
and still does to an extent, produce pixelation that would make the image look
terrible. Today, upscaling is possible and there are all sorts of algorithms
and techniques that can reduce the pixelation, but in truth, it’s still there.
You are seeing a reproduced copy of the original image even using hardware
upscaler’s.
ZX Spectrum Colour Pallet Hex Codes Mostly during the 1980s we
would rely on graph paper and manually plot out the pixels that would appear in
whatever resolution the output would be displayed, in the case of the Sinclair
ZX Spectrum, the entire display was just 256 by 192 pixels and this was the sum
total of screen real estate that you had to play your game, view your art, or
type in a program listing.Another issue with vintage
computers was that there could be what was called colour clash. Mostly, you
could only utilise a single colour in any character block so if the block of
colour moved over another colour, the colour of the block would appear over the
background colour. It was also known as attribute clash or more commonly today
we would think of it as colour bleed. 8×8 pixel blocks could only ever appears
as a single colour.
ZX Spectrum Dithering 8 bit pallet – created manually often with code! This did provide for a unique
look and feel to anything appearing on screen and where modern takes on 8-bit
pixel art are clean, often with each pixel defined with its own colour, vintage
8-bit microcomputers, even the best of them could never achieve that kind of sharp,
clean, look.The question for pixel artists
today is whether they go for a completely authentic look by limiting the colour
palette and include the effect of attribute clash, or whether they should
create a clean, modern representation. The choice is really down to the
audience, hardcore collectors are looking for that kind of raw detail,
collectors of fan art or an aesthetic nod to vintage, probably not so much.The old displays that were
historically used generated a technically compliant NTSC or PAL signal.
Depending on your geographic region you would either see 480i or 576i
resolutions but the images would only be sent to one field rather than
alternate between two fields. This created a 240 or 288 line progressive
signal, which in theory could be decoded on any receiver that could decode
normal interlaced signals. If that sounds technical, I’m not sure any of us
original pixel pushers understood it either back in the day.We would see horrible
horizontal lines on the display. Today these scan lines are seen as being a
charming and nostalgia inducing necessity in the reproduction of authentic
pixel art so it’s more likely today that you might utilise a transparent PNG
image of horizontal lines to place in front of the image when you are creating
vintage inspired artworks.The scan lines were a result
of the shadow mask and beam width of regular cathode ray tube televisions and
monitors having been designed to display interlaced signals so the image would
appear to have alternative light and dark lines.
RF Modulator – Now We Can Play by Mark Taylor – We did HD fuzzy. Originally created as a commission for a long-time collector, this RF modulator was the thing to have in the 80s. When you need to create more
authentic looking pixel images, you have a choice of either creating a modern
representation using modern tools or you go completely down the vintage rabbit
hole and begin to use ither original equipment or even emulation. No modern
tools can even come close to matching the visual limitations of 80s and even
90s technology, it’s simply too good, no matter how skilled you are. It’s not
really about having a high level of competency with modern skills or tools,
everything is already stacked against you when you are attempting to recreate
any level of genuine authenticity.Any technology today is
designed to look clean, sharp, and be reproduced in a large format, often that
means 4K and above and a modern display just cannot get even close to
reproducing the phosphorous glow of an old CRT TV or monitor. At best, you can
hope for a facsimile of authentic pixel art but it will never be quite the
same. I actually feel a pang of sadness when I see vintage art displayed in art
exhibitions on modern displays, it’s not anywhere close to original without all
of the original limitations, not forgetting the phosphorous glow of a CRT or
the scanlines.To counter this with my own
work, I tend to use a heap of layers, using gaussian blur tools over luminous
brushes in between layers before applying a scan line filter I created which
took me somewhere in the region of three months to produce. The filter template
I created has a slight curvature in the lines and every time it is used, I
alpha lock the layer and then apply a blend to provide the darker shadows
towards the edge of the screen before once again applying a luminous brush
stroke or three and using gaussian blur again to provide further reflection on
any layers above and below the scanlines.You’ll notice this if you look
at any of my works that feature a screen, so long as you are looking close
up. I have licensed that template for
commercial use by other artists in the past, alongside a CRT colour pallet that
works in either Photoshop or Procreate, so again, there are so many potential
entrance gates for artists to offer buyers in the retro scene. You can see the level of detail in the LED Matrix on the calculator above. CRTs have similar levels of detail!When there is a need for me to
tackle 8-bit art and even 16-bit art, there are some techniques that I always
fall back to because I know they will help me to achieve a more authentic feel.
Modern displays also have a
very different aspect ratio making it even more challenging to recreate
authentic images that would have originally been presented in a 4:3 format. The
technologies are vastly different which makes it a challenge to make a modern
display look like it’s an old display and this is why scanline filters are
often used to give images a vintage feel.Transparent PNG images of
scanlines can be created relatively easily if you have enough time and with
tools such as Illustrator or even Photoshop, but these can still give an
entirely flat effect to the underlying image. Many of the freely or even
commercially available scanline filters never quite achieve a true
representation of the original look of a CRT, simply because CRTs had that
curvature and scanlines if they have no curvature applied will always look
flat.I think to an extent, any
artist who wants to tackle vintage-inspired work and who wants to maintain an
authentic feel in the modern day with modern tools, will have it way harder
than we dinosaurs had it back in the day. We didn’t know that the future would
be 4K, hey, we were pretty amazed at what we already had. I also think that any
artist wanting to produce this style of art needs to work within some very
constrained limitations.A lot of the work I currently create
doesn’t need to have any specific effects applied to it because most of the
time I’m reproducing memories of the eighties as opposed to a replica of pixel
image that would have been presented on screen. Having said that, there are
plenty of nods to old technology and in some of my works you will find individual
assets within the artwork that have been created on vintage computers, and
whenever I paint a screen, you will always see scanlines or the matrix used
within an LED display. Most casual users never notice this detail but for me,
it’s critical and for collectors who want authenticity, they expect nothing
less.For me and my work, scanlines
are really as complicated as it gets for representational vintage inspired
work, but if I am working on individual assets that absolutely need to look
authentic, say for a retro-inspired video game that needs to retain an old look,
my process can be very different depending on what the commissioner needs.Surprisingly, the easiest
commissions I tend to get these days are to develop images for homebrew indie
games that continue to be released on 40-year old microcomputers such as the
Commodore 64. They’re easy because I literally power up my Commodore 64 and
create the images on that just as I would have done some 40-years ago either
using a rudimentary image editor or I will program it in BASIC or Assembly
language.
New Formats by Mark Taylor – the specification for the disc camera was better on paper. They looked really cool, the photographs were very poor compared to earlier formats. It becomes significantly more
complicated when you have to recreate old looks on new technology, I can spend
maybe as much as three or four times longer working in Photoshop than I spend
on creating the assets on vintage tech and that’s even after I go through the
process of bringing the final image over to new technologies for use as assets
or within an artwork.Whenever I am create authentic
looking vintage-inspired that will be displayed and generated on modern
equipment or on canvas, I tend to apply
some very strict limits to the colour pallet being used. I also reduce the
resolution as far as I can to make sure that I can work with at least some of
the limitations from the past. For me, that’s kind of important because it’s
the limitation that drives my creativity, and for the most part I try to avoid
using Photoshop or Illustrator and instead use some fairly basic tools and
dedicated pixel editors for this kind of work, and where I can, I will use
original technologies or even emulation.One of the more complex
effects I have to constantly reproduce is dithering. Sure, there are plenty of
tools that can dither the image automatically or reduce the colour depth and so
on, but if I have a commission that needs to be out of the door anytime soon
and I need the believability of authentic vintage images, I switch off
Photoshop and its multitude of distractions and fire up an old computer.For all of the beauty that my
8K behemoth of a display foists upon my often weary eyes, I have to say that it
doesn’t touch the beauty of a quality CRT TV or monitor. LCD is great for most people,
I don’t even disagree that it is the right way to go, but LCDs on modern
displays just aren’t great at either colour or speed.I recently watched a football
match (you call it soccer in the US, but this is real football my friends) and
I could literally hear my screen screaming for help as the Wrexham FC players
(the Wrexham FC owned by Ryan Reynolds of Hollywood fame) ran around the pitch
in their battle to escape the National League.LCD displays have three layers
of coloured dots that make up a pixel. Electrical current is applied to each
colour layer in order to generate the required intensity that produces the
final colour. The problem is that this takes time, generally between 8 and 12
milliseconds of time which might not sound like a lot, but in a fast moving
scene, it can be headache inducing and jarring.The transition between off and
on states mean that pixels that should have changed colour lag behind the
signal resulting in motion blurring. To overcome this, manufacturers have
reduced the number of levels each coloured pixel can render as a way to reduce
the motion blur, but this reduces the number of colours the pixel can display.You might also come across
terms such as bit depth, this is something that quantifies how many unique
colours are available in the images colour pallet but in 0s and 1s, which
translates to either off or on. The depth doesn’t suggest that the image
utilises all of the available colours, but it can specify the level of
precision given to a colour. Generally, the higher the bit rate or depth (audio
uses a similar principle of bits), the better the quality.Today, you might expect to see
a camera with a colour depth of 8-bits which equates to a total of 8x 0s and
1s, which translates to 256 intensity values for each primary colour. If you
combine all three primary colours (red, green, blue as in RGB), this means that
once combined, would provide 16,777,216
colours or what is known as True Colour, 24-bits per pixel since each pixel is
composed of three 8-bit colour channels.Adding transparency would take
the bit depth to 32 and 48-bit colour depth would give you 281 trillion
colours. That’s nothing like the old days of the early home micros, remember
when I said earlier about a 16 colour pallet being made up of 8 colours either
showing as bright or dim, that should put all of what I’ve written here today
into some perspective. Modern technology is just too good to feel real if you
are looking for an authentic vintage vibe and besides, the human eye can only
discern around 10 million colours so for viewing purposes anything higher than
this is overkill even for today’s technology. Where higher bit rates become
invaluable is if you are doing any kind of post-processing of the images but
mostly, modern technology has already gone beyond human limitations of sight.
Y2K by Mark Taylor – by the end of the 90s we had bugs, and panic had set in around Y2K – The Millennium Bug that wasn’t. When it comes to recreating
graphics in the modern day, it has become a lot easier to create images with
photorealism, but due to the excess of power available today, things have
equally become much more difficult if the aim is to achieve believable 8-bit
images.There are differences in the
way that modern technologies utilise their display output compared to vintage
technologies which were often output from the computer to the cathode ray tube
TV or monitor using a range of technologies such as RF (Radio Frequency) often
using a modulator. Remember those little black and silver steel boxes with a
cable that you plugged into the antennae socket on the TV, they would often
have a slider to select between TV and Game. You can see my representation of an RF Modulator above!Those really weren’t ideal,
they gave us a fuzzy picture that would be prone to interference and the TV had
to literally be tuned to the correct frequency. If the frequency was even a little
off the picture would be distorted and you would see noise. Later, here in the
UK, we began to use SCART connections but this was pretty much confined to
Europe and the UK on our 50Mhz PAL displays, whilst in the USA the preference
was to utilise RCA phono connections on their 60Mhz NTSC displays.The regional difference
between PAL at 50Hz and NTSC at 60Hz can be seen if you ever get to play a
vintage video game. What you will find is that the game will run markedly
faster on the NTSC version, the PAL version would run slower and sound was also
generated more slowly creating a further distortion due to the output speed of
the device. However, the opposite can also be true in that a game or program
developed in a PAL region would run fine as it would have been optimised for
that region. Hey, the world was smaller back in the 80s right?Video games are one thing, but
if you work in animation, this variation in speed can be a huge challenge, as
can the differences in screen resolutions. NTSC and PAL are two types of colour
encoding systems that affect the quality of content viewed on analogue
televisions and monitors. PAL offered automated colour correction and NTSC was
manual. There was also a third contender, SECAM, or, Sequential Couleur Avec
Memoire or Sequential Color with Memory, although it was confined to Eastern
Europe and France.Again, these are differences
that we don’t really have to think too much about today but all of them would
display the same thing differently, imagine if we faced as many of the same
constraints today.There are a couple of
interesting observations around the connectivity of analogue systems and the
quality of display from whichever connection was to be used. SCART was
allegedly the more advanced option of many when it came out in 1977, it would
later become a mandated standard for TVs from 1980 but only in France, other European
countries then adopted the connection throughout the 80s and 90s.SCART, in theory, would also
allow other devices to be controlled through remote switching. Similar to HDMI
CEC today, turn off your VCR and the TV would also turn off, but in practice,
no one I ever knew at the time, or since, has ever utilised that functionality.
I’ve yet to meet anyone who isn’t seriously into home theatre take full advantage
of HDMI CEC today, I’m sure there will be fans of the format, but it’s not
something everyone uses.Personally, I couldn’t wait to
move away from SCART and its propensity for bent pins and migrate to RCA and
later, composite and S-Video which I always found to give much greater
reliability and a way better picture. Thankfully, today we have multi-region
capability in most technologies out of the box and when we don’t, there are
plenty of quality suppliers of weird cables that can hook your 8-bit baby up to
a modern display.
Will Work for Ink by Mark Taylor – notice the dot matrix paper and lines. A larger view is available on my store! Printing technology was
different, even the ink was almost affordable but we didn’t have the complexity
built into many of todays ink cartridges which alongside the costs associated
with modern research and development for ink technologies, make them more
expensive than the finest caviar in relation to weight, pricier than a gallon
of 1985 vintage Krug Champagne and by weight and volume, modern printer ink is
more expensive than gold.Environmentally, ink
cartridges that cannot be refilled and contain microchips to prevent refilling,
make absolutely no ecological sense at all. Things are changing with the likes
of Epson providing refillable tanks, but this isn’t anywhere close to a
mainstream practice.In reality, there’s not that
much more you can do with printer ink to make it better than it is today, good
quality inks used on a dye-sublimation printer can make prints last for
generations, many are now waterproof and the vibrancy of ink has never been
better, assuming you use good quality inks.Printer manufacturers don’t
make money on printers, in my experience, most of them don’t really care about
offering customer service on printers beyond 6-months, as I found out when a
13-month old dye-sublimation printer I purchased for a significant sum went
down in the middle of a print job. For years the printer manufacturers have
been pushing the consumer towards ongoing spend and subscription models for ink
replacement and sadly, we’re mostly buying into their model.That’s partly the reason why so
little of my work is printed in house, I can source printing more cheaply and
not have the hassle or expense if I use specialist print centres who utilise
printers that wouldn’t even fit through the door of my studio. They also work
with high volumes so the overall costs are massively lower than anything I
print in house.That said, I still do have a
need for printers but I run a mixed eco-system. A dye sublimation wide format
printer and original cartridges for one off print jobs, an inexpensive inkjet with
third party inks for general day to day stuff and proof prints.Here’s the thing, I turn back
to retro technologies for my every day printing needs. Mostly, I still use a
dot matrix printer, albeit one that has been manufactured in the past two years
and is still available and still manufactured, with ink replaced from a bottle
for any day to day text. I really don’t need to spend the cost of a gold nugget
on printing out an invoice. I also have a thermal printer for labels which is
also handy for printing receipts which never really fade. So the 80s is well
and truly ingrained into my process and my costs are lower as a result.Printers were never as fancy
back in the eighties, nowhere close. While I had been dabbling with ASCII
characters and creating passable images for the time, the upgrade in graphics
technology throughout the 80s made it easier to create an artistic abstraction
on screen and then print that same abstraction out on a roll of silver thermal
paper using a small thermal printer.The world upgraded to dot
matrix printers eventually but these didn’t offer any massive leaps in
graphical output over and above the thermal printers that were much less
expensive. I actually preferred the thermal print rolls to regular paper
because of the metallic sheen, and because the images didn’t tend to fade when
they were exposed to daylight. I still have some original printouts that have
outlasted many inkjet prints I have created since.With the dot matrix printers
you could use larger sheets of paper but the paper was usually perforated and
fed through the printer using a daisy wheel which meant that any paper had to
be continuously fed and each piece had a series of holes on each side. This
wasn’t exactly the quality you would be able to offer as a commercial grade
print but it was fine for home and business use if you were only printing text.Printers evolved quite
quickly, but the underpinning dot matrix technology would still be the most
common and most affordable for a while. The first consumer grade inkjet printer
had been released back in 1976, although the principles of inkjets had been
muttered about in the 1950s yet it wouldn’t be until 1988 when inkjet
technology became more readily available as a consumer product. The HP ThinkJet
released in 1984 was still far too expensive for most consumers and it still
wasn’t quite good enough to offer commercial prints, even for the time.I remained with thermal
printers for a while before moving onto near letter quality dot matrix
technologies and then I remained with those technologies until the late
eighties before finally making the leap to inkjet technology in the early 90s.Inkjet was by then, a leap
forward but it was still limited, and most of my digital output from the
Commodore Amiga and by the 90s, the early PC, would still need to be printed by
a specialist printer with the lead time often measured in multiples of weeks
even for a single print. There was no such thing as print on demand, it was
more akin to take your file to a specialist and join a waiting list and it was
incredibly expensive for small print runs. It made commercial prints of digital
work prohibitive for most people. When I create work today on vinyl sheets it
costs around a tenth of the price to outsource the work.By the time the early PCs hit
the market I now had the ability to shape images on screen and print them out,
and this was to be the game changer that meant I no longer had to be creative
with only a box of pencils and a sketchbook. I was able to produce digital art
professionally on canvas using a combination of the Commodore Amiga and an
early PC. It was at this time that I would be able to take on commissions at a
time when relatively few other people were offering digital art commercially.
This was the closest we ever got to the gold rush during the days of creating
8-bit computer games, but the outgoing costs were now much higher.The biggest issue with modern
printers is that for retro aesthetics they can be great but for authenticity,
you still have to look at older technologies, not least because of the expense.
A modern printer cartridge contains less ink today than ever before. For example, the Epson T032 colour
cartridge (released in 2002) is the same size as the Epson colour T089
(released in 2008). But the T032 contains 16ml of ink and the T089 contains
just 3.5ml of ink.Hewlett
Packard (HP) cartridges have seen the same diminishing quantities over the
years. A decade ago, the best-selling HP cartridge had 42ml of ink and sold for
about £20 (UK). Today, the standard printer cartridges made by HP may contain
as little as 5ml of ink but sell for about £13 (UK). There hasn’t been a
massive leap in yield from ink cartridges either, we’re at this point now paying
not for the ink but the plastic cartridge and a microchip that keeps us within
a genuine eco-system.I
really don’t buy into the R&D spend any more because they’re just not
innovating like they were in the 80s, all of my modern printers rapidly die
soon after a new model gets released. My original dot matrix from 1988 was
still going strong in 2019, my Sinclair Thermal from around 1982 still works,
but I’m down to my last roll of thermal paper and it is becoming a challenge to
find new old stock.With my retro and vintage
inspired work, I now insist on making sure whoever prints it can capture the
detail I put into the artwork, and if needed, some work is recreated on aged
paper which I keep supplies of, it’s useful for recreating some of the ephemera
that was originally found in the 80s.Some of the papers I currently
have were genuinely created during the 80s, although it is becoming more of a
challenge to purchase genuine aged paper today, some people do continue to
carry stocks of it which has been properly stored. For more specialist work I
often find myself in a conversation with a hand made paper supplier who does a
really good job of recreating the look and feel. Again, it’s about
authenticity, especially when recreating ephemera.If you are looking to produce more
authentic work, there are plenty of sellers on platforms such as Etsy and even
eBay who can supply home made aged paper stock, it’s never quite like the
original paper but it’s also a lot less delicate and a lot less expensive.
Expect to pay around three or four dollars per sheet and up for really good
quality papers, genuine 80s papers can go for triple this and even more so it
will also depend on the price point your audience will pay.
Handheld electronic game art print by Mark Taylor – again the matrix is visible on the print. Like I mentioned earlier, old
technology that works is not quite yet in short supply, with a few exceptions.
The downside to using old tech to create authentic period digital art is that
it does come with the potential that it will fail at any time and unless you
are comfortable with a soldering iron and carry enough spares you might find
that getting older tech repaired can be problematic, no one really understands
this stuff quite like us older dinosaurs.Most old technology isn’t
overly expensive even now with a growing popularity in collecting it, but I
suspect it won’t remain quite as affordable for much longer. Back in 2012 much
of this stuff was being given away or worse, thrown away, but if you are
looking for unboxed working technology, it is still within reach of most
budgets if you are looking to create more authentic looking work.What isn’t quite so affordable
will be the rarer games consoles, or those systems that failed to gain any
commercial traction. A few hundred pounds/dollars will provide you with a
40-year old working Commodore 64 and either a tape or floppy drive, but if you
are after console such as a working Vectrex, you will be paying two or three
times as much.That said, there are
alternatives to using older technologies that will still ensure you can provide
that greater level of authenticity, and to an extent, negate at least some of the
need for your workflow to rely on increasingly expensive modern technology, not
completely maybe but certainly enough for you to be able to minimise your
outlay. Every year we see new specifications emerging to run applications such
as Photoshop and it’s just not practical or affordable for many working artists
to keep on top of the tech.That said, some of the
alternatives are not what you might call inexpensive, but they will provide you
with equipment that will get the job done and you will be able to get closer to
authentic looking work than you can with a traditional computer with Photoshop
or Illustrator installed.
A Raspberry Pi – currently in short supply but I will paint these as retro devices one day! I collect vintage technology
but there is always that risk that it will need some periodic TLC to continue
working. It’s always a good idea to use new power supplies rather than the
originals and it’s also a good idea to find someone who is able to recap old
computers so that you don’t find yourself with leaking capacitors which can
destroy the printed circuit boards rendering the equipment useless.There is a compromise that
comes in two forms, either emulation which can be done either on a Raspberry
Pie or modern PC and to an extent, even a Mac. The good thing about emulation
is that it doesn’t always need overly powerful equipment to work. Emulation is
just that, it emulates a past system, and some emulators for some systems work
better than others.The second method is to utilise
an FPGA based device such as the MiSTer FPGA which is based on the DE10 Nano
development board, although you will need other components alongside the DE10
to get the most out of recreating vintage graphics.FPGA or Field Programmable
Gate Array, essentially creates a system on a chip. It’s not really emulation
because you are loading an original core onto the programmable chip and at this
point you will have access to an exact replica of the original hardware running
at a hardware rather than emulated software level. It’s as close as you can get
to running the original device but without the headaches and it comes with all
the benefits of using brand new equipment every time you power it on.Various cores are available
for download, you can replicate an arcade video game machine and then switch to
a Tandy TRS80 Colour Computer from the 1980s, or pretty much any other vintage
computer or console and run the original software or the modern software
created today for old systems. It’s a couple of levels above the Raspberry Pie
in terms of the learning curve but many levels above a Raspberry Pie in terms
of what you will get out of it.The downside with either of
these options at the moment is that the global chip shortage has impacted
manufacturing of both the Raspberry Pie and MiSTer FPGA DE10 Nano boards and
finding them for close to their regular retail value is next to impossible. If
you plan to go down this route and don’t already have the equipment, you will
be paying over the odds, possibly for a little while longer too.Either of these options will
allow you to run the older image editors such as Delux Paint for the Commodore
Amiga, so you can create original graphics using the original software loaded
from a ROM and have the benefit of being able to more easily transfer the
created assets over to your PC. Using emulation or FPGA is hugely beneficial
when it comes to file transfers back to a modern PC or Mac.A note about ROMs, there is a
legal grey area with the use of ROMs and unless the software is now available
through open source channels you might need to own the original copy of the
software to legally run it. Also bear in mind that in some cases owning the
original files in order to use the image files with emulators might still be
outside of the copyright laws applicable to the software and its use. If you
can satisfy the legality of running ROMs, then the internet is a vast resource
for tracking the ROM images down.In my humble opinion, the
MiSTer is the way to go with vintage technology, but getting one is another ask
entirely. If you do get one, you will never need to buy any other vintage
technologies because it really does do it all and it does everything really
well and you don’t need the space for a lot of vintage kit.There are a handful of vintage
computers that have been specifically recreated for use in the modern day,
namely the ZX Spectrum Next, but just like other FPGA devices, these things are
extremely rare in the wild and the second Kickstarter campaign remains to be
fulfilled due to the limited availability of the FPGA chips needed. It is a
great machine though and it also goes beyond the capabilities of the original
8-Bit machine and there is no doubt that the second wave will be fulfilled because
there are some great people behind it who can absolutely be trusted to deliver.There is also another FPGA
Sinclair Spectrum, the ZX Spectrum Next N-GO, which is a smaller version of the
ZX Spectrum Next, but again this is FPGA and well, the chip shortage is making
life difficult for those who want to buy one of these too.
Together in Electric Dreams by Mark Taylor – best decade ever! If you are looking to
replicate either the Commodore 64 or Commodore Amiga, which is essential if you
are looking to run something like Delux Paint, then you can go with either the
C64 (mini without a working keyboard, or Maxi – with a working keyboard) or the
A500 Mini, both from a company called Retro Games, and all of their machines
are available pretty much globally.The compromise here is that
whilst the machines look and act just like the originals, they are running
software emulation to perform their magic. In the case of the A500 Mini which
has a non working keyboard, (a USB one can be added), you can use WHD Load
which means that once you have a WHD load ROM file, you can place it on a USB
stick and you won’t have to swap the discs or load in multiple ROMs for the
multiple discs that the original application used on the original hardware.For most people, all of these
devices will be mainly be being used to play retro games, but they are all more
than capable of creating original code and graphics. I own the original
Commodore machines but now use the recreated versions to create authentic
Commodore based artwork, purely because I want to preserve my original 30 and 40-year
old computers for as long as I can.As I said earlier, hardly
anything was documented back in the 70s, 80s, or 90s. The knowledge we have
today comes mainly from those who were either involved with the industry or
consumed from the industry and from the publications of the day that did manage
to capture a lot of what was going on but by no means everything. Instead, we
rely on a dwindling number of people to recall events from 40, 50, and even 60
years ago.Of course we have seen this throughout art
history too, there is very little historic documentation in relation to the
number of historically important artworks hanging in museums, where it’s often
the case that any provenance or record of the time has to be painstakingly researched.
Today we are more inclined to record important moments, historic events, things
and places, we live in a slightly less disposable era and we’re less inclined
to dispose of history.There’s also another
consideration in that video games, music, and other digital mediums are finally
being seen in the mainstream as legitimate art forms and I think that’s the
right way to view them. If we look at how traditional art is created, it is by
hand, often from the imagination or interpretation of the author and that’s the
same process that creates all of these more non-traditional art forms. 8-bit
graphics are the technical equivalent of hieroglyphs, and maybe people might
disagree that they are nowhere close to being as important, but this was how
society communicated in the early days of using the technology we know today.The technology we see today
and the technology we go on to see in the future and its journey will become
historically just as important as artwork in time, just as the beginnings of
the industrial revolution have become. I do think that maybe some of the uptick
in retro collecting might not only be stemming from the need to feed the
current hunger for nostalgia, but for many of us who collect vintage
technologies and the ephemera that goes with them, it is widely regarded that it
is often more about the importance of preservation and being able to make sure
that the technology story isn’t lost.For artists who have an
interest in retro/vintage (I wish there was a term that could be used to
describe them better), and for those who have an interest in producing period
work, there is a growing market that consistently devours quality artwork and
recreations that represent the time.Artists do have opportunities
in this area, it’s perfectly fine to create work that is a representation and
there is a healthy market to feed and a decent living to be earned from
providing an aesthetic reference to the time. If you are looking to engage in
the higher value collector market, there are plenty of options here too but the
difference is night and day in terms of what those collectors expect.With that expectation comes a
revenue stream that is significantly higher than the retro aesthetic market and
the initial outlay to create the expected level of detail both in terms of
finance and knowledge of the period is relative to that. In terms of finding
those collectors, it can be a completely different social circle that you might
need to engage with. You might want to test the waters by joining retro
enthusiast communities and visiting some of the many retro events that now take
place across the globe to see what the more serious collectors collect. Think
high quality art prints, reproductions of ephemera alongside the originals.I remember visiting some of
these events five or six years ago and less than a hundred people and often way
fewer would turn up. Today the events are usually packed to the rafters with
tickets selling out weeks and sometimes months in advance.For those interested in how
the technology in the digital art space has changed in the past forty years,
anything produced using the technology we have today is incomparable to what could
be achieved in the past, yet many of the principles and techniques we use today
were invented in the 1980s and even before.Today we automate many of
those techniques which arguably could be seen as a method of deskilling a
workforce but if we are to preserve a practice just as we strive to do with
other historic artistic practices, then it becomes critical that more artists
take a look at the retro and vintage scene for digital art and embrace the old
way of doing things. Not because we can, not because it’s not as easy, but
because it is a craft and a history we are in danger of losing and that will
make it challenging to evolve even further. More than that, hey, it can only
make you a better artist right!
The Underdog By Mark Taylor – Betamax was superior to VHS but the length of tape was shorter. By the end of the 80s, Blockbuster had become the church of many people. Hopefully you will have found
this one an interesting glimpse into the early days of microcomputers, the
current retro collecting trend, and the real dawn of digital art becoming more
accessible to more people. It’s hard to comprehend sometimes that digital art
hasn’t been around even longer, though there were examples of digital art going
way back well before the eighties, it was the 1980s that truly set it on a path
to what we have today.The eighties is a fascinating
decade even beyond the technology it gave us. Steven Spielberg said when his
Ready Player One film was released that the 80s was a stress free decade, I
think if you sugar coat it, it very well might have been but there was a lot
going on.The age of MTV, a time-travelling
DeLorean, and synth, also oversaw Cold War escalation, the Iran-Contra affair,
the crack epidemic, and the AIDS crisis. The decade’s televisual and
computational innovations alongside cable television, VCRs and game consoles,
it wasn’t entirely stress free and less so for those who were involved in the
politics and the innovation, there were plenty more casualties for every good
news story.More than this, the 80s was a
defining era for the art world more generally, there was a blur between art,
advertising and entertainment and a question as to whether artists could simultaneously
commodify themselves and critique consumer culture? We’ll be exploring more of
the 80s as I create even more new vintage inspired works, and the hope is that
my own works will provide a pictorial backdrop to what has to be the decade
that really did have it all. Until next time, stay safe, stay well, and always
be creative!Mark x
I am an artist and blogger and live in
Staffordshire, England. You can purchase my art through my Fine Art America
store or my Pixels site here: https://10-mark-taylor.pixels.comAny art sold through Fine Art America and Pixels
contributes towards to the ongoing costs of running and developing this
website. You can also view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.comYou can also follow me on Facebook at: https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia where you will
also find regular free reference photos of interesting subjects and places I
visit. You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia
