Moving forward: a scanner for making prints

I had a Bright Idea

Trecento Madonna and Child, in the style of the Master of the Sienese Straus Madonna. Graphite on paper. A preparatory drawing for a commissioned icon, and now also my very first print order! Thanks Tom!

I've been so encouraged and a bit surprised by the response to my plan - announced just two days ago! - to make prints available to customers. Within a few hours of posting the thing about it on the new "Hilary White; Sacred Art" page, I had people contacting me to ask for prints of some of the works I posted. Despite my protestations that these drawings weren't finished works suitable for prints, they insisted they wanted copies - which is pretty flattering, by the way. And this has prompted me to move from the "just planning" stage to actually getting on with it. (Thanks again, Tom!)

St. Anthony the Great, father of monks. (Sold) Egg tempera on gesso-treated paper, mounted. After a 14th century fresco at the Church of San Francesco, Narni.

This little painting of St. Anthony of the Desert sold within a couple of hours (thanks Josef!) and another client has asked if she can have a print of him. It's quite exciting to get such a good response so quickly to the idea, but it means the schedule has to be moved up; from just planning and thinking about it and gathering information and researching how it's done to testing the system as I figure it out.

The Plot So Far

So last night I was up pretty late doing the figuring-out, looking up all the things one needs to get started making art prints and have discovered a whole new world; this is a well-blazed trail. 

It turns out that there are whole companies doing exactly this! (I know, there are some of you out there smacking your foreheads... but this whole entrepreneurial stuff is all new to me, and I'm working it all out as I go along...) I've settled for now on one, theprintspace.com, that specialises in museum-quality fine art prints, does the shipping for you, and ships internationally. 

The system is called "dropshipping", where you email the printer a high resolution digital scan of the work, choose the paper from the options they keep in stock. Then you pay them to do All The Things - printing, packaging and shipping to the customer. (They also do mounting, matting and even framing.) They keep a large stock of high-end, acid free museum quality paper and make sure the customer gets something worth the price at the end.  

I've been hesitating about doing prints, being intimidated by the difficulties and expense involved in getting all the professional level equipment. By itself, a printer capable of doing this kind of work runs in the thousands of euros, and that's not including the insane price of the inks... And keeping sufficient stocks at home of the right quality paper, shipping materials and then shipping costs... I know some people do their own printing but it all seemed too much while at the same time trying to focus on the larger work, the Big Project, of developing my painting and drawing, gilding and decorating, and all the skills. 

With dropshipping, all that technical skill-set is taken care of by specialist professionals. A client - me - keeps an account with the company where I finish a drawing or painting, make a high resolution scan, (and tidy it up with software), send it to them to keep on file and I use my own platform - this site and/or Substack - to create a catalogue of works available to my customers. 

Trecento St. Agnes, graphite on paper, after the Master of the Sienese Straus Madonna. The first drawing I’ve done with a view to creating prints and digital paintings.

A customer - you guys - asks me for a print of, say, the drawing of the Madonna and Child or St. Agnes, or of the finished painting of St. Anthony, that I have posted to the shop page, and I just have to go to the file in my account with the company, do some clicking and they create the print and ship it to you. They have the skills and equipment to do a high level professional job, a much better job than I possibly could with my limited resources. And, importantly, without us having to wrangle with the whimsical vicissitudes of Italian post and customs duty.

(To say nothing of the bureaucratic entanglements the Italian government requires for shipping art - even your own art - out of the country... don't even get me started!)

A Scanner

But to do any of that there is one piece of equipment I will need to have right here in the studio; a scanner. I live in a tiny town in Umbria, and the nearest professional printing outfit that could do the work would be Rome, so having it in-house is indispensable. 

And it can't be just any office scanner, but one that can produce the professional level digital files for fine art prints. This means at least 4500 dpi ("dots per inch") in 8 bit. 

Fortunately, the trail-blazers have already done the research. This is the scanner I need; the Epson Perfection V550. It was recommended as the "best overall" for high quality art prints by Architecture Lab magazine. It does 6400 dpi and 48 bit and most importantly for me, it takes documents bigger than the standard office size.

I found out a big drawback with nearly all digital scanners is the small plate size, that only allows for scanning standard office documents, 8.5 x 11, which is too small for what I'm doing. My largest paintings and drawings are running around 30 cm x 40 cm, (12" x 16"). The only professional level scanner I could find that does larger documents is the Epson V550 that reproduces documents up to 17" x 22" (about 43cm x 56cm).

And, lucky me, the Epson company has discontinued it. There are still a few floating around, and though it means I have to act fast to get one, they're running cheap. The replacement, the Epson V600, is back to the tidgy little plate size of 8.5 x11 and is a hundred Euros more.

My Bright Idea

So this is my idea: instead of just straight-up asking for donations to buy it, I thought I'd offer a 20% discount on their first print order to the first 14 supporters/customers to contribute €20 to getting the scanner  - the one piece of indispensable equipment I need to make it possible. 

14 x 20 = €280, the cost of the scanner. This would mean if you ordered a print for €100, you'd have already paid the first 20%. So, it would be more like a deposit on your print order than a donation. 

St. Elijah the Prophet. Graphite on paper, after Ugolino di Nerio.

More to come

Obviously this is just the first stage. I mentioned that I'm also looking into getting (and learning how to use) a digital painting programme so I could take scans of the graphite drawings and colourise them and offer more affordable full colour icons and paintings. But as I've said many times, I find I often like the simplicity of the graphite preparatory drawing even more than the finished item. And drawing in graphite and charcoal is something I really love to do and want to do  a lot more of. In the end, I would like to have a large catalogue of icons and other art works, both drawings and finished paintings - either physical or digital. 

And there is of course a whole range of other things one can offer with print-on-demand. The idea for Christmas and greeting cards, and tree ornaments, that has remained on the back burner for a long time, can be moved up. 

I'm really quite excited by the possibilities this creates, and am grateful to the customers and patrons who have encouraged me to move forward. This being an entrepreneur is all quite new to me, and I find the more ideas like this I develop the more confidence builds that the whole enterprise could really actually work out! The more it works, the more I want to do, the more energy I have to try new things, build new skills and develop as an ... I dare to say the word... artist. 

I can't express enough how grateful I am to all the friends and supporters, patrons and clients who have come this far with me. It’s literally been life-changing.

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If you'd like to donate - and receive your 20% print discount - to help me buy the scanner, you can click the button below. The same button will let you sign up for a monthly contribution of $10/month or more to support my Big Project as a patron. And thanks again.

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