Has anyone ever made prints from paintings before? I have a lot of acrylic paintings I’ve made, and want to start selling them, but I’ve also had people who have expressed interest in prints of the paintings. I was wondering if anyone had recommendations on doing this. You can see some of my paintings on my website, or more of them on my flickr page.
I’m looking for good places to get prints made that aren’t too expensive. But also if you know of things quality wise that I should get done or avoid, I also want to know that.
I know there are websites that do prints on demand, has anyone used any of those? Are the pictures I’ve taken high quality enough for good prints? I used to have lower quality pictures up on my flickr page, and someone recommended I get a better camera and take better pictures. So I bought a fancier camera and took better quality pictures, and they are definitely better for displaying the paintings online, but I’m not sure if they are good enough for ordering good prints from print on demand websites.
It’d be most helpful if someone has had prints done from their paintings and has recommendations from that, but also if you have bought prints and you know things that look better or work better I’ll listen to that as well.
Or if anyone knows of websites where I can find more information, that would help. Someone had told me previously about the Wet Canvas forums, so I tried looking there for information, but it keeps timing out on me.
Back about 10 years ago when I was applying to grad school for for my MFA in painting, I had to send applications out with a full size color copy of a painting. There were architectural firms that had huge color scanners and printers. I ended up getting a full size photo copy of a 24 by 36 inch painting, which looked awesome. I think it cost about $20.
Giclee prints seem to be the great thing now that everybody is using.
So maybe a full size scan and then giclee prints onto canvas paper from files?
If you can afford them, Rayko in San Francisco is obsessive about quality. They’ll even mail you a 4x6 test print so you can approve the color balance, black point, etc. White-glove service all the way, but at white-glove prices.
I can advise not even trying Uprinting. They don’t offer proofing and they don’t even seem to look at what comes off the printer before they roll it up and stuff it into a mailing tube. I had them do a purely grayscale image, and what they sent to me was green and purple.
As for the images on your site - you need them to be at least 150 dpi, and more is better. If your camera can take 12 MP images, you’ll max out at about 16x20 inches for a final output size at 150 dpi.
Thanks for the help y’all! To expand what I’m looking for, I think for right now for prints I’m looking more for printing on paper. I visited a store/gallery here in Houston, and they said they’d be willing to maybe do an exhibition of my work, but they want to sell prints along with the original canvases. And if I’m remembering correctly, the art that was being shown there at the time I was looking around was printing on paper, not canvas. But I appreciate all information, since I might do more stuff after I’m selling more and I’m a big fancy artist.
Thank you for the information. I’ll look into scanning. There’s a Kinko’s somewhat near my apartment. I’ll go by there soon with one of the works and see what the price/quality of printing something there is.
Thanks!
Thanks! I will post an update when I got the prints thing worked out and ready for sale.
At this point I’m not obsessive about quality, but thank you for the recommendation; I have Rayko bookmarked for future possible use. Since I haven’t sold much at this point, and the places I’m looking to sell my stuff aren’t the most fancy-pants places, I’m just looking for decent quality prints that aren’t too terribly expensive. I also have Uprinting saved as one definitely not to use.
I’m not sure if my camera can do 12 MP images; I’ll try to find the manual and look into that.
Giclee is a French term intended to obscure the fact that the image is produced with an ink jet printer. Personally I find it annoying. A friend of mine runs an art printing service company, and they are the go-to people for high quality work in Kansas City. They use an Epson Stylus Pro 10000 6 color 44" wide printer.
Here’s what makes their work better than you’ll be able to produce on your ink jet printer:
They produce a calibration for every type of paper and canvas they stock. This means they print color chip charts on each type, then measure the color of each chip with a colorimeter. All that information goes into a “profile” for that printer/paper combination.
They profile their monitors, camera, scanner and the cameras of the photographers they usually work with. They even control the lighting in the space to a particular color temperature.
The end result is that they can take a painting, photograph it, and print it and hold the print next to the original and (with most printing media) it will match.
They probably won’t do as careful a job as my friend, but they print a LOT, and they generally have an excellent reputation. For instance, one of my clients is the photographer for an NFL team, and he uses CostCo for prints. And they have profiles available for downloading, which is the major thing in getting decent results, or at least being able to have some idea how the results are going to turn out.
With these prices, it would be worth it to get a CostCo membership.
Thanks for the explanation. I’d seen Giclee referred to various places, but wasn’t quite sure what it was.
Man, you’ve got it right about Kinko’s. I checked on their website earlier today and was surprised how expensive they were. Thanks for the tip about CostCo; I don’t have a membership there but it might be worth it for the printing, and I never would have thought about checking them out.
From what I understand, it’s French for “spray” or “spurt” (and also slang for “ejaculate”).
It used to be different when dye sublimation printing was all the rage, and an Iris printer was substantially better than anything anyone else could get for home use. But large format ink jet printers now exceed the color quality of the old Iris printers.
Kinko’s is selling to businesses, to people spending company money.