Fine Art Giclee Cards

New, hand printed Fine Art Giclee Cards

There are plenty of printers out there printing cards, there are many Giclee printers printing cards, but they are usually not Giclee cards.

So what is the difference and how does it affect me, the artist? If you are just handing out cards as a promotion or you want something cheap and cheerful there are some very good deals from high street printers and the internet. These are usually printed on a digital press or by the litho method. By the very nature of the process, these cards cannot even come close to the quality of Giclee Cards, which will be colour matched to your original and printed on the same high quality archival museum quality paper that all my Giclee prints use.

So, what is the problem? There is obviously only one way to go, original Giclee cards. Well, yes, if you want buyers of your printed art to have the most accurate representation of your work, but this comes at a price, literally. It is quite common to see prices under a  £1 each from digital/litho printers and the price gets lower the more you order.

How does this compare to a cost of a Giclee card? Quite simple really, they are £2.95 each and to make it even simpler, the price stays the same however many you order. This is because a Giclee card is hand printed, each one takes the same amount of time to produce and uses the same amount of materials.

I can now hear you saying, how can I make a profit when the card is already £2.95 and with the set up charge,  the first 25 will cost me £3.95 each? Easy, stop treating it as just a 'card'. It is in fact a smaller version of the larger Giclee prints you may already be selling. In fact, apart from the size, it is identical. You may have no trouble justifying £60 or £70 for your A2 giclee print, so what price a smaller version? I have an artist as a client, who regularly displays her prints at exhibitions. She also has a small display of Giclee cards, one of which she shows in an A4 frame with a high quality mount to show potential customers how their card could look if they decided to frame it. She has no problems selling her cards and she makes a healthy profit!

Take a look at the website for more information: http://www.artorigination.co.uk/Cards.htm

Photograph your Own Art?

Can I photograph my own Art?

Yes you can if you follow my easy to use guide.

Many artists use my upload page on the website to send me their own images for the production of Giclee prints. These are images they have had taken professionally or in some cases they send images they have produced themselves. I always offer a free assessment of images sent in this way, but some of the images uploaded are not suitable for the production of high quality Giclee prints. In many cases, a simple adjustment at the time of photographing the art would have made a world of difference, which has prompted me to produce a guide on 'How to Photograph your Art' and publish this on the website.

I am not suggesting  that you use this information to photograph art yourself in preference to using a professional service, however if it is not possible to bring your art to the studio, the information provided should enable you to produce images suitable for Giclee printing and will help you avoid some of the simple pitfalls that make an image unsuitable for print.

However you choose to photograph your art, with natural light or artificial light, the colour of the light will vary. Tungsten lights are a totally different colour to fluorescent and even the colour of your walls can have an  effect on the colour balance of the resulting image. The white balance settings on your camera will help to compensate for this, and usually work quite well, but unless your monitor is set up as mine, we will be seeing different things.

So, how do you ensure that the image you produce from your art will reproduce correctly  when you order your Giclee prints? You use a Grey Card!

The 'Grey Cards' have been produced to match my printing profiles and set up. Including the grey card within the your image area, provides me with a point of reference to determine how your image will appear in print. Matching a digital image to original art is always a challenge, even if you have the art next to you, so the inclusion of a Grey Card in the image you send me will help in producing Giclee prints that are more likely to match you art.

View the full article and order Grey Cards at  http://www.artorigination.co.uk/Booklet.htm