11
votes
How does one create prints for canvas paintings?
If i have a lot of acrylic on canvas paintings and I want to produce prints to sell, where do you make the prints? Local Kinko's/staples?
Clear plastic bag or no? Brief artist blurb at the back? Post card?
Have you ever bought a print? What made you want to buy it or what stopped you, and what would have made it go from no to yes?
I’ve purchased prints:
I use a camera to sell prints smaller than 17” when the work is larger than what my flat bed scanner can handle.
Are your originals selling? Are you showing your work in galleries? I would start with trying to sell either smaller prints or your originals. See if there’s a market for your work.
The online space is over saturated and almost nobody buys work randomly. Places like Society 6 are okay to send your existing base to, but your margins are really small and their markup is pretty large.
Friend is an independent painter new to the industry. Their answer, no they haven't tried to sell anything, and considering bringing some to local markets or maybe coffee shops. They're probably not the type to sell online. I agree from a completely outside perspective it looks very over saturated too.
Follow up question, after taking digital images (either scanner or camera) where does one go to develop them into physical prints?
I used to use https://finerworks.com/ when I wanted prints to sell locally. I haven’t done price shopping in a long while to see if there’s a cheaper source.
As for scanning larger pieces, search for “large format scanning near me,” to see if there’s something local. You might have to old school call places to see who has a large format scanner.
You might also get lucky and find a local printshop that can do large format printing on either canvas, printmaking paper or another fine art quality stock. Rare, but they exist.
I suggest getting the work into a gallery show before investing too much effort into making prints. The coffee shop crowd is like your $5-10 small format prints.
I think the artists that do best are integrated into an artistic community of other artists. They show together, share knowledge, critique each others work. It also helps gather a following, my experience is the people who buy art, buy art. They’re not first time buyers, and in some cases approach it like investing—so an artist that has been in the community has better renown and more likely to sell to that crowd.
Very high resolution photos. These are the best people in the print biz in the US: https://staticmedium.com/pages/faq#:~:text=What%20does%20this%20process%20entail,put%20that%20on%20the%20wall.
When I was doing a lot more photography, I would get my prints from professional printing services. I used Millers and WHCC. Both of them gave me excellent results.
I never got a chance to get any of my photos printed from them, but Moo is more consumer-focused and might be easier to use. I got a sample pack from them a while back that looked good, as did the business cards I ordered from them.