Step 1: Choose the right colours
Step 2: Choose the right equipment and canvas
Step 3: Be Bob Ross, God bless his soul (if you’re into that kinda thing).
Hello, it’s me, Jade, again, reporting to you from the igloo.
Take these little works of art, for example. If they look the same to you, then may I ask you stop copying paintings? Please?
This image is a digitisation (I did the digitising this time guys – I’m moving up in the world – hope you’re proud of me, Mummy) of a painting called ‘Suspense’. It is named, I believe, quite appropriately being a painting of a dog waiting by a door for its owner to come home (cue: “aww”). The artist is, once again, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer who quite clearly believed that dogs did nothing but sit and wait by the door all day long for their owners to arrive home. It’s not like they have a chair-leg to chew, or anything.
Back to the topic of conversation: Seriously, though, one of the carpets is green and the other is a vibrant red with the tablecloths vice-versa. The image on the right has a feather that looks the same as the feather in the left hand picture, after the dog has used it as his personal chew toy. Not to mention that the dog on the right looks like it could have been the dog on the left… maybe ten or twenty years prior (how long do dogs last, again?).
Moving on, colour-blindness is a common occurrence in today’s society – even my partner has it. A few nights ago, my partner, a friend and I spent the evening in Zizzi’s (shout-out to Zizzi’s in LiverpoolOne!) arguing about the colour of some chairs sat out in the rain. They were definitely Navy and blue, BTW. Some avid internet users might remember the recent horrors of “the dress”, but that was never linked to some viewers being colour-blind, everybody perceived it as a matter of perspective. The relevance is the fact that despite its radical colour differences, someone who took a different perspective of the painting may have copied ‘Suspense’. However, both images are mere copies and now we don’t know what the original looks like. Commenters, send help.
Speaking of commenters, a few readers came back to me saying that they couldn’t leave a comment. This issue has now been resolved. So please,
This isn’t all that my colleague, Roisin, and I have been doing this week. For example, Thursday morning was spent walking around the Walker Art Gallery for about two hours looking for art of animals in the Victorian era, along with ordering a book in Liverpool’s Central Library special collections section which, once it had arrived, we remembered images are only allowed to be taken for personal use. Yay. By lunch, my feet were so sore that we had to go to Dory’s (a fantastic little sandwich shop located on Hardman Street) for a couple of slices of toast with extra butter (Cue: “It’s the Hard Knock Life” – Martin Charnin).
Anyway, moral of the story: Be Bob Ross.
Over and out.
LJMU Special Collections & Archives 