Scott Menaul's Blog

I’ve been busy getting ready for the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts this weekend but I wanted to share something I worked on recently. In addition to my artwork, I do photo restorations and reprints of old photos. A woman wanted a picture of her mother restored so she could give it out as a gift to family. The original is pretty faded and discolored and suffers from a lot of damage. Here is the before and after:

As you can see, I fixed several big scratches and marks across her face. But more noticeably, I colorized the entire photo. The daughter gave me direction on where to take it and some other photos for reference. The final result is very stunning when you see it printed out. Today I got an e-mail from the client that says “I cannot thank you enough. Your work is unbelievable.”

Please contact me or call 727-726-7411 if you have any photos you want fixed up!

Here is the piece Cyndi Edwards of Daytime did. I put the video on Youtube so it would be easier to watch:

Here’s the segment “Daytime” did on me and my art!

Scott Menaul on “Daytime” with Cyndi Edwards

This has been a busy week! I completed a series of custom pieces for the Jewels of the Bay, a show house by ASID interior designers that benefits the Boys and Girls Club of Sarasota and Manatee counties. You can see it in this photo from the newspaper article “Designs showcase talent for tours” in the Herald Tribune of Sarasota:

Designer Showhouse in Sarasota, FL

If you’re in St. Petersburg, FL this weekend, head by Temple Beth-el’s 37th Annual Art Festival and check out the art on display, including several pieces of my own. This is my first year in Temple Beth-el and I am also the first artist they’ve accepted that works in digital arts and the first that produces originals on giclée.

And like I said yesterday, the TV show Daytime is running a piece on me and my artwork that’s running on Thursday! I’ll post more about each of these events once I have another spare minute!

The TV show Daytime is running a piece on me and my artwork that’s airing this Thursday. Host Cyndi Edwards came by my studio about a week ago and we shot an interview and I showed her around my gallery. Daytime airs nationwide on the Retro Television Network, NBC, ABC and CBS. You can check your local listing to see when it’s on.

Here are photos of Cyndi Edwards and I during the filming of the show:

As promised, here is the artwork I have been creating using the Aum symbol. You can also see how I preview the artwork in the client’s home using photos of the space.

Those 9 panel pieces are a new creation that I am excited about. They require a custom-built frame to align them, but that actually makes it easier for people to install on their own without help. It would be a pain to have to line up and hang all 9 pieces separately.

I will share the Ganesha art soon! Let me know how you like this.

I run a combined art gallery, photography studio and printing shop in Clearwater, FL. One of the services we offer is restoring and retouching photographs and printing them as giclées (high quality reproductions) on paper or canvas. This is great if you have photos you want to showcase or if you have old photos you want to save before age gets to them. Here’s an example where a woman brought us photos of her mother and grandmother that she wanted put on canvas.

In the original photo, you can see that the tops of their hats are cut off. Using Photoshop, I expanded the picture by extending the wall in the background and recreating their hats (that’s a pretty neat trick.) I also adjusted the colors to make up for fading. Before and after:

The hats were cut off in the original so I had to recreate them with Photoshop.

Here’s another great group shot of the women with their friends. She asked that I remove the background (chain link fence, people walking by) so the image in the giclée on canvas would focus on them. Here is the before and after:

The original photo of the women.

Ready for printing on canvas. Removed the background, cleaned off dust/scratches and fixed the colors.

The photo had scratches on it that I was able to fix. You can see the corrections below:

I removed the spots and scratches from the original and improved the color.

If you have a box of old photos or even newspaper clippings or your kids’ childhood drawings, you should dust them off and have me restore and reproduce your favorites. You’re welcome to bring your stuff to my Clearwater, FL studio and we can go through it and figure out what you want to do. Call me at 727-726-7411 or message me online.

Just today I had a woman and her mother come pick up a reproduction of a family photo collage. The collage was made over 30 years ago, pieced together from more than 100 family photos from over the past century. The daughter was in town for a couple days and she wanted to get copies made since they weren’t sure how much longer the photos and the glue holding them together would last.

They had tried going to Kinkos to make copies but they were told the collage would have to be taken out of its glass frame and run through a rolling scanner, which would have wrecked the fragile photos. They came to me to see if I could reproduce it without taking it out from behind the glass that was helping hold it together.

As a photographer with my own studio and equipment, I had no problem shooting it through the glass and making digital copies. As a Photoshop expert, I was able to clean up the photos and get it ready for printing. And as a giclée printer I was able to handle the reproduction in-house and have the entire job done within 3 days. I also gave her it on CD.

I’ll be posting more before and after photos of other projects soon. Subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Facebook or Twitter to get updates.

In addition to my Clearwater, FL art gallery, I also run a giclee printing service and do digital capture and photo restoration. A client came to me with an old family photograph that had some pretty serious damage and they wanted to know if I could restore it and print reproductions for them. I thought you might be interested in seeing what I did. Here is the before and after:

Before and after. Notice the significant fading and the big tear in the original.

The photo was almost falling apart when I got it. A piece of tape on the back was all that was keeping the rip from making it fall apart. You can also see how faded and worn the photo had become with age. Here is a close-up of the tear and how I handled it.

Digitally restored by removing the tear, fixing the damage and color correcting.

Once the photo was fixed up, I printed a bunch of giclee reproductions on archival paper and the client gave them out as Christmas presents at a family reunion.

If you have any old photos you want restored and reproduced, let me know by contacting me online or calling 727-726-7411. You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter or subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed.

I often run into the problem of interior designers and home owners thinking that abstract art can’t work anywhere except a space age “stainless-steel-and-glass” condo. This is frustrating because I know from experience that traditional and classical decors can be the most stunning settings for abstract art. It is simply a matter of pairing the two properly.

Modern abstract art has a reputation for being off-putting and visually “harsh”—jagged shapes, hard lines, violent colors—and it’s not difficult to see why people would have trouble putting it on the wall in their cozy den. It is simpler to grab a safe (but dull) painting of a lighthouse or a flower or a snowy cottage. Sure, they’re a dime a dozen, but they’re not some piece of abstract artwork that leaves you going “I don’t get it…”

If you are able to forget preconceptions about what abstract art is “supposed” to be, you will see that there are artists like myself who have a unique style that can be softer and more natural that suits traditional settings. If the issue is simply that you don’t think bright colors work next to wooden furniture and a softer color palette, then you need to see pieces with natural, warm color palettes like Triptych in Brown or Autumn Musings. These pieces look beautiful in traditional homes, and in fact that is what they were created for (learn how I create custom abstract art.)

That isn’t to say you can’t do something exciting with abstract art in a traditional setting. I challenge you to get rid of your fixed ideas about what art can work in a space, and I have a story that might help. The Designer Showhouse of Sarasota is an annual event held to benefit the Boys & Girls Clubs where interior designers from the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) are given rooms in a large home to design and decorate. Several designers working on the 2009 showhouse collaborated with me to created art for their rooms.

What surprised (and impressed) me most was the plan an ASID designer came up with for using my art in a way I’d never thought of. They were charged with decorating the fireplace and their idea was to take one of my pieces and turn it into the “fire.” This involved drastically resizing “Four Tori” down to 8″ by 48″ and altering the color then printing it on archival paper and mounting it on a piece of plywood. Then this was inlaid into the wooden mantle place.

I have to admit that at first even I was skeptical but as I worked on it with the interior designer and finally saw it in the finished room I knew it was a perfect match. The life and energy in the artwork creates a focal point and helps bring the room together. Take a look:

Custom artwork in the mantle place (click to expand)

For more examples of abstract art being used to create “transitional” decors (transitioning between classic and contemporary) check out what I wrote up on Menaul News.

Call me at 727-726-7411 if you have any custom art ideas of your own. You can also become a fan on Facebook or follow me on Twitter.

When I tell people I make “custom art,” it isn’t always clear to them what that means. I have been doing it for so long that I forget that it is an unusual concept to a lot of people. So how can art be customized?

It helps to understand my creative process. My abstract art is created using digital 3D rendering techniques that let me sculpt “glass” and control their lighting and composition. Then I produce the art on canvas (or paper or almost any material I want) using the giclee process. I run my own giclee printer and handle all of the prints myself so I can make the piece at nearly any size—from a small 8″ by 10″ to large 40″ by 60″ (and even bigger if we start using special printing methods.) Most of my work is gallery wrapped, which means that I stretch the canvas around wooden stretcher bars instead of framing it. The stretcher bars (what the canvas is mounted on) are handmade by a local craftsman that can make custom sizes. I stretch the canvas on to the frame by hand and even go as far as to constructing my own shipping boxes if needed.

Here is a breakdown of how I can customize my art:

Custom Sizes — Since I control the creative, printing and framing processes, my art can be produced at almost any size. This doesn’t just mean I can make it bigger or smaller; I can also make the art taller or wider or even expand it across multiple canvases. For example, you might like one of my pieces but it wouldn’t work above the wide couch where you want to put it. I can turn it into a horizontal piece or triptych that fills the space. Read The Evolution of Atlantis to see how custom sizes worked for clients with different demands on their space.

Custom Colors — The properties of the glass and lighting in my art determines the colors in the piece. By changing these I can drastically transform the artwork to suit different decors and environments. The original art may be cool blue tones but if you have a rustic country house you need warmer colors, and I can do that. For the clearest illustration of this, look at original Musings and its variations Autumn Musings, Musings Natural, and Romance. Each was created as clients came to me and said “I like this piece but my place is these colors…”

Custom Composition — My artwork often contains geometric elements such as rings, spheres, cubes and pyramids. A client saw Aqua Rings and asked us to add spheres inside of the glass rings (as well as change the colors), and so I made Glass Rings and Spheres.

Custom Materials — Most of my art is on fine art canvas but I can also produce it on paper and watercolor paper or even unusual materials like vinyl, aluminum, ceramics, semi-transparent film that goes over windows, and more. This opens up creative possibilities such as mounting the art on wood, wrapping the piece around a column or cutting it to custom sizes and shapes and mounting in clear plastic objects (we’ve done all of that and more!)

Totally New Artwork — You can always come to me with an idea even if you don’t see anything in my art galleries that matches what you’re looking for. When I created art for the high rise condo Signature Place in St. Petersburg, FL, the interior designer asked for original artwork for the main lobby (in addition to the 60+ custom pieces that went in all 30 elevator lobbies). Knowing their size requirements and color palette, I created Dancer in the Breeze and Daisy.

That should give you a good idea of what it means to make custom art. Let me know if you have any questions or ideas. I love hear them! You can call me at 727-726-7411 or leave a comment below.