A spectacular “cosmic eye” has been photographed in space by a telescope in Chile, showing a distant nebula in which sunlike stars are burning themselves out.
The image of the Helix nebula, which lies 700 light years away in the constellation Aquarius, was captured with the Wide Field Imager instrument at the La Silla Observatory high above the Atacama Desert.
Already amazing in color and already resembling the human eye, when duplicated, it has an incredible resemblance to the human face.
This very high resolution image would be excellent for police stations, or anywhere else where big brother may be watching. Then again, maybe it’s better for a church. This image can be produced at up to 10′ high, by up to 40′ in width.
Art, eyes, Images, space
The occasional wallcovering job will bring you face to face with a measurement nightmare.
- What if you have to provide a mural that runs around all four sides of a room, and has to match up perfectly from starting edge to final edge?
- What if you have to provide 4 sides of an interior wall and have the beginning and end of the mural match up?
This isn’t your momma’s dainty flower design that you can hack together in the corner above the door. You have to be dead on to please the customer.
What do you do? Read more…
Because of the materials involved and the printing process, occasional problems arise in digital prints that are due to material shrinkage.
How does this happen? - Wallcoverings are fabric backed, but can still stretch under normal conditions (a very small amount). When heated, as when under an ink jet printer, and pulled taught between rollers, some stretching occurs. This minimal amount is usually only 0.25% or less. When cooled, the wallcovering material is usually not pulled taught (as on the take-off of the ink jet printer) and returns to its actual size. –This means that the printed design is now 0.25% smaller than it was intended to be.
0.25% shrinkage, big deal, right? I’ve had customers deal with high height projects (40′ heights in a casino) that had shrinkage of nearly 1.5″. This is a BIG deal for if you are matching other architectural components. Read more…
Shrinkage, wallcovering
In 1787, the painter Robert Barker opened an exhibition in Edinburgh which was to have a major impact on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century entertainment industries. It featured a panoramic view of the city of Edinburgh painted around the inner wall of a rotunda which, viewed from the center of the room, gave the spectator the illusion of reality.
During the nineteenth century, panoramas and related forms of visual illusionism–dioramas, moving panoramas, peep-shows–became an early form of mass entertainment in European and American cities.
Cross section of Robert Barker’s Panorama, Leicester Square, London, 1789
The panoramic view itself was far from new. Panoramas are at least as old as the Bayeux Tapestry, and artists had been painting bird’s-eye views of cities long before the invention of manned flight made them a reality. What was new was the idea of putting the painting into a circular room and attempting to deceive the eye into believing that it was looking not at a painting, but reality itself. The history of panoramas is closely interwoven with that of photography throughout the nineteenth century, each playing an important part in the other’s development.
Poppy Field Mural
The above image is part of the December 2008 LateralArt collection.
The image is targeted for 19′ tall x 14′ wide. As always, LateralArt is happy to custom design to your dimensions and specific design needs. The image here has been cloned to produce a much wider width to coincide with our LateralArt theme of ‘wide walls’.
Contact Us or Read about how we can help you apply this image to your project.
Artwork, Images
I’ve worked on art projects in the past that have included digitally printed prints cut from and laid over another substrate or hidden image. Those were cool, but I must say, the concept outlined over at LimitedHype.com from burojet.com is really something.
They’ve used digitally printed murals of unique furniture, but have not been scared to cut them to pieces, and overlay them onto moveable doors.
Obviously these are tailored for those with small living spaces, but the concept in relation to division and revelation of new layers is exciting.
At Lateral Art, we’ve had the opportunity to work with custom cutting houses that cut Aluminum Letters, Sintra, and of course digitally printed items out for us.
What about two layers of murals, one cut to pieces with an intricate pattern, revealing the other behind, but 6 to 12 inches away. As the visitor walks from one viewpoint to the next, the back/revealed image keeps changing. Kind of like a massive lenticular.
We’re up to that challenge, we only need that target wall. Do you have a good application?
Depth, Substrates
In the mural business, we often check out what other people are doing. I found this great bird cage mural in a restaurant. The simple lines add uniformity and really fill the wide open space, and they also do well to the open rafters/faux rafters up above.
One thing to note - the decorator for this project was thinking ahead in his or her combination of the mural with the well matched chosen lighting. It’s not a trivial task to line up mural positions with other wall objects. One has to pay particular attention to HOW the installer deals with the bleed of the mural.
If 6″ of bleed was provided here in the install, but the installer just lined the left hand edge of the mural with the left hand edge of the bleed, the entire mural could be off by 6″ away from any electrical junction boxes. A critical error. It’s very important to clarify to an installer HOW to deal with provided bleed, and HOW to deal with other objects.
Bleed, objects
I’ve recently come across a fun new tool from the design professionals at Adobe. It’s Kuler.
Kuler is an online respository of color themes that are sorted and voted on - a little Web 2.0 community for color enthusiasts. We’ve utilizied this tool when creating new murals, and are happy to use it again based on client request.
This tool is excellent for pulling up new ideas for mural use, as well as other A&D and printing projects, however one has to be cautioned that the colors here are not necessarily printable. Some colors are outside of the printing capability of many wide format printers. Color problems often occur with very light colors, very dark colors, greens, oranges, and flourescents/neons.
Color
Jelly Dance One Mural
The above image is part of the December 2008 LateralArt collection. All elements are individually created for easy replacement by the end designer. All components are separate layers. Color Adjust, and texture layers are separate for easy customization to end user needs.
The image is 20,000 pixels wide by 7,200 pixels tall. The surrealistic color choices of the jellyfish are offset by the fact that they are actual Jelly Photographs.
As always, LateralArt is happy to custom design to your dimensions and specific design needs.
Artwork, Images
Color Bars Mural
The above image is part of the December 2008 LateralArt collection. The image was created from a base palette that can be replaced with your custom palette. Color Adjust, and shadow layers are separate for easy customization to end user needs.
- The image is 20,000 pixels wide by 7,200 pixels tall.
- Image of suitable quality to be interpolated to a larger image. The image can be stretched to a longer image, or recreated to a larger size/ larger width. with little to no degradation.
LateralArt is happy to custom design to your dimensions and specific design needs.
Artwork, Images
