What "made in Dehradun, printed near you" actually means
Where the designs come from, where the printing happens, and why those are two different places.
Blog
Pieces about the designs, the paintings and how the things we sell are actually made.RSS.
Turner painted a train when he was sixty-nine
Rain, Steam, and Speed makes the machine and the weather out of the same paint. Critics complained you could not tell what anything was.
A labyrinth is not a maze
One has a single path and no choices. The other has junctions and dead ends. Calling them the same thing mis-sells the page.
Monet's shadows are not grey
In the wheat-stack series the darkest part of the picture is also the most colourful. Here is what he was doing.
How the printable pages work
Extra printable pages are included with our books and packs — free account, no purchase needed to download the free ones.
Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait
It is a tronie — a Dutch genre of invented head study. Knowing that makes the "who was she?" question the wrong one.
Van Gogh wrote down the colour list for The Bedroom
He described exactly what each surface was to be, and why. Reading the letter beside the painting changes what you see.
"Bold and easy" is a design brief, not a lower standard
Thick lines and open fields are harder to draw well than intricate ones. Here is the test we use.
How we choose paper, and why your print is on cotton rag
What 240 gsm cotton rag actually means, why it costs more than satin poster stock, and when you should buy the cheaper one.
The Great Wave is not about the wave
Hokusai's most famous print is the first in a series about a mountain. Once you find Fuji, the composition reorganises itself.
Five tiles and a thousand years of Persian walls
Girih patterns look impossibly complicated and are built from five shapes. Here is the set, and what the tilemakers were actually drawing.
What a kolam actually is, and why the dots come first
A kolam is one unbroken line looped around a grid of dots. That constraint is the whole art form — here is how it works and how to draw your first one.