Digitizing Your Artwork for Print-on-Demand Success

1. Introduction: Welcome to digitizing your artwork for Print on Demand Success. My name is Steve Simon, and I've been painting and printing my art since 1994. Specifically, I'm an oil painter, but this class is applicable to anyone creating two dimensional art. Now, as an artist, I'm sure you like to focus your energy on creating original art and what artists doesn't, right? But if you're like many artists, you're intrigued and even excited by the prospect of having your intellectual property working for you to create passive income. One way to do this, of course, is to digitize your art and make it available as prints, cards, books, or whatever multitude of different arts you like. Now, over the 30 plus years that I've been reproducing my art, I've tried a lot of things. I created lithographic prints, printed seven coffee table books of my art, and then even bought a large formac clay printer to reproduce my art on canvas. And all these items I sold at a gallery that I formerly owned in California. All of these endeavors were very capital intensive. With the explosion of print on demand services in recent years, however, the barriers to entry for artists into the self publishing art world and presenting your published work to people all over the world have been dramatically reduced. Now, all you need is a digital file of your art, so graphic editing software, print on demand service, and you're up and selling to an international marketplace. No whoever comes through the front door of your gallery. It's all very doable, but there are a number of things to learn and pitfalls to avoid. In this class, I will teach you all you need to know to get up and running quickly. I'll also offer up some pro tips that will have you selling reproductions like a seasoned art publisher. First, you're going to learn the pros and cons of photographing versus scanning your artwork. Then you'll learn what to look for in an art scanner. Next, you'll learn the ins and outs and sneaky tricks to getting the best quality scans of your artwork. Then you'll learn all you need to know about image editing and how to properly prepare your image files for print. Finally, you'll learn about the print on demand marketplace and how to navigate your way through it in a way that suits your strategic vision as an artist. So come join me in digitizing your artwork for print on demand success. I look forward to seeing you in class. 2. Capturing Your Artwork: Okay, so capturing your artwork, there are two ways to digitally capture your artwork. One would be digital photography using a camera, right? The second is digital scanning. Now there are certainly advantages and disadvantages to both. When it comes to capturing your work for reproductions and licensing, scanning is definitely the go to method. So in this class, I will be specifically discussing digital scanning. But let's first talk about why you might prefer to photograph your work instead of scanning. The first case is, if your artwork is exceedingly large, with a camera, you can capture the entirety of the piece with one click of the shutter, right? With a scanner on the other hand, you would need to scan your artwork in sections and then stitch it together. This can be quite laborious, but don't worry. We're going to address this. So size is certainly one consideration. Second, you might want to photograph your artwork instead of scanning it if the artwork is in a frame that is just impractical to remove. Scanning something that's framed is obviously not a good way to go. The third reason you might prefer to photograph instead of scanning has to do quite simply with marketing. If, for example, you're trying to capture your art in situ, and by insitu, we mean how the artwork will look in a natural position and environment, including natural ambient light. Maybe something like, how does art look in the living room over the couch. Now, photographing artwork demands a certain level of expertise and can require substantial investment. If you're trying to digitally capture art for reproduction and licensing purposes, you will have to equip yourself with proper lighting, polarizing filters, and a high resolution digital camera. Even then, it can be quite tricky to rival the uniform focus and lighting you can achieve through scanning. Therefore, flatbed scanning will be the focus of this class, and in the next segment, we'll take a look at what to consider in acquiring an art scanner. 3. Scanner Consdierations: So what should you look for when you're considering buying a scanner? Well, first of all, resolution. Instead of getting too bogged down in the numbers, first, just make sure you're buying the right kind of scanner. That'd be a good place to stay. Scanners are generally designed to either scan documents or images. Make sure you're purchasing a scanner designed to scan color images, not simply documents. Almost all color image scanners these days will have a suitable resolution for your needs. If you can, aim for resolution of at least 2,400 DPI. We'll get into the role resolution plays in reproducing artwork more later. Second consideration when buying a scanner is something called color depth. This refers to the color gamut the scanner can discern. That is how many variations of different colors it's capable of interpreting. The good news here is that technology has advanced pretty substantially in this area in recent years. Color depth is measured as the number of bits per pixel. In other words, how much digital color info is dedicated to every pixel. 24 bits is a decent number, but strive for 48 bits. Number three, D max. This refers to the scanner's capacity to distinguish colored density. Think of color depth as the scanner's ability to see hue and D max as the scanner's ability to see value or light and dark. Strive for a D max of at least 3.2. The fourth consideration is scan area. Most art scanners will have a skin area of 8.5 by 11 " or something close. At this size, it is possible to buy an art scanner for under 150 bucks and satisfy all the specifications I've discussed. Doubling or tripling that budget would offer greater quality and bells and whistles. If however you want to increase the size of the scan area to 12 by 17, you'll certainly need to increase the budget still further to say $1,200 or more. Now later in this class, I'm going to demonstrate how to scan artwork that's larger than your scan area and then stitch it all together. But there is definitely an obvious increase in efficiency to your workflow by being able to scan larger. For me, 12 16 is a very common size for me to paint, and therefore, it's worth the extra expense of having a large format scanner. If, for example, I had an 8.5 by 11 scan area instead of 12 by 17 and was scanning this 12 by 16, I would need to stitch together four hands instead of doing just one, but more on this later. I've owned this Micro tech scanner for over 15 years and it still works like a gem for me. Now, as I mentioned, we're going to go through an example of scanning large artwork and stitching it together. Once you have a feel for that process, coupled with an idea of how large your original artwork tends to be, you'll be able to better determine what size of a scanner makes the most sense for you. As I say, this is the biggest component in determining cost size. In addition to the scanner, you will need graphics editing software. The industry standard is, of course, Photoshop, and that's what we'll be using in this class. If you don't have Photoshop, Adobe does offer a free seven day trial, and they also offer student discounts if that applies. So next up, we'll start scanning. 4. Scanning Best Practices: In this segment, we're going to detail the procedures of properly capturing your image, what settings to use, which file formats to save your image as, and some other setup considerations. First of all, let's talk about resolution. Most scanners are capable of scanning at much higher resolutions than you will need to print your artwork. You will need a resolution of 300 DPI to print your art professionally. So let's say we want to scan this 12616 image full size, and then print it on a clay printer. You will need to scan the original full size at 300 DPI. Let's say, on the other hand, we want to print this image maybe twice as large. So something like 24 by 32. We want to scan that image, again, 12 by 16, but at 600 DPI, twice the resolution. Okay? Now, of course, increasing resolution will increase file size. So you want to weigh this trade off or how large you want to scan your image and eventually archive. Now, when you upload your digital image to a print on demand service, you will be constrained by the file size limitation the service places on your uploads. In fact, you're likely to find that these print on demand services often keep the file sizes relatively small for efficiency's sake, and then apply upsampling algorithms to enable larger printing. Now, this isn't a purists way of reproduction, but almost everybody is doing this now. And frankly, the difference in quality is largely imperceptible, so we just roll with it. With all that said, I recommend archiving your files at some resolution larger than 300 DPI, just for safety's sake, maybe 600 DPI, and then duplicating your archive scans and reducing the duplicates according to the constraints of these downstream parties that you'll be working with. The next setting, which will affect quality, and again, the file is the color depth you choose. This is sometimes called colorimage or image type or something like that. If you have the option, choose 48 bits. This will broaden the achievable color gamut and enable you better color correction control once we bring the image into Photoshop. Next thing is file format. The three most popular formats used by scanners are PDF, JPEG, and TIF. PDF is a document format, so do not use this for any kind of art purposes. JPEG is a compressed file format and therefore has potential image quality issues associated with it. Here again, some print on demand services will require JPEGs, but as a means of archiving your work at the best quality for print, choose the TIF format. You can later copy the TIF file as a JPEG if need be. Now we come to the considerations of the actual scanning process. Art scanners use what is called a charged coupled device or a CCD to scan your art. As you can see, it travels from the bottom to the top, scanning the image. Due to the directional travel of the CCD, scanners have a tendency to create a subtle but consistent shadow in the direction of the travel. Naturally, if your original has a lot of texture, this will affect the scan much more dramatically. To mitigate against this, it is very helpful to scan your original twice in opposite orientations. So first, we'll scan the original right side up. Then we'll flip it over and scan it again. This might seem nutty, but you'll appreciate the method to this madness when we start working on the image and photoshop. Another consideration when scanning is creating an overlap for sections of a scan that will be stitched together in Photoshop. If your original is larger than your scan area, you will need to scan it in sections. Photoshop does an amazing job of stitching these sections together to form a single seamless image, but you need to give it a reasonable amount of overlap in the sections for the software's algorithm to work its magic. Strive to create at least a 1 " overlap. One more pro tip in this regard. When you scan, especially if you're scanning in sections, use a dark towel or a blanket to block out any light that might sneak under your art. Even slight amounts of light can become annoyingly perceptible along the seams of your stitched images. Once your scan is completed, you're ready for image editing. 5. Image Editing & File Preparation: So this is the painting that we're going to be working on. This is a 24 by 18 inch canvas. I've specifically chosen this one because it's bigger than my scanner, which is 12 by 17, right? So we're going to have to scan this in four sections to get the full image that we can stitch together. So you would think we only need four scans, but we're also going to illustrate that concept of scanning right side and upside down, right, so that we get rid of any kind of texture that might otherwise cause some shadows in our scan. So we're actually going to require eight scans for this, and then we're going to take this over to Photoshop and work on the color correcting. So the first thing we're going to do is to photo merge the first four scans that we did. And to do that, we're going to go to file, automate, photo merge. Choose the auto option and then browse for where those files are, select all four, and then just open them, and it okay. And you're going to see down here in the lower right, it's going to start opening each of those scans, each of those files as a layer. And in the background right now, it's trying to blend these four layers seamlessly together. And if you haven't done this before, you're likely to be pretty amazed at the results. So there you go. All four layers automatically blended together. So this is the version where it's right side up. Now we're going to go ahead and replicate this same process to the other four scans that were done the other way or upside down. Right, so we're going to repeat that process. So again, we're going to go up to file, automate, photo merge. Make sure auto is selected, browse for the files, and this time, I'm going to go into my second set of four scans, hive A through D, open those up, and then hit Okay. And again, it's going to do that same thing. Again, you'll see the layers coming in and Photoshop in the background blending these seamlessly together. And There you go. So what we have now are two files. This one that's upside down that is called by default, panorama two, and the other file, which by default is called panorama one. This first one's right side up, this one's second one is upside down. And both of these files consist of four layers. And what we're going to try to do now is to take this one that's upside down and place it on top of the first one that's right side up. And so firstly to do that, we want to get rid of these four layers down here. And to do that, we're just going to go to layer flatten Image. And what you'll see is those four layers then will just go away and we'll be merged into a single layer. And then the second thing we want to do is to flip this upside down. So we're going to select all that's Command A or Control A, and then go into edit transform and rotate 180. Okay, now we're going to keep it selected and hit Command C or Control C to copy it to the clipboard. And now we're going to go back to the other file that's right side up. And same thing. We're going to merge those layers, go to layer, flatten image so that it's a single layer, and then hit Command V to bring that other file in. So you can see now we have these two layers, both of which the second one we brought in is on top of the other. So now what we want to do is select both of these layers, and we're going to place them directly on top of each other. So this is edit auto align layers. Again, first option auto, hit Okay, and it's going to place these as close as possible right on top of each other. Okay. Now, what we're going to do is go to layer one, and on the layer, we're going to turn it into darken. You might not have appreciated what went on there. I'm going to actually magnify and come in closer. And click off this layer and have a look at this canvas texture in here, you see all these specular highlights that are going on, and when we click that, that's going away. Now, it's also creating a little tiny bit of a blur, and that's because these two layers as good as it's trying to line them up, it's not getting it perfect because there's a little bit of warp going on between these two skins. So and that's not unusual. What I'd like to do here, well, first of all, what we're going to do is to again, flatten the image. So we're going to get rid of both of these layers now. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to blur this slightly. So we're going to do a little Gaussian blur here, maybe just one pixel. And then we're going to go back. I know this sounds counterintuitive and sharpen it using the unsharp mask. So, something like that. So that'll take this approximation of these two scans that were just maybe a pixel or two out of focus with each other, blur them a little, and then tighten them back up. And you can see the result. That's already really good. We've gotten rid of a lot of the specular highlights and just some of the other anomalies, and now we're going to go in and fine tune this scan. So the first thing I want to do to this is to just clean it up. I want to crop it and size it properly. And even before that, I want you to make sure that your file is CMYK color. That's the color that you want for printing. And that if possible, you've got at least 16 bits per channel. That's the amount of colors that you're going to be able to the 16 bits that you're going to apply to each one of those pixels, right? So let's go ahead and try to resize this. We're going to use the cropping tool over here, just bring it into the image edge on all four edges. And I like to get pretty close to the edge without encroaching too much or if at all, into the artwork. Then you just hit Return. And then what you're going to want to do is go up into image size. So this is going to be a 24 by 18. I want to make sure that it's at least those dimensions in both directions. So I'm going to crop off the excess, but I want it exactly 24 by 18 because once you start sending these files to the print on demand services, it's just going to be very helpful for their algorithms if these numbers are precise. So go ahead and do that. And then what I'm going to do is go back into image. Go into canvas size this time, right? So you have image size and canvas size. So go into canvas size and change this parameter to inches. And then I want to crop off this bottom bit here where I see a little bit of the white going on. So I click on this, and then I just say I want that to be 24. It's going to give me a warning that I'm cutting stuff, and I said, that's fine. And there you'll see that goes away. So now I have an image that's clean on all four sides and is exactly 24 by 18. And now we're ready to start color correcting. Color correction is where Photoshop really shines. So we're going to we're going to do an example here of something not to do. So you can go into image and adjustments up here at your main menu. Let's say you want to go into any of these brightness and contrast levels, curves on and on. Let's just choose the first one, brightness and contrast. And let's say I want to make this darker and amp up the contrast. And I hit okay. Now I can't this is destructive, right? I've changed this in a way. I know that sounds weird, destructive, right? But I've changed this in a way that if I now start doing additional things to it, I can't back off that original thing that I've done. So we do, instead, and I'm going to hit Command Z, Command Z or Control Z to undo what I've just done. You don't really want to go in here and make your adjustments. What you'd rather do is to create adjustment layers. Now, to create adjustment layers, we're down here in the layers area. You can click on this, and all those same image adjustments that you saw on that main menu up there reside here. So if I go into brightness and contrast, it creates this adjustment layer here that I can then later toggle on or off. Okay? So if I make this adjustment to brightness and contrast, just like I did earlier, I can then toggle this on and off, and I'm not doing anything destructive to the original layer. Now, we can also do this a different way, and it's actually my preferred way. And that's that same icon, that adjustment layer that we saw down here, see that little icon? That's the adjustment layer. You too you can access the same thing through this panel. And so here's our different color correction. We have hue saturation. Brightness and contrast, I don't really use, and I'm going to explain why in a minute. And then curves curves is what I use instead of brightness and contrast, and I'll do an example of that in a minute. Um, levels and curves really do the same thing. So if you're comfortable with curves, not really reason to use levels and vice versa. Color balance will go into a little bit of a description on. These three black and white exposure and vibrants are grayed out because these only function for a JPEG file. And then we're going to get into selective color a little bit, also, and everything else is superfluous to us. So the first thing that we're going to do and what is recommended whenever you're color correcting an image is to start with value. So I'm looking at this image right now and it just appears too light to me. I don't want to start playing with the hue yet until I can get value correct, and my preferred way of getting value correct is to use curves. So we're going to use this curve in on CMYK, if you bow this out, you're going to get it darker. You can also even play around with even giving this thing, you know, a very specific curve to it. This already and here's how you toggle it on and off where we started, where we're at. That's already starting to look much better to me. Now, it's set to CMYK, which is all four channels. If I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, you know, what I really want is just a whole bunch more can in here, I can select that channel and you see what happens to the image, right? I'm going to Control Z out of that. Or let's say I'm looking at this, and I'm thinking, there's just too much red or too much magenta. I can pull Magenta out of the entire thing. So those are the four channels in the curves. Right now, I'm just going to use our curves to dial in the value that I feel I want. Now, what's interesting about adjustment layers also is you can see down here this is the actual adjustment that we're doing curves, and then this white thing here is a mask. So let's say I wanted to change the value of everything going on, but let's say there was a certain area that I did not want this adjustment to affect, okay? This is where this mask comes in. So to use the mask, you need to come over to your tools, select the paint brush. Okay. And then you need to make sure that these guys over here that your brush is set to black. Okay, and make sure you're on the mask. And then let's say I didn't want that curve to affect any of the water. I can come to the water and mask that off. Again, I need to be in black. And let's say it's this area back here that I didn't want affected by my adjustment layer. I can mask that off. And you can see now in my mask that part of the mask has turned black, meaning this adjustment layer, these curves will only affect this white area of my adjustment layer. Now, I didn't actually want to do that, so again, I'm going to control Z out of that. So that's our first thing is dialing in or trying to dial in as close as possible our values. So I like where that's at. And again, I'll be able to come back here and adjust this further or even completely take it away without doing anything destructive to my original layer. Next thing I'm going to do is we're going to scroll through these different options. Again, we're not going to do brightness and contrast because we've done that in curves. And hue and saturation is an interesting thing. I don't use the hue very much here, but I will do saturation. If you are going to use this, do so only sparingly. You got to be judicious with this. We've all seen people that have oversaturated images, you know, that look something like that. Please don't do that. So, you know, I feel like this could use a little bit of a pop, so I'm going to pop it up a little bit 43, something like that. We're going to do that to the whole image. So we've gone through huge saturation, dismissed the idea of brightness and contrast. Curves. If we're doing curves, there's no real need to also do layers levels. It really is, in many regards, just redundant to what you can do in curves. And really, people will prefer one or the other. My preference is curves. Color balance can be interesting. Color balance works in three tones or three levels of value, highlights. Midtones and shadows. So let's say, for example, I'm looking at this see foam in here, and let's just say, I think, well, it's too yellow. Maybe it needs more blue. So I'm in highlights, right? And that looks like a highlight to me. And if I want to take some of the yellow out with a little bit more bias towards blue, you can see what has happened to the see foam. Now, everything else that's a highlight is also going to get affected, right? So you have to keep you have to keep that in mind. Or let's say, we're in the midtones and this water, I'm thinking needs more red in it. You can see what's going to happen. Now, of course, it's going to affect the entire image. If we don't want it to affect the entire image, again, we can play around with our mask, right? So again, to do that, we'd make sure we're clicked onto the mask, come over, hit our paint brush, make sure you're on black on there, and then go ahead and start masking. The area off that you do not want it to affect. So I'm going to get rid of both each of those last two adjustment layers since we were just speaking about them for example sake. So now, last one I want to talk about is selective color. So let's say, for example, you know, you can go into each of these different colors. Let's say, for example, these alllo flowers here, I want I feel like they're just not popping enough. I want more magenta and yellow in them. To really make them pop. I mean, that's an exaggeration. But as I click this eyeball on and off, you can kind of see what's going on there, right? So if you're just trying to focus on a specific color, this is a good adjustment layer to use. Now, again, if we go in here, you can see, again, how all of these adjustment layers are adding up to create the image that we want, and each of them can be undone. Right? And we can see what would take place if we undid these, right? And now, let's say I go in here and as I turn this on and off, I go, You know what? I don't really like that. I can go in here and just delete it. Highlight the layer and just delete it. Okay, so let's say you can hit delete or you can just trash can, right? So, um, So that's in general, how I go about using adjustment layers to color correct. There's some other tools that come in handy, and so we're going to talk a little bit about the magic wand tool up here. The spot erase tool or some people call magic erase or spot healing, sorry. And then also the clone stamp tool. So let's start with the healing brush tool. So if we select that and go in here, you know, there's going to be certain anomalies like this thing right here that I don't. Oh, sorry. That I don't like. And if I just click on that, we're going to be able to get rid of these little strange anomalies, and it does a pretty good job of just saying, I see what you're trying to do there and blending it in with the background. So this is a pretty handy tool. It comes in handy along edges, too, like, let's say, this you don't like, I'll figure that out, as well. I'm going to undo that and also show how you can use the clone stamp to solve a problem like this. So if we hit the clone stamp, maybe get a little bit larger. Okay. And you need to hit option in an area that you're trying to clone. So let's say you want to take this green area and clone it onto that spot, all I need to do is hold down my option key, hit that area, and then let go option and then just start painting that on there. So that's the uh the clone stamp. And then we wanted to go into the magic wand. So let's say that I want to just select all of the bright parts of the Alo plants. So I can click on those, and then go to select and hit similar. And you'll see it's going to select all of those brightly lit areas of the low plants. And now let's just say that I really wanted to to dial up the saturation on that. I could do that. By just going into that one little area that I've created and dial up the saturation just like that. So those are some of the ideas in terms of how to use adjustment layers and some of the tools that you would like to use. And you can see relatively quickly, we've created a nearly perfect scan of that original, and we'll be able to send this over to a print on demand service, and they'll be able to print Glas from it. Once you're completely happy with all your color correcting, it's time to save this file to archive it, in other words. And it is helpful, and I know this sounds a little scary to flatten the image. So this is going to get rid of all our adjustment layers and just blend everything together. Now the reason for this is if you're going to be saving the file with all those layers, there's certain situations where when you send the file, some weird things happen with those layers. Then just go ahead and save it, and there's your archived file. So that, for me, will be at 400 DPI, CMYK, and TIF. And so now, if I'm going to upload this file to a print on demand service, a licensing service or whoever it is, I can save this file, duplicate this file, save it at the right resolution requested by that service, and perhaps even in a different file format. But in terms of saving your file for the best the best color corrected best resolution file, you will want to save it at a TIF File, CMYK, and at a resolution likely exceeding 300 DPI for whatever your specific circumstances might need in the future. 6. Print On Demand Marketplace: In this segment, I'd like to talk about the print on demand marketplace. Now, in terms of signing up with a print on demand provider, you have quite a few options that are accessible to really anyone. However, you have to make a strategic decision upfront. From my experience, the print on demand world works in two general ways, and it has to do with what kind of customers the specific provider is seeking. Not what kind of artists, but what kind of buyers of products. So there are really two kinds of buyers. First, there's those who are seeking decorative art or merchandise to satisfy a practical need or. These are people who might need a print for a bathroom wall or a coffee mug is a souvenir, for example. Then there's another group of customers. These are the people who see value beyond the practical use of the product. These buyers are seeking fine art as a means of satisfying an emotional need or want. They may identify philosophically or stylistically with you as an artist or whatever the reason. They want something more than a commodity. Okay. So for print on demand providers to be successful, they must know their customers and cater to them accordingly. And since you can't serve two masters, print on demand providers will necessarily direct their marketing efforts at one of these two kinds of customers. As a result, you will find providers who present their art either as a commodity and those who present their art as a collectible. In this ecosystem, you as the artist are in the middle. And so you have to decide which system you want to operate in. Both have advantages and both have disadvantages. In general, the commodity based system seeks to maximize revenue through high volume sales while accepting a lower ticket. The collectible based system, on the other hand, seeks to maximize revenue through high ticket sales while accepting a lower volume. Okay, so if you are the kind of artist who is creating art for purely functional reasons or have designs that are mass marketable, then the former is likely for you. If on the other hand, you are the kind of artist who envisions a career path where you endeavor to elevate the perceived value of your art or build a following of collectors, then the latter is for you. Firs artists, the marketplace has exploded with print on demand providers, and it is constantly evolving. So, unfortunately, it wouldn't be of much value for me to suggest providers in the two different marketplaces I have outlined. I just want you to be aware of the landscape as you go out there and explore it keep these thoughts in mind. Now, once you commit to one path, you still can offer your art through more than one provider, but it's got to be on that same path, right? You need to keep your pricing also as consistent as possible across the different channels that you sell for obvious reasons, right? You don't want customers discovering that they could have purchased your art somewhere else for a lower price. I personally follow the art collector path. Okay. And I use two sites to sell my work through Crenn Demand Services. The first site is my own domain, stepsimon.com that I have set up through art store frins. And the second site is fine art america.com. So you might be wondering, you know, if you're offering the same art at the same price, why duplicate the effort across two different sites? Well, quite simply because I can promote my art actively through my own site and also passively through a channel that gets massive traffic. Right? So the customer base I have developed over the years, I direct to my own domain. Steve simon.com. And as much as I might like to optimize new buyers finding me on my own site, I cannot realistically compete with Fine Art in America's massive capacity to attract new buyers art. For this reason, it also makes sense for me to present my work in their enormous portfolio, r now, there's also additional functionality that fine art America offers that is interesting. That is licensing. Licensing of my art is actually not a big focus of mine, nor do I have a lot of expertise in this area. However, if your art lends itself to licensing, once you have your art properly digitized, this might be an interesting avenue to pursue. For me, I just offer my art under these limited licenses on fine art America. I don't have to worry about contracts or anything. A handful of times I've licensed my work in this way. It has been without a complication for me or for the licensee. 7. Class Project: All right, so the project for this class is as follows. First, select one of your originals, preferably one that is larger than your scanner and scan the image in sections. So remember to overlap your sections by at least 1 ". Then I'd like you to stitch the image together in Photoshop using the photo merge function. And then thirdly, color correct the image in Photoshop and archive the file at 600 DPI in a TIF format. Then fourth, I'd like you to duplicate that archive file and save it as a JPEG at 72 DPI, and then finally upload this Lower RS file to the M project area of the project and resources section of this class. Doing so gets me the opportunity to offer you some feedback and enables other students to learn from your example. In the next segment, I'll offer some final thoughts. 8. Final Thoughts: Thanks for following the class through to the end. I just wanted to re emphasize the opportunities that digitizing your art opens up to you. As an artist, when you create original artwork, you are not only creating tangible property, you are creating intellectual property. This property is inherently owned by you and even the heirs to your estate for another 70 years. In other words, the intellectual property you are creating is likely worth far more in terms of income potential and personal legacy than your originals could be on their own. This is one of the great empowering aspects of being an artist, author, or musician, any of the creative pursuits, really. Besides inventors who have to go through a challenging patent process, only those of us in the arts have this unique authority to create intellectual property. And the beauty is the intellectual property we create is inherently and legally ours. We don't need to file copyrights to sell prints or license our work, and only we have the express authority to do so. So artists, get out there and claim your power.