Art prints that match what you actually painted

Colour is the whole job with art prints, and it is where most print services quietly let artists down. A print that is 90% right is 100% wrong when it is sitting next to the original.

Why it shifts. Your screen makes colour with light and the print makes it with ink. A screen can show a vivid cyan or a deep saturated orange that CMYK ink physically cannot reach. Nobody can fix that with settings. What a good printer does is control how it falls short, so the relationships between colours stay true even when the absolute values cannot.

What we do about it. We look at your file before printing and flag the colours that are going to move. Where it matters, we adjust the file so the print reads correctly rather than accurately, which are not the same thing, and for artwork reading correctly is what counts. Then we can run a test print so you can hold it against the original before committing to a run.

Working from a physical original? Photographing a painting introduces its own colour cast and lens distortion, and even lighting is very hard to achieve. Scanning is £6 for large format up to A0, by appointment, and gives you a clean flat file with no perspective and no shadow. Scan once, sell prints from it for years. This is the single biggest quality jump available to most artists.

If your file needs cropping, cleaning, dust spotting or a border adding, that is editing work from £15.

The reason artists come to us rather than a trade printer is quantity. Trade printers want 250 minimum. You want eight, because that is what sold at the last fair.

Our minimum is four A3 prints or eight A4, and the price steps down as you order more. A3 is £6 each for the first nine, £5 from ten and £4.50 from fifty. A4 is £3, then £2.50 from twenty, then £2 from fifty. Print what you will sell this month and reorder, because we keep the file and a repeat order is one message.

A note on stock. We print on 350gsm silk or matte, and we also stock a cream card if you want a warmer, softer base than bright white, which suits a lot of illustration and hand drawn work. Matte is the safer choice for most artwork because there is no glare under gallery lighting, no reflections when someone photographs it, and it looks right behind glass. Silk gives you more punch on bold, graphic or photographic work. If you are not sure, order one of each on your first run and decide with them in your hands.

Prints are supplied flat rather than rolled wherever the size allows, so they are ready to mount, frame or bag up without fighting a curl. We also stock frames if you want a piece finished rather than loose.

Artists ordering prints usually add postcard packs of the same artwork, which sell at an impulse price point at fairs, and larger poster size versions for the statement pieces.

We say art prints, not giclee. It is the same thing done properly, without the markup that word usually carries.