Welcome to our Kickstarter page!
What is Colourstory?
Colourstory is the brainchild of Arthur Buxton, an artist and printmaker who tells stories with colour. Arthur has exhibited work in London, New York and Hong Kong. His limited edition prints have featured on BoingBoing.net and sold at Christies Multiplied Art Fair. This is an opportunity for you to own a collectable artwork whilst supporting a project which will enable creativity and spark ideas.
We are raising money to build a free web platform which will enable anyone to create beautiful colourful artworks at the touch of a button. You can make Colourstories from absolutely any set of images - your holiday in Ireland, a football match, your friend's wedding, your twitter feed, your facebook albums, your favourite artist or even your favourite food (cake anyone?).
Back the project to get your hands on some personalised collectable artworks! Have a look at the rewards...
How are Colourstories created?
Colourstories are made using digital tools which extract the main colours from an image and display them proportionally. The resulting colour charts are arranged chronologically to form a unique narrative using colour. Sounds simple? It is but this novel approach is the result of years of research and hard work by Arthur. The process is currently very labour intensive - our aim is to create a web application that simplifies the process and places it in the hands of the public. We want to see what Colourstories you have to tell!
As well as being pretty to look at, Colourstories have the potential to reveal trends otherwise hidden in large collections of images and as such have vast potential in the worlds of data visualisation, academia, art history, education and many other uses we haven't even thought of yet! The Colourstory platform will be totally free to use and you will be able to order each one as a unique museum quality printed memento.
What will the money go towards?
Almost all of the money you pledge will go towards designing and programming a simple, easy to use, robust and most importantly free web platform. The remainder of the budget will go towards ink and paper to print the beautiful artwork you will be receiving as rewards! We expect to spend 80 percent on development and 20 percent on ink, paper and postage!
What happens if we go over the goal?
We are aiming for overfunding! If we get overfunded we will expand the range of digital and physical products the platform produces. Printed textiles, jewellery, and product design are all things we would love to explore so please become a backer and help us make our digital dreams become physical!
Some more of the swanky printed goodies we're offering to backers
Meet the rest of the team
Helping achieve this goal are experienced managing director Seth Jackson and studio assistant Charlotte Smith. They are all based at The Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol, which houses a wonderful mix of engineers, artists, producers and academics - the perfect place to get the support and advice needed to make this happen!
Research & Development so far
In 2013, Arthur carried out a six month feasibility study with Dr Paul Laidler of the Centre for Fine Print Research at UWE, Bristol. Funded by Research and Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technology (REACT) and entitled ‘Visualising Colour Trends’ the study helped him to develop a prototype and refine his idea. At the start of 2014, Arthur took part in the incubator Webstart Bristol, where this project was born!
Colourstory has been featured by:
Motherboard, part of VICE: http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/colourstory-uses-image-data-to-make-colorful-life-stories
Bristol Culture: http://www.bristol-culture.com/2014/06/26/turning-life-into-a-colour-wheel-story/
The Wall Street Journal: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/07/09/five-art-projects-looking-for-some-crowd-love/
Risks and challenges
We already have some of the groundwork done when it comes to building the digital platform therefore six weeks should allow us plenty of time to finish it off. However, if we do encounter a hold up of any kind we will inform all the backers of the delay immediately and begin fulfilling those orders which require the platform manually.
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Funding period
- (30 days)