©2006 Michael J. Silva

When it comes to art, beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. Before you spend a lot of money having a piece of artwork reproduced, get it in front of as many people as possible, so you get a feeling for how much people like it. It's always better to test a few pieces on the public to find out which ones will be popular. before you spend a lot of time and money on a piece that will not sell as easily as another one. I once knew an artist that was so sure the one piece she loved the most was going to sell hundreds of copies, that she spent $8,000 dollars on prints, only to find that two years later all but three prints were still sitting in the bottom of her closet.

If you can put your art on the web for the largest audience, there are ways to track what pieces people stop and look at the most. This is how we let the artists at darkartgallery.com know what is popular on their gallery pages Art created with pen, pencil, ink, paint, and mixed media can be photographed with a camera that uses film. You can then scan the photos to make digital files for prints. The best thing to do is to hire a professional photographer who is experienced in photographing art. If the artwork is small enough, it can be scanned directly with a high-end drum or flatbed scanner to produce a high quality color corrected file that your digital printer will like.

A good digital camera with the right lighting can sometimes give you a good file, but it may need extra work on the part of your printer to get the color right. Programs commonly used for printing fine art include: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe PhotoShop, Paint Shop Pro, Adobe PageMaker, Adobe InDesign, CorelDraw, and FreeHand, among others, on both Mac and Windows platforms. Some of the most common graphics file formats are EPS, TIFF, BMP, GIF, and JPEG. Most graphics programs will let you "export as" or "save as" in one or more of these file types. All files should be provided to your printer at output size and enclosed with either crop marks or a rectangle that is proportional to your final size. This can be a no-stroke, no-fill rectangle, or it may be part of the design.

Since there are so many different manufacturers of fonts with the same or similar names, it is best to convert fonts to outlines (paths) to avoid font problems. Colors on your computer monitor rarely match printed color. Choose colors only from a printed reference such as Pantone's Process Color Imaging Guides and match the CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) values rather than screen colors, which are RGB (red, green, blue). Most non-graphics applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. use only RGB colors, therefore printed colors will not match the screen colors. When it comes to printing, there are many kinds of printing machines. Some have 4 inks: C, M, Y, K (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). They are 4-color machines. Some have 6 inks: C, M, Y, K, Lc, Mc (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, light cyan, and light magenta).

These are still 4 color machines because light cyan and light magenta are different values, but not truly different colors. 6 color machines can swap out the light cyan and light magenta for orange and green inks so they become machines capable of printing Hexachrome® color, which gives you a wider color gamut and simulates over 90% of PANTONE® Matching System Colors. Some 6 color machines use 8 inks: C, M, Y, K, Lc, Lm, Or, Gr (cyan, magenta, yellow, light cyan, light magenta, orange and green) inks, which can all be used at the same time. Or they can use 2 sets of CMYK inks at the same time to increase their printing speed. There are machines that use 12 inks, but this is mainly for speed. In addition, there are software rips (raster image processors, which convert image language into printer language) that allow you to work with different color channels such as replacing Lc, Lm, and/or Or, Gr, with different levels of black inks for great black and white work.

Be aware that if your favorite color is red, it is one of the more difficult to print in the exact shade. In regard to media, there are many great papers and canvases to print on these days. Here are a few of my favorites: photo papers by Ilford, especially their Insta-Dry Photo Satin, 7 and 9 mil thicknesses under the name of OmniJet; and Artisan brand Insta-Dry Satin 9 mil thickness. These are very good papers, especially the Ilford, because they do not show fingerprints when handled, which makes for good posters. Sihl makes good photo papers as well. For textured papers, I like Somerset Velvet and Concord Rag watercolor paper for watercolor images and to enhance textured backgrounds. I also like Fredrix artist canvas for great color.