Need advise on Fine Art Printing

CarolSueRi

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Mar 30, 1998, 3:00:00 AM3/30/98

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I am a fine artist and need some advise on making prints of my work. I do
detailed graphite renderings on paper ... no color ... just shades of grey ...
and also my work is very small ... nothing over 8x10. I'd like to reproduce
them on a good quality paper and get all those details that are so
important to
me printed too. Price is an issue also.

I know so little about printing that I don't even know what questions to ask.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated and I figured a group of
professional printers would be the people to ask.

Thank you,
Carol Rosinski
carol...@aol.com

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JosephALVISAlexander Snow

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Mar 31, 1998, 3:00:00 AM3/31/98

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do you want repro to look like "prints" in an art book,
or to mimic the feel and look of a paper?

that will affect your paper choice...
a smoother paper (the fine art print book look) will look more like a
photographic repro.
on print stock more like "Arches cold press" or "cansons" repro will look
more like an actual drawing BUT may not keep true rendering of the very
finest details...

either way it's an offset litho process you want...
altho you could go silkscreen for a fine art look...very artsy...

if you have a lot of fairly solid black areas in the art,
then you should shop for a printer with a real press as opposed to a
duplicator press...

if you are doing 1000 or more (500 or more?) of each of a number of
originals which would spread out to cover a larger size press sheet, then
go with a larger size press...
ie 19x25, 23x 35, 25x38, 26x40 sheet sizes...

--
Cheap-O Art Werks
"Leaving Hi-Quality werk
to those that can afford to deal with it"
http://www.mindspring.com/~ialvis

Richard Kirk

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Apr 3, 1998, 3:00:00 AM4/3/98

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carol...@aol.com (CarolSueRi) writes:

>I am a fine artist and need some advise on making prints of my work. I do
>detailed graphite renderings on paper ... no color ... just shades of grey
...
>and also my work is very small ... nothing over 8x10. I'd like to reproduce
>them on a good quality paper and get all those details that are so
>important to me printed too. Price is an issue also.

My grandfather used to have a set of Spy cartoons hung in his office at work
back in the 1920s. I had always assumed since I was a child they were
originals. I went and looked at the things - and they had a 200dpi screen
pattern (that's the little dot pattern when you look at printing closely,
okay so you knew that, sorry).

You will probably want an offset print with a 200dpi or higher screen pattern.
The finer the screen pattern, the harder it is to see. However screen
patterns get greylevels by making the dots bigger and smaller, and it is
hard to get ink into dots bneath a certain size, so your fine screens won't
be able to hold light greys. Now with charcoal and graphite drawings, this
won't be much of a problem. In fact some artists prefer the 'cleaner' look
to the copies. If your printer works with film separations, you can have a
look at the film (the same pattern on clear film) before they make the plate.
Because you have a black-and-white image it should look almost the same.

If you really want to be fancy, I believe there are inks that reproduce the
sheen of graphite. But your printer won't like having to scrub his press out
after using them.

Another option is getting a good photocopy. Photocopier toner is little
granules of black stuff stuck to the printer, so it will even look like
artwork at the microscopic level. A nice photocopier will have controls for
matching photographs, editing the tone curves and things like that. You will
probably have to learn how to drive the photocopier to get the results you
want, but that's all part and parcel of the artistic process.

By the way, I have managed to get good matches to colour watercours on a
colour photocopier. The only real giveaway is that photocopier paper is
smooth and watercolour paper is rough. Annoyingly enough, people often
preferr the straight photocopy with its brighter, cleaner colours to the
one I lovengly colour matched. Phooey.

Cheers
--
Richard Kirk 01483-448869 (phone) 01483-448845 (fax)
Canon Research Europe Ltd, r...@cre.canon.co.uk
1 Occam Court, Occam Road, Guildford, Surrey GU2 5YJ, UK.