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Self-Imposed Charity Art Challenge

Early this year I was visiting a charity's website to make a donation and saw they had a shop where you could buy (among other things) A5 digital art prints by various artists, with all the profits going to the charity. I liked one of the images and had a sticking-out bit of wall in my living/dining room that I thought would be a good spot for some artwork, but I wanted more than just a single A5 print on its own and decided that a set of three framed pictures, arranged vertically, would look good.

I set myself the challenge of finding two more pictures that met the following criteria:

• A5 sized (exactly, not just close)
• Relatively cheap (the first one I found was £10, so ideally somewhere between £5 and £20, including postage)
• 100% of profits go to charity (with the specific charities being mentioned by name in the product description)
• Looks good (obviously!)

This turned out to be much more difficult than expected and I probably spent the best part of a day scouring the Internet for suitable options! There were a few points where I questioned whether this was a sensible use of my time and even whether it was necessarily the right thing to do to limit my choices to those donating 100% of profits (and so earning the artists nothing for their time), but on the whole I found it surprisingly fun to work within these (essentially arbitrary) limitations and I eventually ended up finding two more pieces that I liked and that met all my requirements.

The original plan of displaying all three together on the wall completely fell apart when the first picture (a botanical cyanotype image) arrived and I liked it so much that I went back to the store and bought a whole set of them! I now display the cyanotypes together on a wall by my PC and have the two art prints in standing frames on a shelf.

I'd love to hear if anyone else has done anything similar to this, or is inspired to do so. Given the time of year, it could be an interesting way to shop for gifts: pick something you think a person would like, try to distil it down to a few key points and then challenge yourself to find two more items in the same vein.

What I bought

1

=> Picture 1

This was the first one I found. It's by an artist called Soofiya and the money went to a charity called akt, who support young LGBT+ people in the UK who are homeless or living in hostile environments.

=> https://www.soofiya.com/
=> https://www.akt.org.uk/

2

=> Picture 2

A cyantotype image of a gingko leaf, created in the artist's garden. The money is split between Stop Hate UK (fighting all forms of hate crime in the UK) and the Zoological Society of London (international animal conservation).

=> The artist's Etsy store
=> https://www.stophateuk.org
=> https://www.zsl.org
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanotype
=> The full set of cyanotypes I ended up buying (all supporting the same charities)

3

=> Picture 3

A watercolour print sold by a one-person stationary company in support of Black Minds Matter, a charity working to provide mental health services to Black people in the UK.

=> https://www.blackmindsmatteruk.com/
=> You can buy it here (it's the only one of the three that is still available to purchase at time of writing)