A trend in the world of commercial art and surface design—and, by extension, in the world of art licensing—is an affinity for imagery that is hand-created. Even when digitized for production, the hand-made qualities, such as brush strokes, show through and give the work a singular look.
A couple of the artists and art studios known for their hand-painted images include:
- Dena Designs, which recently signed The Joester Loria Group as agent for its Happi by Dena and Haute Girls brands and has 30 licensees for textiles, home furnishings, gifts, social expressions, stationery, and crafts.
- Holly Ross, who is represented by Synchronicity Licensing and whose licensees have included Trader Joe’s and Cape Shore, while her own Fish House Designs creates greeting cards, calendars, and prints.
- Collier Campbell, a British name that came on the scene in the 1960s and oversees bedding, home, and stationery collections in U.K. department stores and boutiques and on QVC, as well as fabrics with Fabricut and a new bedding collection in the U.S.
There is a broader movement in licensing, and society in general, toward products that take consumers away from the digital world for a moment. Examples range from toys such as Disney and Hasbro’s Playmation, which has a downloadable component but encourages offline play, to sophisticated coloring books, which offer adults a brief respite from the computer screen, to the DIY and Maker trends (from crafts to engineering), which are all about creativity in physical form.
Consumers’ desire for hand-painted artwork can be seen as part of this trend.
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