How to turn paintings into prints

I ask you this: You've got a painting, a pretty big painting, on chunky canvas painted with acrylic paint - how do you get this digital, and good enough quality, to make reproduction prints?

THAT right there is what I've been answering for pretty much the whole of September.

Making and selling prints has been something I've planned to do for a while now. I knew it was a smart idea judging by the fact people would be far more likely to spend a few 10's on a print as opposed to a few 100's on the real deal. I'm a big believer in owning original artwork and supporting us fledgling artists, partly for my own sake of course, but I do think owning an original painting is a rare and lovely thing, because how many things in your home are totally unique, one offs, one-of-a-kinds?

But pricing art is an art itself that I'm sure I'll never understand. I've seen coloured splodgy squares with a price tag of thousands, and stunningly detailed watercolours with change for a fifty. There's not a lot of consistency and sense as far as I can see. You just need to come to a number that suits you, recognises the materials, times, effort that was involved, and all in all is realistic to what you're willing to let a painting part ways with you for. There's not such problem with prints. Although not unique, it is a great way of letting a greater audience share in the image you've created. It's spreads your message that bit further, it's making your work accessible to everyone.

So print making always made sense, I just hadn't gotten around to it yet.

However this latest project I'm involved with (Operation Concrete) required me to go get all digital at last so to be included in an art book that will be published. It was a nice big shove into the world of print making.

You've basically got 2 options:

1. Scan your work, thus achieving the most detailed digital version of your painting, free from all light problems and colour issues. From this scan your work could be blown up to billboard size - stopping traffic the world over.

2. Photograph your work using a kick-ass top notch camera. However with this you encounter having to do some post-processing, fiddling with levels and colours to balance out the natural or artificial light.

So obviously it's a no-brainer and any artist in their right mind should scan their work immediately. Yes, this is great, given that your art is no bigger than A3. I found it near impossible to find a flat-bed scanner bigger than A3. Apparently they are rather rare, and instead large scale scanning is done on a machine where work can be fed through, hence the subject you're scanning needs to be flexible. This is mainly used for maps, blueprints, that kind of archiving.

So plan 1 was to scan my work in pieces of A3, then Photoshop it together. This might work for some styles of painting, but after hours of nudging layers, rotating in painfully small increments I threw in the towel and when back to the drawing-board - or in this case, Google.

It was surprisingly difficult to find a clear answer from all the pages on digitising artwork I found online. It seems everyone is finding their own way to combat the problem. So I thought sod it, bleedin well ask someone how they did it. I stuck 'Basingstoke Artist Prints' into google and Louise Height was top of the list. A quick phone call later and Louise kindly put me in touch with the photographer who took photos of her work for her website. The photographer in question was Chris Hawkins who speedily answered my e-mail asking for more info. Chris was familiar with photographing art and was able to clear up this whole digitising art business once and for all.

The answer to digitising art work is simply this:

• If your work is large (over A3) but flexible the best way to capture a high quality digital version is to scan it using a machine where the image can be fed through - as large flat-bed scanners are rare and expensive.



• If your work is A3 but cannot bend you could use a flat-bed scanner as A3 is a pretty standard size in most print companies/offices. You could also make a couple of scans and piece together in Photoshop - this is rather fiddly but can be done.



• If your work is both larger than A3 AND cannot bend - painted onto canvas for example - then you need to find an experienced photographer who knows their stuff (like Chris) and get it photographed in one of two ways.



• Digital Photographing
  This will allow you to print up to A3 but not really any larger. For my purposes this was ideal. About an hours shoot will cost you around £60 with an optional £20 processing charge if you need help with working with RAW files.



• Film Photographing
  Take pictures of your art using film and you can blow it up to billboard size if you wanted to. But how is developed film digital? - I hear you cry. Well develop your pictures at A1 for example and then feed that through a scanner and voila! You've got a high resolution larger than life size digital file. You'd have to get a quote from your photographer for the cost of this one.
  
  Photograph by Chris Hawkins. (One of my faves).
  
  

I did the former and spent about an hour with Chris, who is a rather interesting fellow who has photographed all over the world. He told me photography is a reason to stop the rushing through life and just take in the view - great reason that. I've ended up with some great shots for the art book and future print, but it was very strange to race through my collection one-on-one like that with someone I didn't know. I felt like I should introduce the paintings by name and justify them. But then I'm a weird artist type, often forgetting how personal my work is to me, and how uncomfortable it can sometimes be to have someone comment on them.

However Chris was professional and complimentary of my work and even dashed off a blog about it all before I'd even driven myself home! Puts me to shame as this one has taken me ages.

But the subject of turning paintings into prints has been a biggie and needed a decent explanation. Unfortunately - or fortunately I guess - life has been massively busy recently. I've been mad at work, still learning salsa like a trooper and doing the important stuff like planning the outfit for the Operation Concrete launch night.

Lastly I urge you to check out the latest Op Con news - official info coming very soon.