Anatomy and Art

Recently I went through the process of getting prints made of a painting.  Real ones.  Good ones.  Expensive ones.  I have to say that the process has been a little bit terrifying.  For starters, let’s face it… I’m not exactly the greatest business mind out there.  But I gave this some thought as to what was reasonable to charge, how many I would make, how many I thought I could sell, and did a little research into what it would cost me.  Unfortunately, the first estimate of what it would cost me reflected less than half of the ultimate total costs I wound up spending.

At first it was a matter of having having gotten my estimates based on the image size without doing the math on what the added border for framing would be.  I’d expected there to be added cost for that, but I had underestimated how much.  Secondly I had to rescan the image.  Letting the printers scan your painting is not an inexpensive endeavor.  But in this case, I believe it was both necessary and worth it.  Between those first two points though, I wound up deciding to make fewer prints than I had originally intended.  It’s good that I didn’t make as many though, because the next blow came when I went to pick up the prints and found that their scan had picked up so much detail, that it had practically x-rayed my painting.  I didn’t catch it immediately.  At first glance, all I saw was that they had gotten the red right (no small detail, that), and that the new scan had not shown the same problem as the scan I had done previously.  I left happy.  But then as I was packaging up my first print for shipping, I saw that there were mistakes, familiar mistakes.  I kept wanting to dab a bit of paint here or there to fix them, and then I realized that I was having the exact same thought process I’d had while finishing the painting in the first place.  I was seeing mistakes brought back that I had already fixed, and I couldn’t send that to paying customers.  So I called the printers back.  I went through Gamma to do all of this.  Their tech who had done the scan for me had already left for the day, so I had to make plans to go back later that week after my finals (and yeah, taking on this process at the end of my semester, maybe not the greatest plan of action.)

I had purchased a digital copy of the scan as well, so I was able to review that as well.  I was surprised when I didn’t see the same detail from the under layer there.  But just now, just today, when I opened the image in Photoshop I did.  It’s the strangest thing, the detail is in there, but I wasn’t seeing it in the raw file.  It’s actually kind of a relief to see it now.  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how I was getting added detail from the printing process.  Anyway, despite picking up those covered brush strokes, it really is a beautiful scan.  Here is smaller version of what they got…

So I was able to go back in and discuss things with them.  It’s been a good thing, having the painting handy for all of this, not just for rescanning purposes, but also as something to bring in while talking about the desired outcome of the prints.  I’m fortunate that the buyer wanted me to hold on to it for the time being, and that I’ve been able to do all of this despite the sale.

They saw the problem, and we decided to have the prints redone with different settings.  Unfortunately, this brought my costs up considerably.  Since I hadn’t paid for giclee printing (which comes with the opportunity to approve proofs) my options were limited in terms of how to handle this.  They did make an effort to work with me though, and while I lament loosing so much of my profit margin, I am very happy with the way the 2nd set of prints came out, and the product I can now deliver to my clients.

In the end, I only wound up making six of them.  I’d initially thought about leaving the window open to further printing down the line, or making 12 all at once and just selling them off over time.  Especially considering the added costs along the way, I am happy that I only opted to create the six of them.  At present three of them have been paid for and shipped off to buyers.  One is spoken for, to be paid for and picked up in January.  And I may have a fifth buyer in the works.  All in all, this has been quite the learning experience, and something that I hope to do again and again with other works, though hopefully with less nervousness and better planning along the way.  It’s tricky though.  You don’t know if something is right or not until you see it.  You can’t know.  But I do know a little more about what to look for, and what to ask for now.  So here’s hoping that next time I can be a little less neurotic artist about things, and a little more savvy seller of my art.