5 Things You Can Make With Photos of Your Art

Could these Warhol-inspired bunnies be made into a shower curtain? Sure!

So you’ve invested in professional photos of your art. You have big, beautiful, sharp files just waiting to be put to use. But what can you do with them?

Here are five things you can make using photos of your art:

1. Giclée Prints — Giclées are high-quality, archival reproductions of your art. You can sell them as prints at various sizes, embellish them to create original works and more. (Read more about giclées in this blog post.)

2. Greeting Cards — Greeting cards are a great way to expand the audience for your artwork and an affordable way for people to display and share your art. Best of all, once you've printed greeting cards you'll never need to buy more at the store.

3. Postcards — Like greeting cards, postcards are a great way to make your artwork accessible to a larger audience; some collectors even frame them like small paintings. And (oh yes) you can mail them to your friends and family for the price of a stamp.

4. Calendars — Can you imagine creating a piece that contains 12 of your best works and is viewed all year? That's a calendar! A great way to showcase your work and provide your fans with a collectible gift. And unlike most calendars, these ones aren’t likely to be recycled next January.

5. Mugs, Shower Curtains, T-shirts — The sky's the limit! Make puzzles, pillows, dresses, shopping bags and more…all you need is a high-resolution image of your artwork.

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and turn your art photos into something (else) beautiful! And if you need help creating high-resolution images of your artwork or working with a printer to create any of the suggestions in this post…get in touch.

What are giclées? Let's take a closer look

Giclée candiate? Candy Cub | 20 x 24 | Acrylic on Canvas

If you’ve been around the art world for any length of time you’ve likely run into the term “giclée” or “giclée print.” Often the words are spoken in hushed, reverent tones, as though describing something rare and exotic. So what are these mysterious giclées?

Simply put, a giclée (pronounced zhee-clay or jee-clay) is a high-quality inkjet print of an image. And while the name connotes some arcane, old-world art process, the term has only been around for about 30 years.

The term “giclée” was coined by California printmaker Jack Duganne in 1991. He was looking for a name to describe a new process for creating high-quality fine-art prints and chose giclée from the French noun “gicleur” (a jet or a nozzle) and the French verb “gicler” (to squirt out). The name stuck and is used to this day to describe fine-art prints made using special inks and papers on advanced inkjet printers.

The words “special” and “advanced” are important, because while all giclées are inkjet prints, not all inkjet prints are giclées. You and I may have inkjet printers in our houses or studios, but that doesn’t mean they’re capable of producing giclées. There are no giclée police (yet), but a number of criteria must be met for a print to be considered a giclée:

• Resolution — A giclée is usually printed at at least 300 dots per inch (dpi). To produce a print of any reasonable size at that resolution you need to start with a high-resolution image of your artwork; that is, an image that has enough pixels. We’ll save the technical discussion about how to prepare your image files for printing until another day; for now suffice it to say you need high-resolution images to create giclées.

• Paper — Giclées are printed on high-quality, archival paper. Look for descriptors like “acid-free,” “lignin-free” or “museum grade” for these papers. The giclée process can also be used with canvas to produce high-quality reproductions.

• Ink — To ensure accurate colour reproduction and longevity, the giclée process uses pigment-based inks that are quite different than the dye-based inks used in most home inkjet printers. Pigment-based inks are like paint — they’re thicker than dye-based ink, consist of pigments (fine, coloured powders) suspended in liquid and wouldn’t work in most home inkjet printers. Because of their special properties pigment-based inks can last for up to 200 years without fading.

• Printer — The printers used for the giclée process are not the kind you pick up at your average big-box office supply store. They’re much larger, work with rolls of paper rather than single sheets and use 10 to 12 colours (compared to four to six for most home printers). Using so many colours of pigment-based inks allows them to produce prints that are deeper, richer and more colour-faithful to original artwork. It also makes them expensive to operate, rendering them impractical for most home studios.

Boiling it all down, a giclée equals a fine-art image printed at high-resolution on archival paper using pigment-based, archival inks on advanced inkjet printers. Done right, a giclée can last more than 100 years without yellowing or fading — longer than some pieces of original art can last without yellowing or fading!

I hope this overview has been helpful. There are all sorts of other considerations related to giclées — artwork photography, colour correction, image file preparation and submission, limited and/or open editions…the list goes on — but those are topics for other articles.

If you have questions about giclées, or would like assistance producing giclées, drop us a line!

15 tips for taking better photos of your art with a smartphone

If you’re an artist who wants to photograph artwork for display on social media or your website a smartphone may be all you need. Smartphone cameras have come a lng way in the last few years; under the right conditions they can produce results that rival more expensive digital cameras.

Ready to give it a try? Follow these tips to get the best results:

Getting ready

• Use — or create — soft light — The best light for photographing art without glare and shadows is soft and even. That’s why you’ll find some of the best light outdoors on an overcast day. If you have to work inside using artificial light, or if you have bright sun pouring through a window, soften it by hanging a white sheet over the window or light. And be sure to place your painting against a wall or dark background to be sure no light comes through the canvas from behind.

• Stick to smaller paintings — For best results, shoot only paintings that comfortably fit in your frame. Why? If you need to move back significantly to fit a large painting in the frame, you’ll likely be left with a lot of empty space on the sides or top of the image. This means you’ll need to crop most of the photo to isolate the image of your artwork leaving you with with a low-resolution file. Photographers solve this by shooting large paintings in pieces, then stitching them together using image-processing software. That’s beyond a smartphone’s capabilities, however…and don’t even think of using the panoramic photo option!

• Use a tripod and smartphone holder — Smartphones are good at image stabilization but for the best, sharpest results always photograph your art using a tripod. You don’t need a fancy professional tripod — a table-size model will do. If you do have a tripod, a smartphone adapter costs only a few dollars and is well worth the investment.

Camera Settings

• Turn off the flash — The flash on a smartphone can create annoying hotspots and glare on your artwork. Be sure to turn it off before photographing your artwork.

• Turn on your camera’s grid option — Most smartphones have an option to superimpose a three-by-three grid on the phone’s screen. This is useful for ensuring your artwork is properly centred in the frame and square to the camera.

• Don’t use HDR — HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. Using it, your camera takes several exposures then blends them to create a single photo that preserves details in both the scene’s dark and light areas. This works best in high-contrast situations such as landscapes, where the sky is bright and the ground is comparatively dark. When photographing art, however, it can unnaturally darken and lighten areas and affect colour. Best to leave it turned off and ensure you have good even light instead.

• Skip the fancy filters — Smartphone camera apps allow you to apply filters both when taking a photo and when editing it after shooting. Neither is good when photographing art. Your goal is to produce an image that resembles your original work as closely as possible. Filters look cool, but they won’t help you create faithful reproductions.

• Turn on “do not disturb” — This tip is included just for the sake of your sanity! There’s nothing more frustrating than setting up art, getting everything just-so and being interrupted by a text or a phone call.

Technique

• Use the back camera — Smartphones have two cameras — one on the back and the other on the front. The lower-resolution front camera is used mainly for taking selfies or making FaceTime calls. For best results, use the higher-resolution back camera.

• Don’t use zoom or wide angle — Zooming too tightly or backing the camera out to capture a wide angle can both introduce undesirable distortion in your photo.

• Don’t completely fill the frame — Usually we advise filling the camera’s frame with your artwork. For smartphones we don’t, and there’s a good reason: Smartphone cameras have small, relatively wide-angle lenses; if you move close enough to fill the frame you risk producing a distorted image. So back up a bit, make sure the artwork takes up a good portion of the frame without distorting, and shoot.

• Use the self-timer — A tripod helps, but using the self-timer removes all camera movement and produces a sharp image. Use the 10-second timer for best results..

• Keep your painting upright — To avoid distortion (such as the bottom of your image being wider than the top) make sure your painting is upright — either by hanging it on a wall or propping it on an easel. If you can’t achieve a perfect upright position, ensure your phone and painting are at the same angle.

Processing

• Process using Snapseed or similar — All smartphones come with built-in image editing apps; on an iPhone it’s as simple as opening the image in Photos and pressing Edit. Doing so offers options to change the photo’s orientation, correct distortion, change colour, contrast, exposure and apply filters. While the built-in app is powerful, Snapseed (a Google product) is even better, with more options and controls — and it’s free to download and use.

• Straighten, crop and check colours — You shouldn’t need to do a lot of processing if you have good light and good technique. But at minimum, check to be sure your image is straight, crop out the background and make sure your colours look the same on-screen as they do in real life.

Give these tips a try the next time you shoot your art with a smartphone. And let me know if they helped you or if there are other tips you’d suggest!

If you’d like to keep these tips in a handy format, download this tip sheet I created!