Monthly Art Project Subscription
Smart Art is an art project in a box, delivered monthly to their door. It’s designed to inspire creative thinking and may be the perfect thing to help get them over a creative block. Each box will contain everything they need to create a new project. They’ll explore a new technique each month and experiment with encaustic painting, mixed media, impasto painting, street art, and much more.
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While it may look like a party favor from a 10 year old’s birthday party to the uncultured eye, any artist will recognize these replicas of Jeff Koons’ iconic large scale Balloon Dog sculptures. In 2013 he sold one of his dogs at Christie’s for $58,400,000. Perhaps looking at this piece will be inspiring for its owner, or maybe completely depressing if they’re the typical starving artist type.
It can be tough to shop for artists, but one thing you know for sure is - they’re into art. Commission an original work by a local artist or find a starving artist online who is hungry for a sale. The gift will be sincerely appreciated by everyone involved. Make sure you pick something that suits your friend’s aesthetic and not your own!
Artist thrive on creative challenges, and everyone needs to eat. Why not bring the whole picture into focus with this kit full of culinary experiments? Their food will be as beautiful as their artwork, and you may just get invited over to try some chocolate spaghetti noodles, exploding caviar beads, solid spheres of yogurt, or salmon topped with lemon foam.
For the artist, art is about expressing themselves and their individuality. What better tribute to their uniqueness than a work of art depicting their actual one-of-a-kind DNA? You can give them the DNA sampling kit as the gift and let them choose the style and color of print they want, or if you’re really clever you can find a way to get that cheek swab ahead of time and present them with the finished work of art.
It’s rumored that the real reason great Renaissance artists like Ingres, Van Eyck, and Caravaggio were able to draw so accurately is very simple - they cheated. The Camera Lucida is an ingenious tool that superimposes the subject’s image on the artist’s canvas. From there, all the artist needs to do is trace the projected image and, voila, another masterpiece accurate down to the last detail.
Artists are always searching the world for inspiration, but the most amazing discoveries are really inside their creative minds. Treat them to a sensory depravation experience and let their minds wander the Cosmos in search of beauty and truth. Or maybe they just take a nap, either way they’ll get something out of it.
In the right hands, a color wheel is like a recipe book for beautiful design. There are actually a lot of cool tricks that can be achieved by placing certain colors beside each other, as Jasper Johns explored in his work in the 1950s. For example, did you know that you can make one color look like two different colors? Or make two different colors appear as if they were exactly the same? There is a science behind it all, about how your brain interprets sensory input, but let the artist worry about that. Just know that this is an item that should be included with every painter’s toolkit, that can help them mix colors and understand the effects colors have on one another.
The greatest innovation in stippling since…well maybe the only innovation in stippling. It’s a fun process and the results are beautiful, there’s just one big problem - making all those damn dots. If the artist you know happens to have shaky hands (or a serious coffee addiction), then they may already be a stippling machine, but for the rest of us there is the Pointillist Electronic Pen.