Wallpaper Drop - The Course of Empire
I’ve always enjoyed paintings in some form or another, but it wasn’t until I met my wife that I was introduced to world of art history. Since then it’s been a fascinating subject, and while I’m a complete noob, I love finding paintings that strike a cord with me and learning as much as I can from them. One of those series is The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole.
I highly recommend checking out that link and learning more about them, but in short, its a series of 5 paintings that represent the rise and fall of a civilization. Again, that is a crude and short summary so please go learn more about them for yourself. I’ve enjoyed these so much lately that I had the idea to use them as wallpapers. It just so happens that I use 5 MacOS spaces, so this setup works out great.
To make these I downloaded the raw scans of each painting, added them to figma, resize them to 4K resolution, then added a slight matte overlay to help reduce the saturation and brightness. I’m a huge fan of how they turned out!
For those interested I’ve provided a zip file you can download with the link below, but you will enjoy them more if you learn the messages they carry!