Prints | MagentaDot Brands

1928 Essex Super Six right hand side front three-quarter view

From Photo to Art: The 1928 Essex Super-Six Experience

December 3, 2024 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

Welcome to a journey where the past meets the future, where the classic lines of a 1928 Essex Super Six four-door car, whose chief selling point was “affordable luxury,” intermingle with the art of modern graphic design. I recently had the incredible opportunity to photograph this rare American vintage beauty in the car park of the historic Richmond Workingmen’s Club in Christchurch. Note that the gallery of images from the photoshoot is at the foot of the page.

Capturing the Essence:

A classic 1928 Essex Super Six four-door car photographed head-on — The 1928 Essex Super Six was designed to be an affordable luxury car, making it accessible to a wider range of car owners. It was equipped with a powerful 153.1 cubic inch inline-six engine that delivered 55 horsepower, providing ample power for its time.

Photo of a young man with a cup of coffee engaged in art print production with a red-billed gull, New Brighton pier sunrise composite illustration on the computer monitor of his iMac alonside a matching large format framed poster of the same print sitting on his desk. The headline is on the dark navy blue background of the wall and reads: “Let's celebrate our passion for New Zealand… on your wall. Surface Active wildlife art prints. Canvas & specialty papers available.”

Surface Active Wildlife Art Gallery Prints

December 10, 2021 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

Surface Active Wildlife Art Gallery Prints

Surface Active design pARTners Chrissie Terpstra and Shaun Waugh welcome orders to reproduce fine art prints from our collection of wildlife artworks, linked here. We provide archival/fine art quality reproduction prints of our works—perfect for your walls or as a gift.

Our offering of limited edition wildlife art prints celebrating New Zealand nature is founded on two strong foundations:

Wildlife Photo portrait of a Cheetah at Orana Wildlife Park

Where the wild things are

December 14, 2018 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

Orana Wildlife Park is a great place for wildlife photography

ORANA WILDLIFE PARK, MCLEANS ISLAND, CHRISTCHURCH

WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY IS THE GENRE of photography concerned with the documenting of wildlife in their natural habitat, Orana Wildlife Park in Christchurch, is New Zealand’s only open range zoo. Visiting Orana Park therefore offers a unique opportunity for the self-assignment of exercising your photography skills because in the wild animals are difficult to approach, predicting their actions is hit and miss, whereas the animals at Orana Park are not perturbed when viewed from quite close up and because there are mostly no bars or cages capturing great images of them in interesting situations just takes a little patience to be in the right place at the right time.
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‘Jewel Gecko - New Zealand’ eight colour T-shirt print on dark green fabric.

Jewelled Gecko: lifelike graphics make a vivid impression

July 6, 2018 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

Surface Active | Making waves in a sea of sameness.

Hyper-real graphics like the Jewel Gecko make a vivid impression. Why? Because people relate to them! Dramatic lifelike renderings of wildlife produce a prompt and typically positive response in a person’s mind. People relate to real things and enjoy them most. It is the route to why people relate to many of our eye-catching and impactful “SurfaceActive” wildlife-art-to-wear designs.

How did we do it? The technique of colour separating this design by hand involved breaking it down into eight separate designs, from which the screens are made. The separations are printed over each other, in layers to create the original hand screenprinted design. This crafty route is the only way to achieve the unparalleled vivid impression of the design.

It helps that beauty is permanent

Fashions come and go, then come around again, but the fundamentals stay. The inspiration for the designs came from getting to know superlative alpine/wildlife photographer Colin Monteith, and renowned wildlife photographer Rod Morris. We visited their image libraries to cherrypick the most beautiful jewels in their amazing archives that we could see had the potential to be developed into hand-separated wildlife art screen gems.
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‘Tuatara - Sphenodon Punctatus’ portrait T-shirt front

Fuss, fuss, fuss: How this Tuatara drawing evolves

July 3, 2018 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

This terrific Tuatara illustrative design work evolves by focussing on the details, this is quite common

Surface Active made in Aotearoa, T-shirts main neck label.

Surface Active Wildlife art – making waves in a sea of sameness.

To make digital art of New Zealand’s Tuatara, that has the look and feel of a natural line drawing, the editing, fussing process can take hours and while it isn’t easy it is a great deal of fun. I take pleasure in design and I enjoy using the computer to draw with the stylus, inking over the scan just as easily as I would with traditional pen and ink. The production of design work is an incredible drill when you are doing your utmost to make it terrific. I do my utmost to make sure that every design project I work on is mega.
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Lifelike gecko wildlife art print

October 20, 2014 / magentadotbrands.com / No Comments

Jewelled Gecko limited edition large format art print

Surface Active | Making waves in a sea of sameness

Surface Active is an auto-printmaking design pARTnership established in 1986 by Shaun Waugh (boss) Chrissie Terpstra (bossier). Between 1986–2002 we were committed to producing original & indigenous designs of the highest design and screenprinting standards.

The technique of colour separating this design by hand involved breaking it down into eight separate designs, from which the screens are made. The separations are printed over each other, in layers to create the original hand screenprinted design. This crafty route is the only way to achieve the unparalleled vivid impression of the design.
Keep on reading!