Articles
An Artist’s Many Uses for Digital Fine Art Reproduction
When artist Susan Van Wagoner approached Old Town Editions in 2007 about doing digital fine art reproductions of her work, she was not interested in doing limited edition fine art prints at that time. Her main concern was to create a single identical reproduction of her paintings to use as samples of her works which would not be for sale. Van Wagoner does very large commissions and all her work, once completed, reside in her clients homes. Without having her prospective clients visit another client’s house to see the paintings she had no way of showing the extravagance of her life-sized work.
The solution was to create one-off reproductions of her originals. These reproductions would travel to promotional events as displays to market her commissions.
Her originals are painted on linen and her main concern was whether or not the prints would look exactly like the originals. She was concerned that the fine art prints would not show the intricate detail of the originals, especially the texture of the linen canvas. We eased her concerns by letting her know that we have no problem reproducing the linen texture and fine detail of her paints with the high resolution image captures that we create from her originals. The texture can be seen in the image below. Some of the sizes of her originals are 61″x26″, 76″x49″, 88″x46″, and 88″x32″. With sizes like these only the highest resolution capturing equipment would capture all the fine detail of the originals from corner to corner.
Fine detail, linen texture
Over time Susan expressed interest in offering limited editions of one or more of her works. The only reason she hesitated is that all her works are commissions and she felt out of respect to her clients that she shouldn’t do limited editions of the commissioned paintings. Usually her commissions are intimate portraits of beloved family pets, some of which have passed away. If she sold prints, she would be selling an image of someone else’s family member or pet. Even though Susan retains all reproduction rights to those paintings, she chooses to not make prints of them.
This time around Susan is preparing two of her her non-commission images for limited edition printing on paper. The two images that she is preparing for printing are the Texas Longhorn and the Greyhound seen below.
Making reproductions is always an artist’s decision even after the painting has sold, unless their client explicitly purchased the painting with the rights. This is rare and usually very costly to the purchasing party.
Susan has had clients order reproductions of the commissions to use in second homes or for other family members to enjoy. This is the case with the piece shown in the image on the right.
Whether you are ready to sell multiples of your paintings or you just need one reproduction of an original for a client, please consider Old Town Editions for your giclee printing.
For further reading, check out our article about the benefits of giclee printing for artists.
