I got a new widebody laptop at work recently. I’m looking for a new desktop image. A nice piece of artwork. Nothing that could in anyway be considered offensive (not even tasteful nudity). I’m hoping to have room on the side of the image to place my icons so as not to disrupt the image. You folks know way more about art than I do. You could save me so much work and searching. Please post suggestions and or the link. I don’t want an image to be blurred because of a lack of resolution. Thanks.
Search Google images for “surreal”.
I like basic black.
I got a lot of my wallpapers here
http://visualparadox.com/gallery.htm
And by perusing this guy’s free gallery
(which rotates frequently and so bears
watching):
http://digitalblasphemy.com/freegallery.shtml
They both have some incredible computer
generated scenes.
Also, doing a Google image search for
widescreen wallpaper is surprisingly
productive, and most results are safe
for work.
Because my laptop is a work laptop, the desktop image needs to be unprovocative.
I’ve found that wooded landscapes work best. My new laptop has one of those wide screens, that are not the previous standard of aspect. Wooded landscapes can undergo a degree of distortion without making the image irritating. And wooded landscapes (or “pictures of trees”) are generally dark enough to pick out an icon and its legend.
I did try a field of wild flowers. Walden posted one a while back, that worked very well as a desktop. The one I took myself was too light for the icons, and didn’t bear darkening.
My current desktop is of a copse at the Bison Farm in Wiltshire, UK. It’s very relaxing.
Hey, Mute, why don’t you use a stretched image from your avatar?
I don’t need the image to fill the whole screen. I would like to have no picture on the sides where I can place my icons and not disrupt the picture.
The surreal suggestion was the best so far. And I might choose one of those. I was really looking for a serious piece of artwork. I didn’t know my avatar could be enlarged but I bet the resolution would diminish. Would the image still be animated?
I haven’t been able to get a normal animated .gif to stay animated as a background image.
Surrealism is also a fine search term. Finding high resolution images can be a real pain though and I usually search for sizes like 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 960, etc. depending on what I need.
For a while I had René Magritte’s The Lovers as my background. Some of Vladimir Kush’s work also made it to my desktop. Mark Kostabi has some fun stuff, but is a bit harder to find. I like John Waterhouse’s work because of the stories that go with his paintings (unfortunately for a work place much of his work has exposed nipples).
I better stop before people start to wonder about my taste in art.
There is also National Geographic
Ding. Ding. Ding. And we have a winner. Vladimir Kush. I’ll start with this one. That man is messed up.
You do know that your coworkers will think you are weird if you use any of his work as a background.
I am an enabler, aren’t I?
Have you thought of Norman Rockwell or other trite?
I like canoe pictures, here’s a great shot of a canoe. BTW wrong species of hornet for that Vladimir Kush painting, that would drive me bonkers.
Can’t resist the opportunity to shamelessly advertise my artwork.
oh! no! we just don’t do shameless here!
Well, wasn’t my laptop the center of attention today. I didn’t even say anything but it caught people’s attention. “Where do you find these things?” was all I heard all day. I wish I would have read Vladimir’s bio on wiki. I actually chose this picture because of the canoe deep in the picture.
I toured your whole website. I liked this one the best. You do blue & green really well. They have a real depth.
Thanks for looking! I don’t ever manage to sell a lot of my artwork, but I’m happy as long as it gets looked at now and then. 