Dental Art

Those of you who follow my blog realize that I am inspired by nature and that is the theme of most of my photographic art. I am always up for a challenge however, so when the founder of Cadmus Dental asked if I could create some dental art, I told him I would think on it. Unfortunately, try as I might, I was stumped. I finally asked to see some examples of pieces of dental art that he liked. It gave me a better understanding, however now I had the problem of trying to figure out how to come up with something that put my own spin on new or different imagery.

After some thought, I decided to do a proof of concept piece using the one dental tool I could easily put my hands on and a couple of my jewelry tools as stand ins for dental tools. I arranged a still life using the tools and took some digital photos of them. I then worked with the photos to see what type of photographic art they wanted to be. The first image in this post is one of the images I came up with from that session. I met with Scott to find out his likes and dislikes with regards to the concept images. He liked several of the treatments so we discussed what he had on hand that might serve as input for some proper dental art. I also found out about an event that Cadmus Dental was going to be holding soon that might be a good place to show others in the business any new pieces I could come up with by then.

I set another appointment a couple of days later when the light would be good to do a photo shoot of some demonstration pieces and samples. We also went to one of his facilities to shoot some images of a piece of equipment in use. Those last photos were interesting but not conducive to quickly working up some new artwork. In fact I now have a better idea of how to try to get better input images and will try taking more photos later. Several of the demo and sample piece images turned out to be good starting points for dental photographic art. I sent some jpegs over for Scott to review and provide feedback about them. I took that feedback and came up with five finished pieces that I framed for the Cadmus Dental event. The second photo in this post is those pieces displayed at the event. (Click to enlarge.)

Where do we go from here with the dental art? Scott said he received good feedback from attendees at his event. I need to get a page together with images and pricing. Scott wants to be able to point people from his company's website to the dental art that is available for sale. In the meantime, the five framed images I brought to the event are hanging outside and inside of Cadmus Dental's main office at CenterSpace in Downtown Arlington if you want to see them in person. These pieces will soon have tags with prices and be for sale on the 817ArtsAlliance Art for Sale - CenterSpace page. In addition to what I am creating, I have contacted two other artists and thrown ideas to them that should be in their wheelhouse of creative talent. I am looking forward to what they are able to come up with. Hopefully I will be able to expand the art offerings through their creations too.