Advice on dive site wall art

[Ian Popple]

Hi guys. I’m looking for some advice from you all if you have a minute. As you may know, we (Reef Smart Guides) create 3D dive maps, which we turn into waterproof cards and use in our guidebooks, etc. We’ve been asked by a number of people if we can print these designs as large formats as wall art.

There’s a lot of time and effort goes into collecting the data, modelling and rending in high res, so in short, it’s a significant investment. And in this day and age, with all the uncertainty, it would be risky for us to invest heavily in stock, which means print on demand is probably our best bet if we’re going to develop this idea. But this in turn bumps up the price, potentially making it unaffordable.

My question to the board is the following: is a product like this interesting and if so, how much would you say a suitable retail price might be?

Realistically, we probably cannot price a 3x2 foot laminated poster for under $60 US (including North American shipping, but not including framing options). A paper version would be more like $45 US. Custom, 5-6 foot across like the Kittiwake in Grand Cayman (shown here) would be more like $200-300 US.

In these covid times it’s important to seek advice from industry types and avid divers like yourselves, so thanks in advance for your feedback.

 

[Azraelien]

Use a service like Society6 or Redbubble - both provide astoundingly high quality prints on a variety of objects (clothing, posters, metal posters, tapestries etc) at a cost of 0 to the artist, and allow you to set the prices for products sold.

 

[Wookie]

Use a service like Society6 or Redbubble - both provide astoundingly high quality prints on a variety of objects (clothing, posters, metal posters, tapestries etc) at a cost of 0 to the artist, and allow you to set the prices for products sold.

Agreed with the above poster, although I've never heard of those services, as I am not woke that way, but most of the snarky t-shirts I buy are print on demand/print to order and I have no idea what the vig is to the artist, it allows the artist to offer a large variety of art at low cost to the artist. Probably a low revenue as well, but sometimes we have to suffer for our art.

 

[Ian Popple]

Use a service like Society6 or Redbubble - both provide astoundingly high quality prints on a variety of objects (clothing, posters, metal posters, tapestries etc) at a cost of 0 to the artist, and allow you to set the prices for products sold.

Thanks for the feed back - I'll look into those

 

[Ian Popple]

Agreed with the above poster, although I've never heard of those services, as I am not woke that way, but most of the snarky t-shirts I buy are print on demand/print to order and I have no idea what the vig is to the artist, it allows the artist to offer a large variety of art at low cost to the artist. Probably a low revenue as well, but sometimes we have to suffer for our art.

So true Thanks for the feedback

 

[doctormike]

Your images are terrific, I wish you would team up with Ben Roberts to do the amazing and historic wrecks in the NYC area - but I do understand that there isn't as much of a market for those as there is for warm water artificial reefs!

One comment. If you are going to sell your images as wall art, I would offer a version without all of the text and supplementary information. Those are great for info cards to plan a dive, but the artwork is much better on its own if you are making a wall piece.

 

[JahJahwarrior]

I don't want to be overly harsh but I don't know if I have the right words to explain this:
If I'm paying that much for art, I want it to look like art, not a technical facts poster.

Example, the wreck looks nice, very cool, desaturated, greens and blues. Then there is a full color white and red dive boat, and full color fish...like I'm looking at some art with a HUD on. I don't like that, they don't mesh.

But if I'm getting something like a 12x18 poster to hang up in the garage, then the full color stuff looks cool.

And if the facts are presented in the same format as the ship, like a blueprint that includes dimensions, that could look nice. I think that is throwing me off is the huge color difference between the fish and the boat.

Print on demand doesn't bother me, and print on demand gives you the flexibility to offer a "artsy" version as well as a "dive facts" version. Artsy version, maybe I can even pony up more to print on canvas and add it to the bedroom or living room wall. I suppose I'd prefer to have the ship more level in that instance though.

 

[rhwestfall]

The price you mention isn't bad (actually pretty inexpensive), but the comment above are spot on as to what the clutter is doing to it (undesirable).

Subject matter too......

 

[Barnaby'sDad]

I don't want to be overly harsh but I don't know if I have the right words to explain this:
If I'm paying that much for art, I want it to look like art, not a technical facts poster.

Example, the wreck looks nice, very cool, desaturated, greens and blues. Then there is a full color white and red dive boat, and full color fish...like I'm looking at some art with a HUD on. I don't like that, they don't mesh.

But if I'm getting something like a 12x18 poster to hang up in the garage, then the full color stuff looks cool.

And if the facts are presented in the same format as the ship, like a blueprint that includes dimensions, that could look nice. I think that is throwing me off is the huge color difference between the fish and the boat.

Print on demand doesn't bother me, and print on demand gives you the flexibility to offer a "artsy" version as well as a "dive facts" version. Artsy version, maybe I can even pony up more to print on canvas and add it to the bedroom or living room wall. I suppose I'd prefer to have the ship more level in that instance though.

I agree that it’s a good idea to offer two options: One technical and one artsy, if possible.

I’m a numbers person. I would appreciate the more technical layout and would be willing to pay a modest amount of money for something like that (Ex. Something like the services offered on the sites mentioned above) to hang on the wall, look at, and daydream about.

 

[Ian Popple]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. We had similar comments from other divers when we produced a first draft, so we removed all the additional info and showed it around again. Once these elements had been removed we started to get feedback from people saying that they actually prefered this info. What we ended up doing was trying to find a compromise. We deleted most of the branding and the rating info, but kept some basic info about the history of the wreck, it's location, the compass and the depths, as this really provides useful info for people. We then found a way to make all this much smaller, so as not to interfer with the visual of the wreck. We could go one step further however. If we removed the logo completely from the bottom left and the species from the bottom right do you think that would eliminate enough clutter to warrent leaving the historical info, location and depth elements?