An Artists’ Guide to Fine Art Reproduction
copyright © 2012 Jon A. Pastor
You’ve just finished your latest piece, and you’d like good reproductions of it. Not just good, excellent: ideally, you’d like to hold the reproduction next to the original and not be able to tell the difference.
I’ve got some bad news, and some good news. The bad news is that perfection is almost impossible. The good news is that getting excellent reproductions is possible, and the purpose of this article is to help you get just that.
The full explanation for the bad news requires a lot of talk about color theory, pigments, the human visual system, and other technical details, but to keep this article simple, I’ll try to be brief and to the point.
Since you’ve worked with inks, paints, and other color media, and on different kinds of paper, you already know most of the explanation. Trying to match colors – finding an ink that matches the colors on an invitation, or trying to mix a particular color again because you ran out – is a challenge. And different media – ink, watercolor, gouache, even different brands of the same medium – behave differently on different papers.
What you’re trying to do when you print a fine art reproduction is match the colors and textures of the original medium and paper with the totally different pigments and papers used in Giclée printing. You’re probably wondering about the difference between an inkjet print and a Giclée print. There isn’t any: Giclée prints are inkjet prints.
From this point on, I’m going to have to use the word “printer” to refer to both the machine that does the printing and the person who uses that machine. I’ll use a capital ‘P’ (Printer) for the person, and a lower-case ‘p’ (printer) for the machine.
A digital image must be captured, either with a scanner or a digital camera, and here’s where most fine art printing runs into trouble. It doesn’t matter how good the Printer (or the printer) is if the original artwork isn’t captured well enough. By “well enough” I mean that the digital image must record all of the detail in the original, and an accurate record of the full range of tone and color.
This is not a matter of just pointing and shooting, or clicking the “scan” button. The why of this is worthy of another long article, but the simple version is that image capture for fine are reproduction bears as much resemblance to ordinary photography as your work does to that of someone who just picked up a You Can Be An Artist Kit.
Once there is a good capture, all that needs to be done is to push the “print” button, right? Not if you want the best possible results. It’s important for your Printer to discuss with you what you’re looking for in the final print, and to tell you where there may be problems. For example, metallic “colors” are almost impossible to render accurately, even using 12 inks, and the only way to get realistic gold (for example) is to apply it to the finished print.
A good Printer will also be able to advise you on choice of paper; there’s a wide variety of paper types available for Giclée printing, some of which are similar to old standards like Rives BFK. There are some differences, however, particularly in how well the paper takes ink and paint from various implements, which is important if you plan to hand-embellish prints.
Finally, a good Printer will sit down with you to evaluate a proof – a test print – preferably in comparison with the original, and discuss what can (and can’t) be improved.