How to Make Prints of Your Watercolor Paintings

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Kolbie and I'm a self-taught watercolor artist. I've been selling my art on Etsy and online, on Instagram for about three years. When I first started, I only sold original paintings. That means I hand-painted and hand-lettered all of the pieces that I sold because I was too scared to delve into the world of making prints. I didn't know how to make prints and I didn't know where to look, I didn't know what technology I needed. I didn't know if I should go with an outside vendor or if I should print them myself. There it was overwhelming, and so for a long time I made all of my own stuff and I recreated a bunch of stuff. That means I handmade every single piece of item, I mean, piece of art that I sold and I really undersold them. I sold them for not nearly as much as I should have for original artwork. Because I had such a hard time figuring out how to do prints, when I finally did find a process that I liked, I thought that it would make an excellent class because I'm sure there were people like me who were trying to figure this out by themselves and it's just there's not a lot of information out there, depending on how you look. Here's a class with my easy way to digitize your watercolor paintings. Could also be your hand-lettered paintings as well, but I do all of my digitization in Photoshop. This is a basic intro to digitization. It's not a really in-depth tour. It's just, go in, go out, make sure you have all the basics that you need to get a high-quality print. Then I'm going to talk about the difference between printing at home versus finding a vendor for your prints, and I'm going to go over a few definitions about printing as well. Like, what is it giclee print? What is a digital print? What is a fine art print? We're going to talk about all of those things. Then I'm going to demonstrate all of those processes to you and share with you my favorite vendor and how I order prints from them. If you've ever wanted to take paintings like this and turn them into prints like this that you can sell and reproduce without having to redo the paintings every single time, then this class is for you. These aren't the specific paintings that I'm going to digitize for you, but this is a real-life example of a print that I have sold in my shop before of a painting that is one of my most popular design. If all of this sounds like it could be really helpful for you and your art business. I would love for you to keep watching this class and take a peek into my process for creating art prints. 2. What You'll Need: Welcome to my class on how to make prints of your watercolor to the works of art. Before we get started going into the nitty-gritty details, let's take a look at what we're going to need to be successful in this process. First, you're going to need a scanner. A scanner is definitely necessary and a very good investment if you are an artist looking to make money off of prints or digital versions of your art. This scanner that you probably have at home that is maybe part of a three in one printer scanner copier function likely won't work. That's because those scanners often don't go up to as high of a resolution as you really need in order to make high-quality prints. I would recommend having at least a 400 DPI option on your scanner, but I think it's even better if you can go higher. So for that reason, I have an Epson Perfection V550 scanner. It was about somewhere between $200 and $300. So it's not an insignificant amount of money, but if you are planning to make money off of your art and sell it, then I think it's a worthy investment. So my Epson Perfection V550 I think goes up to above 2400 DPI and that is way more than you'll likely ever need. But I would recommend at least having between three and 600 DPI and your everyday at home scanner like we wouldn't have that. The absolute perfection V550 is what I have. You're also going to need a computer, so I'm using an iMac for all of these tutorials. You will need a smartphone to take pictures for the final project. Our final project for this class is going to be making a flat lay to showcase your prints online and also you're going to need some editing software. There are a lot of free editing software platforms that you can use. But I still hold strong to photoshop. I think that it's worth the investment. I know that paying the full amount for creative cloud like the whole suite is pricey, but if you just want photoshop, you can have a monthly option that's just photoshop. There are also options for like if you're a student and you have a student email, you can get a discount. Adobe also does Black Friday sales on Black Friday. They usually have a sale where their software is available for less. So there are some ways that you can make photoshop less expensive but I will admit that it's more than free. So if you want to look into other of the free editing software that's out there, please go for it, but this tutorial will focus on photoshop. Next, you will need Internet access and then optional you could have a fine art printer. We're going to talk more about this later if you want to look into printing your own high quality prints at home. Then I would also recommend getting an external hard drive because just as an artist and using digital files, those usually take up a significant amount of room because of the high resolution. So I always recommend having an external hard drive on hand, but just make sure when you buy one that you check the compatibility. If whether or not you have a Mac or you have a different computer, because not all hard drives are universal. So that is just a quick roundup of the materials that we're going to need and use for this digitizing process and ordering art prints process that I'm going to show you. So if you don't have any of these or you don't have all of these, that's okay. I hope that this class will still be helpful for you. But these are the materials that I'm going to use in this class. With that, let's move right along. 3. Intro to Digitizing, Part 1: Now that we have talked a little bit about what the materials you're going to need for this class, Let's dive right into digitizing your art work. I want to make a note, this is an introduction to digitizing, so we're not going to go into any advanced techniques or we're not going to talk about troubleshooting or any of the problems that you might have with digitizing if you already have experience with it. This is really just my quick and dirty way to digitize with Photoshop, so you're in and out and with very little hustle. I think that that makes it easier to get started. Then if you want to learn more about Photoshop, then feel free to obviously check out other tutorials. There's a decent chance that I'm going to do a more in-depth class on digitizing in the future. But for now, this is just the easiest ways that you can digitize your watercolor artwork in Photoshop. I also want to mention that you don't really need to do that much editing to your paintings. I think that some people think illustrator is the best platform to use for digitizing artwork, and illustrator is great if you want to create vectors of your art. If you want to be able to manipulate it much more in graphic design and other forms like that. But for watercolor, especially I think vectorizing it makes it a little cartoonish. It takes away the real life quality to it. I like to use Photoshop most often to do my digitizing so that I can maintain the really natural look of watercolor and that watercolor texture. Now that I've said a little bit about that, Let's quickly go over this process and then I'm going to demonstrate how I actually do it. First, we're going to scan your painting to a computer and I'm going to talk all about how the different settings when you scan, when I do that, but first thing to know is scan it to a computer. Optional is you can also take a picture with your phone. I'm not going to demonstrate that though because I don't recommend it. I think it's tricky to get the lighting right. But there are some apps and other options that you can look into if you don't have a scanner. But I recommend having a scanner especially if you want to pursue selling your artwork regularly. Scan it into a computer, upload your scan to Photoshop and then we're going to do two things in Photoshop. We're going to erase the photo background so that you have a transparent background, and then we're going to edit it slightly to either color correct, or to make it just pop a little bit more off the page. Finally, we're going to save it at two places where first we're going to save it to the Creative Cloud library for future use in Photoshop, and then we're going to save as a PNG at least 300 dpi in high resolution for future use. This is the digitizing process that we're going to do. Now let's take a look at how you do that. 4. Intro to Digitizing, Part 2: Now that we've gone over the process for digitizing, I actually want to show you what that looks like. First I'm going to pull up printers and scanners. I have my paintings. I'm scanning two paintings right now, loaded on my perfection V50, my Epson Perfection V5 scanner. I'm just going to open the scanner on my Mac. It's going to give me an overview scan, which will show me what the scan will look like. Like a preview of the scan basically before I scan it in. Then let's take a look at what characteristics we should look at before making the leap and pressing scan. First, let's look at resolution, which is measured in DPI or dots per inch. I always scan my paintings, I should say I almost always, but usually I scan my paintings at 600 DPI. Now, we talked before about how 300 DPI is necessary to make it a high resolution scan, and 300 DPI will ensure that your scan will be crisp and clear the same size that it is or smaller. I usually do 600 DPI though, because often the things that I paint are smaller than I actually want them to be on paper, and so 600 DPI ensures that you can enlarge your digital version of your painting up to two times its normal size and still have it be crisp and clear. That same math will hold the more dots per inch you use. For example, if 300 DPI is what you would do for one times the same size that your painting is. If you did 1200 DPI, then you could enlarge your painting up to four times that your painting is. But the more DPI that you do, the higher resolution your scan is, a, the longer it's going to take to scan it, and b, the more memory that it's going to take on your computer. That's something to note. If you are somebody who works with video and high-resolution things a lot, I would consider investing in an external hard drive just so you're not taking up so much space and slowing down your computer that way with really high res things. But I also will note that if you're just doing artwork to sell on Etsy shop or to make cards or to sell prints that are pretty average size like size 8 by 10 inches or smaller then, there's really no need to go higher than 600 DPI. There's that. You can also either detect separate items as you're scanning. I can scan these two paintings as two separate things, or I can say detecting enclosing box and scan them as one big thing. I'm going to scan them as one enclosed box because I'm going to separate and edit them in photoshop together. Once they're in Photoshop, then I'm going to save them as two separate files. But because I'm scanning them altogether to save time, I'm just going to scan them as the same thing. Then we're going to look down to, I named it Skillshare Photoshop because that's what I'm doing this for. Then the formats, you can save it honestly, it's pretty much anything that is compatible with Photoshop. I would recommend either scanning as a PNG, a PDF, or a JPEG. I usually just do PNG for the sake of consistency because that's what we're going to save it as at the end, but if you want to save it as a PDF or a JPEG to save space on your computer for this raw scan, then you can go ahead and do that as well. Those are the only things that I usually look at. Resolution, I'm saving it to the desktop. What am I naming it? How am I saving it? All of those things. You don't need to do a billion colors because we're not doing a big thing, you definitely do want to in color not black and white. Yeah, so pretty easy, and then I'm just going to hit "Scan". Once you have scanned in your file, the next step is open it up in Photoshop. I'm going to click "Open" and head to my desktop to see the file that I have scanned that I want to edit in Photoshop. Then I'm just going to go ahead and click "Open". Here are the two paintings I scanned into the system. The first thing I'm going to do is to separate these two paintings. I'm going to click on this lasso tool over here, and I'm just going to lasso this top painting and turn it into a new layer. Now that I have selected this, I'm going to right-click and do layer via cut. Now we'll just go ahead and cut these two paintings into two separate layers. I have the first layer and then I have a second layer. If I go over two layers over here and I click the little eyes, that will make each one visible. Let's work on this first layer. The two things that we're going to edit using Photoshop are we're going to edit out the background, so we have a transparent background and then we're going to touch up some of the colors and vibrance on the actual painting. First, let's get rid of the background. I'm going to use this eraser tool over here. If you click on the eraser tool and then hold, you have a few different options on this menu. We're only going to use the eraser tool first. That is so that we can eliminate all of the extra parts of the scan that aren't paper. It's scanned the bed of the scanner in that light blue gray area. We're going to use the eraser to get rid of that area. Now that we have gotten rid of all that blue stuff, then we're going to toggle over by clicking and holding to the magic eraser tool. The magic eraser tool isn't always foolproof, but usually it works really well. What it does is it erases everything in an open area that looks the same. If I click on the white on that area, it erases all of the things that look white. It didn't erase the white spots in the middle of the tree, but that's because there was this buffer of the color. You're going to have to go in separately. You can zoom in if you want to make it easier and use the magic eraser to get rid of just these little white spots in the tree. One thing I will note with the magic eraser is especially with watercolor, if you're trying to erase parts of white that are near like light parts of watercolor, which happens if you're blending or making different values, then sometimes it will erase all of that instead of just the white part, like what happened right there. That's something to be aware of. There are some tips and tricks to help to remedy that. We're going to talk a little bit about those in the next video when we edit the gouache mountain scape. First I'm just going to use, see right there, I accidentally clicked the orange, so we've got rid of all of the orange, but that's okay just press "Command" "Z" to undo and it was no big deal. I think that's all of the whitespaces. That looks pretty good. Now I'm going to use the eraser to erase the words because I don't need the words here, I just want the painting. It looks like up here, I'm going to make my eraser a little smaller because I've found a little black spot, a little black line right there that I'm just going to erase and do some touch ups. Perfect. Now we're going to go ahead and edit this. When you're editing, go to image and then go to adjustments. When you're editing watercolors in Photoshop, you really don't need to edit that many things. The reason I use Photoshop to edit is because I want to maintain watercolors natural presence. I don't want to make it look too cartoony. The things that I edit are brightness and contrast. I brighten it up just a little bit, and then I adjust a little bit of contrast also to help those colors pop. I don't do too much. Like if you did a ton of contrast they would look really over processed and not very nice. I only bump those up a little bit. Then after I do brightness and contrast, I go to hue and saturation. Hue is where you can slightly change the color or color correct. If the scan wasn't exactly what your original was, you can use this sliding scale to change the tones and underlying hues in the painting. I'm just going to make mine a little more red. Then saturation is how you make your colors more vibrant. By saturating them more, adding a little bit more dense pigmentation, you can just make them pop off the page, but be careful of this too because once again if you add too much saturation, it is not a good thing. I'm just adding a tiny bit of saturation, and then with hue I do want to know, you don't have to color correct if you don't want to. Sometimes I go to zero, I most often just do like one or two in either direction or I don't use it at all. Then saturation, I just bump up a little bit, and there we go. That's my finished edited version of this tree. I'm just going to use the move tool to move the tree in the middle, and then I'm going to save it as two different files. First I'm going to save it, I'm going to name this gouache mountain scape. I'm going to save it as a PNG, that will make sure that it has a transparent background. I'm just going to save that right to my desktop. Then I'm also going to save this again as a JPEG. That's because the platform that I use to make prints, the vendor that I use only takes JPEG's. I'm going to name this gouache mountain scape, and I'm going to save it to a folder that I have on my desktop called two print. We're going to talk about that more in the video where we upload this to the vendor site, but there we go. That is an easy way to go in and out of Photoshop and 10 minutes or less to prepare your files for digitization. Then the next video we're going to edit the other one. 5. Intro to Digitizing, Part 3: Now that we have digitized this little autumn tree graphic, I just want to talk a little bit about how to save it to your Creative Cloud Library. There's this option, there's this little tab window called libraries in Photoshop and this is where you can save some of your graphics if you want to use again or if you're planning to use graphics or photos with other projects in other Creative Cloud platforms, like if you have the whole Creative Cloud subscription, not just Photoshop. This is really useful for me, like when I created my wilderness watercolor workbook, I would edit my graphics and photos in Photoshop and then I would go to InDesign and they are just on the Creative Cloud server already. I have a lot of different folders in this libraries section and so I'm going to open up digital prints and this is where I would probably keep this graphic. In order to save this autumn tree watercolor, [NOISE] I'm just going to name it that autumn tree watercolor. A little illustration, I would drag my layer over to libraries until it shows me the plus sign and then just unclick and drop it there and now it's saved in my libraries so that I can use it in the future whenever I want, when I'm using Adobe products. That's something that's really useful, especially if you don't have tons of space on your computer. It's important to note that you do have a certain amount of saving space on your Creative Cloud in the Adobe server. This is a really useful tool to have and that's how you drop your layer right into your library of graphics. Now let's toggle over to this other layer. It looks like it's still locked because it's that background and so I'm just going to make this a layer. It doesn't have the lock symbol anymore, so that means that I can edit and we're going to do the same things that we did before. First, let's erase the background. I'm going to start with this original eraser tool, just like the manual one and make it big enough so I can erase all of this non paper space on here. If ever you have a space that looks white, you want to erase it so that you get this gray and white checkered background because the gray and white checkered is what means it's transparent. We're erasing everything with this manual eraser that's not the paper and that includes the gray blue background of the scanner and I'm trying to be careful not to veer into the painting too much. Then I'm just going to flip this around using my trackpad. One thing I want to note before we fully do the magic eraser is, or let me just show you. When I use the magic eraser on the outside of this frame without doing anything, you'll see that it erased some of the white paint from the waves that were along the bottom edge of this painting and that's because the white paint looked very similar to the white border of the paper. In order to avoid that, because we want to keep the paint, we want to keep the paint look. It's not quite the same if you have a transparent background. In order to avoid that, we're just going to manually erase the paper that's underneath the white spots that are in danger of being included in that magic eraser tool and that is because we know that the magic eraser works by working in areas. It's only going to erase the white spots that it can touch. If we erase the white part underneath here manually, then the white border frame around the painting is no longer touching this white part of the wave. Then if we toggle back to magic eraser and click "Erase" on the frame, it erases it without touching the waves, and then we are good to go. One last thing before I go to image editing is this painting, I'm just zooming in here. The tape on the painting was a little loose when I was painting it and so there are tiny little dots of paint that got loose on the edges, making the edge not quite so clean and so I'm just going to go in with my eraser and clean up some of those edges. It doesn't have to be exactly straight. In fact, if you want exactly straight, it's going to be hard [LAUGHTER] and take lot of your time. But I am just going to go and clean up some of the edges so it does look a little bit cleaner when I upload this into the print server and I think that's going to look really nice. Just taking a few minutes to notice some of these details and have a few crisp, clean edges, sometimes can make all the difference. After we do this, then I'm going to go into the image editing and once again, we're not going to do tons of editing or tons, of course, color correction. Mostly the colors look pretty good from the original that I have. There's not a real need to do a lot of color correction here but we do want to look at it and maybe make some of the colors a little more vibrant. I cleaned up most of the edges here, so I'm going to zoom back out so that I can see this painting. Then I'm going to go to image and adjustments and brightness and contrast. I'm just going to tick up the brightness just a little bit, add a little bit more contrast and that looks pretty good. Then I'm going to go to adjustments, hue saturation. I don't need to adjust the hue, it already looks pretty good to me, but I am going to increase the saturation just a little bit to make these colors a little bit more vibrant, a little bit more pigmented. For the record, I never really have a set number or a specific setting that I shoot for, because I've found that paintings are so different and so I can never eyeball it and I do a case by case. Then one last thing before we save this is, I'm going to lasso this painting in order to select it. I caught a little end of that corner there, so I want to lasso the whole painting. I keep being super unwieldy and accidentally clipping some of it. I want to get the whole painting in this lasso so that I can select it and right-click and then I'm going to go to free transform and this is so that I can move the painting, and especially so I can rotate it. When I move my mouse up to the little rectangle box where I can transform this, I have this up and down arrow, but I want to move it just a little farther up so that I have the side to side one, and that's so that I can rotate it just a little bit, so it's a little straighter on my paper. Then if I do Command D to de-select, then I can make sure that my painting is a little more straight on this graphic, and so when I need to manipulate it on the platforms that I'm going to upload this to it won't be as wonky. There is my file and now I'm going to save as a PNG and as a JPEG. Here's the PNG and I'm just going to gouache mountain scape. [LAUGHTER] It looks like that's hilarious. It looks like in the previous video that I digitize the autumn tree, I named that one gouache mountain scape instead of autumn tree. That's really funny. I'm going to name this mountain scape number 1 and save that as a PNG just so it has a different name and then I'm going to save this again. It's being saved. I can't save it again until it's actually saved as the PNG. I'm going to save it as a JPEG in the to print folder and that's once again for when we find our vendor and use them to print, use our platform to order prints of our stuff. I'm just saving that. There we go. That concludes this digitizing video where we go into all of the ins and outs of using Photoshop in very basic ways to digitize our artwork. [NOISE] 6. Giclee vs Fine Art vs Digital Print: Before we dive even further into making prints, I want to talk a little bit about some definitions to nip this in the bud in case there are any misconceptions of what we're talking about here. One definition I want to talk about first is printmaking. Printmaking has a long history in the art world, like hundreds of years old and traditionally, printmaking is the process of reproducing images from some original source. But usually when we're talking of printmaking, it's like making a print lithography, so using linoleum to etch into some surface or engraving on a surface or a carving something out of wood and then putting ink on whatever surface you're carving on and then transferring that image, transferring using the ink onto another surface. Screen printing is also like a more modern version of printmaking. This is not what we're talking about here. Printmaking is its own art form. Saying stamp is a really oversimplification of the art of printmaking. But essentially, that's what a lot of printmaking traditionally refers to, is carving out some image or something. You don't always have to carve, but that's just the first thing that comes to mind. Or like when you think of a printing press, how they use the characters of the letters and rearrange them every time and then put ink all over them to stamp them over and over again. That's printmaking in the traditional sense. What we're talking about is creating digital prints. Creating digital prints from technology is a process that wasn't really streamlined or created until the 20th century. It's a cool history if you want to do some googling and look more into the history of printmaking and the history of G clay prints. That could be fun for you. But for now, we're just going to differentiate between the two. We are not talking about their traditional art form of printmaking, where you create a piece of art by etching or some other means on surface and then transferring it over to something else. We're talking about scanning or creating digital versions of a piece of art, so that could be for us is watercolor paintings or a hand-lettered piece would also work as well. Scanning that, turning it into a digital form, and then printing it using an inkjet printer. That leads us into the next line of definitions we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about what's the difference between a fine art print, a G clay print, and digital print? First, I'm going to say digital print is the broadest of all of those terms. A digital print is just a print or a reproduction of a piece of artwork using digital technology. By digital technology, we're saying like either you took a picture or you took a scan, and then you used computers and technology to edit and then reproduce via an inkjet printer, or some other way, but either way, we're using digital technology in order to reproduce a piece of art. That is a digital print. Digital prints can range from really expensive, high-quality fine art prints to printing a picture that you found on the internet and printed it off with your home office printer. Digital prints encompass all of those things. In the art world, in the ETC world, a lot of people sell digital prints that you wouldn't classify as fine art prints or G clay, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, but they're still valuable and people still like them a lot. There's no shame in having digital prints and not using these really high-quality traditional processes. You can just use a Costco as a printer or you can use other places that don't focus on fine art, high-quality printing, and that's okay. Especially if you're trying to do a low budget make art that people can buy for $10 or less or something, then that's probably the route that you would go. But in this specific class, I'm focusing more on high-quality fine art prints. Some of these terms that we're going to look for, if you want to sell high-quality prints of your watercolor paintings, that's really what I'm focusing on in this class. Now let's gear more toward fine art versus G clay. A fine art print is a form of a digital print, like we talked about. Basically a fine art print just means that you're using really high-quality materials to reproduce your art. Traditionally, fine art prints are like prints of big paintings or of really complex pieces of art. I would say, like in a museum, sometimes fine art prints aren't even on paper. They can be printed on Canvas, they can be reprinted on other things. Often fine art prints use such a specific process that will ensure that the print is as close to the painting as possible. That gives us more towards the even more narrowed G clay print. A G clay print is, G clay is a French word that means to spray. I'm pretty sure. It was invented, I think as I was doing my research in the 1970s, the G clay printing process was invented where you use digital technology like scanning and photography to transfer an image and reproduce a painting using an inkjet printer. That's why G clay to spray using an inkjet printer because it's sprays on the ink. When you're producing a G clay print, you're doing a very specific and traditional process. Typically, a G clay print is printed on an inkjet printer, so that means it sprays the ink, with at least seven colors. To put that into perspective, if you have a home office printer, likely your printer has four colors. It uses the CKMY color scheme, which is cyan, black, magenta, and yellow. If you're trying to print a G clay print, you need at least seven colors, and that's because it helps to keep your prints true to color and to get as detailed as possible with the highest possible detail mixed. A lot of G clay prints or actually printed using even more colors than that, like nine or 10 on the printer. But to make it have a BAG clay, it has to be at least seven. You're using seven different colors and you're using pigmented archival ink. Pigmented means that its color is derived from pigments as opposed to dye. Dye-based inks are derived from different chemicals that you have in the ink. The biggest difference between pigment-based and dye-based is pigment-based inks are more permanent. That means that they're going to last longer and they're going to last longer in the sun. If you accidentally spill water on a pigment-based ink, it's not immediately going to erupt into a blurry mess. Whereas dye-based inks are more easily reactivated with water. G clay prints are printed with pigment-based and archival ink. Archival just means permanent also, so it's able to be archived. If you've ever seen Micron pens, if you're trying to get a pen that you can draw and paint watercolor on top of it, you need archival so that it doesn't reactivate. So it's waterproof. G clay prints use archival pigment-based ink and they use archival paper. Archival paper also means that the paper is not going to disintegrate or discolor after a period of time. It just, once again, means that it will last probably not forever, but for a really long time. Most of the time archival papers are 100 percent cotton. If you do watercolor, you know that 100 percent cotton watercolor paper is definitely the preferred paper that you have for that reason as well. When G clay prints are printed on 100 percent cotton paper, it also makes them much more lifelike in terms of while you don't have the original painting because you're using pigmented archival ink on archival paper, it still looks like it could be a painting. That's just a little breakdown of what a G clay print is and things that you need to look for. Another important thing to look for is G clay prints are usually printed on a wide format printer. Wide format just means that you can print big pieces of paper on it. A lot of art printers have big giant paintings that are like size 18 by 24 inches or something, and then use photography and high-quality pictures instead of a scanner to edit a digital version of their painting together and then print it on that big printer. G clay prints typically use a wide format printer. With the kind of prints that you are likely doing, if you are just trying to sell on Etsy shop or to sell like eight by 10 or five by seven prints, you don't need necessarily to have a wide format printer. But it's useful to know that that's why they have those there. Just to wrap up, that's some of the definitions that are important as we go into this class. I'm mostly going to talk about fine art prints and G clay prints throughout this class. But I also have a lesson later on where I talk about digital prints and how to put your digitized paintings on other products as well, if that is something that you are interested in doing and selling other things aside from art prints that have your artwork on it. With that, let's move right along. 7. At-Home vs Vendor: Let's talk just a little bit of time to talk about the difference between printing at home versus using a vendor. There are few things to consider. First, let's think about convenience and control, cost, and then timeline. Convenience. Obviously, I think that using a vendor, I think that both of them have convenience in their own way. Using a vendor is convenient because you can just send off your print or your graphic and then they're doing all of the work for you and making sure that it's a high quality print versus when you're doing it at home, it might take a little bit more finagling and doing the research to find exactly the right printer that you like. But then again, it also takes some research and picking a vendor that's good. You have to look at reviews and make sure that you're not being scammed or I don't know. I think that there's a lot to be said. Like both options are convenient in their own ways. But after I weighed out everything, I go with a vendor, mostly because, and this is something that's also important. High-quality fine art printers are big and they're expensive. Just honestly because they're big, I don't really have the room to have one in my house. When it comes to convenience, the convenience factor going with a vendor wins for me. But you should definitely weigh those things in your mind for you and figure out how that fits with your lifestyle. When you're printing at home, you can have the convenience of printing whenever you want, however many you want versus with a vendor, you probably have to wait for a few days and go through the process of figuring out their platform. I think that convenience is something important, but there are different types of convenience. Next up is control. Obviously when you're printing at home, you have the most control. If you're somebody who really wants to make sure that what is being printed is exactly [NOISE] what you had in mind then I would go with an at-home printer and just try to do all of that. Versus if you're okay, handing over the control of what the print looks like along with your money to a vendor, then it's less time that you have to spend doing it, but you're also giving up some of that control. I will say most fine art printers are really open and transparent and are willing to work with you to send you proofs and have phone calls and conversations and figure out exactly what you want so that you're not relinquishing all of the control. But there are also some vendors who if you're hands-off and don't like talking to people, like me [LAUGHTER] I just want a high-quality art print. Honestly, for me, it's more about how many people don't I have to talk to because I'm a super introvert and I don't like being on the phone for longer than I need to be, and still maintain the quality art that I look for. I have the vendor that I go with, White House Custom Color, which I'm going talk about later, really works for me in that way. But I know a lot of people really prefer to just take everything into their own hands and do it themselves. That's a factor to consider as well. Next is cost. I think that printing your own prints at home is not going to cost you as much money each time, but fine art printers are expensive, and fine art ink is expensive. Honestly, I have not done the math to determine which version, like whether at home or vendor in the long run, like over the course of a year or whatever, which one is less expensive but I am going to say that both of them have [NOISE] their pros and cons. The cons of at home is you're going to have a lot of overhead. It's going to cost a lot of money to buy the printer. It's going to cost a lot of money to buy the supplies like the ink, and you might have to fix the printer if it jams sometimes some at-home fine art printers, I know, if you don't use them every week, the inkjets start to clog and so you might have to deal with that [NOISE] But also when you use a vendor, you do pay more for the prints [NOISE] than you would if you were just paying for the paper yourself. It's a matter of if you would rather pay more upfront or if you would rather not have to deal with the hassle and pay a little bit more as you go along. It's a give-and-take, I think. Then finally, timeline obviously, when you're printing at home, as long as you have all the supplies on hand, you can just print whatever you need and ship it out like that day, versus when you're working with a vendor usually takes at least a few days, both for them to format your work into a print and to ship it to you. So you have to factor in a few extra days on your timeline when you're considering whether or not to work with a vendor. But I think there are certainly pros and cons to both versions, to both methods and I don't think there's a right or wrong answer, really I don't. For me, I live in a one-bedroom apartment with my son and my husband, and I don't have a ton of time to spend doing all of that printing. I have very limited time and also art prints are not my main source of income, and so I only sell them occasionally which means that going with a vendor is the right choice for me. After this slide, we're mostly going to talk about how I go through finding a vendor and things to look for in that regard. But if you decide that you want to print at home some fine art home printers. I did a little bit of research just to get you on the right track. The Epson SureColor Series is pretty highly regarded and some of the forums that I was looking at. So there are a few different printers in that series with Epson brand or the Canon PIXMA PRO series. Both of those are fine art printers. You just want to make sure that you're looking for a printer that is a wide frame printer. Make sure that it's a wide frame fine art printer, and then it has at least seven colors in the inkjet lineup and also make sure that you purchase pigment-based archival ink. I mean, well, that's if you want to print a giclee, I guess. [LAUGHTER] If you want to. Going back to the difference between digital and giclee, all of these costs. I'm talking about referred to if you want to print like fine art giclee prints. If you are okay printing just on card stock and you don't really care about archival ink or pigmented ink, and it's all of those things aren't as important to you, mostly so that you can sell your art at a less expensive price, then whatever printer you have might work. But I will say that I tried to do my own prints with my office HP printer, and it did not go very well. We're going to talk more about giclee and digital prints as we talked about vendors in the next lessons. That wraps up this at home versus using a vendor discussion. Now let's move on to the next slide. 8. Selecting a Vendor, Part 1: Now that we have talked about the difference between at-home printing and using a vendor, and that you know that I prefer to use a vendor, I'm going to give a little bit of love to how to decide which vendor, which printing house to use. When I first started the journey of figuring out how to produce prints of my art, I had no idea where to start. I had no idea what to look for and I was lost for a long time. More than anything, I hope that this class helps makes you less lost than I was, and more prepared to make the choice that's right for you. First let's just take a look at this list. If you don't even want to do any of your own research, you just want to use what I use, my vendor is White House Custom Color. In the next slide, in the next lesson, I'm going to take you through the process that I use for White House Custom Color and show you how to do all of that. But there are some other vendors I found here that work just as well. These three are all online that you can use from anywhere. White House Custom Color, I'm not exactly sure where they're located, but I just use their online platform to upload my graphics, upload my digitized artworks, and then I choose the options that I want and then I send it in and I pay for it and then they ship me my prints and it's worked pretty well. Also, I found a place called White Wall that does that, and also a place called FinerWorks. I'm sure you can find dozens and dozens of other places if you do your own research. You could also consider looking at a fine art print shops in your local town, so in your community. I live in Northern Virginia, so a local publishing house that I've found before is called Old Town Editions. Often, these local shops, like Old Town Editions for example, I would have to make an appointment and then go in and talk with them and they would talk through their options with me and we'd figure out what would work best. If you prefer to build relationships that way and have somebody help you on this print process, then going with more of a family owned or local print shop, I think is going to be a good option. Just make sure that whatever print shop you're looking for, they produce fine art prints, not business cards or business things. Sometimes when you go to printing shops, like for example, if you go to UPS or if you go to FedEx, both of those places have printing services available, or if you use VistaPrint or any of those other business-focused printing shops, they're probably not going to have the options that you want for a quality fine art print. With that caveat, I will say I have printed art from UPS before, that was when I very first started. I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea where to start, and some people had recommended Costco or UPS, and so I did that and it worked. But I will say that their color correction wasn't great. I wasn't super happy with it. When I finally looked and did the research on what fine art prints were versus just printing at a business place like that, it made a really big difference. I would recommend looking for if you want high-quality prints that people can frame and that you can feel good selling for more than $20 or $30. Then I would recommend looking for a fine art printing place. If you don't want to use any of these that I have as options and you want to try to find your own, I have some key phrases that might help you. I would search for fine art printing or giclee printing or quality fine art prints, quality art prints, online art prints. Specifically make sure that they are selling fine art prints as opposed to business cards or greeting cards or things like that. Well, greeting cards, you could probably find other places. I talked a little bit about that too, how you can use your digitized art to put on products. But specifically, as we're talking about fine art prints, just know the difference between printing shops that focus on business and printing shops that focus on art because they have different technology and different skill sets. Then as you are evaluating vendors, it's important to look for keywords and phrases there too. Like we talked about the difference between digital prints and giclee prints, where digital prints are just any print that is printed on a piece of paper, but it doesn't take into account the specific dye or the specific quality. It's just any digital reproduction versus giclee print, which is a really narrow and specific print that uses a wide format printer with at least seven inks and archival ink and archival paper. If you're looking, giclee is very high-quality and it is one of those words in the art community that people look for to signify that the print you're making is of the highest quality you can. As you're looking at printers and vendors, look for these keywords and don't just look for giclee, make sure you look for the other words that accompany what a giclee print is. Look for wide format printer and archival ink and paper and 100 percent cotton paper and pigmented inks, things like that so that you can tell that they're using giclee correctly and that you're actually getting what you pay for that you're looking for. That's just a little bit that I have to say about selecting a vendor. We're going to continue looking at vendors and this process in the next lesson. 9. Selecting a Vendor, Part 2: In this video, we are going to take a look at how to use the keywords that we have talked about to research and find a vendor that's right for you. In the previous video, I took you through my top choice, the vendor that I use, White House Custom Color. I want to show you their website. Then we are going to use the keywords to test out looking for a different vendor if you prefer. Here is White House Custom Color. Right off the bat, they have a clean website. They're not paying me for this by the way, they really are just a vendor that I found that I really like. I'm going to go ahead and look at their products and see what they offer. It looks like White House Custom Color offers like sample sets and other things that you can buy, cards, books, boxes. But when I was looking, I pressed print to see what prints they offer. It looks like they offer photographic prints and fine art prints, and fine art prints is exactly what I'm looking for. But we know that when we're looking at prints and we're looking at publishing houses that offer print services, we want to make sure to find the keywords that indicate that it's a fine art print and or a giclee print. First, let's look at their three superior surfaces. They offer fine art papers of superior quality. That's pretty vague wording. I don't really know what superior quality is supposed to mean. Obviously, it means it's supposed to be of excellent quality, but I'm not 100 percent sure until they tell me what it's made of. They give a little bit of just like a vague description there. Then into the finest materials section they produced to the highest archival standards. There's that word we're looking for archival, meaning permanent. We know that they're using archival materials and fine art papers are acid-free, pH neutral and made from pure cellulose. Acid-free means that it's not going to discolor over time, so that's good. They're inkjet printed. Inkjet is the printer we know that giclee prints are made from, so that's good. With archival pigment inks, again there's archival with the inks, that's another word we're looking for that significantly enhance visual brilliance of both your color and black and white images. We've seen archival, we've seen inkjet, things we haven't seen are like wide format printer. We also haven't seen how many inks they use. We haven't seen 100 percent cotton quite yet. But if we go down to smooth matte, immediately smooth matte, they offer three kinds of paper. Smooth matte is 100 percent cotton hot press paper. It has a smoothest surface for our fine art papers. It looks like both smooth matte and velvet offer 100 percent cotton paper and then torchon by Hahnemuhle is actual watercolor paper. I think that it's a mixed between student grade and professional grade watercolor paper, but it is real. It is very cool that they offer a legitimate watercolor cold press paper. That's the torchon option. Just based on what I know about paper and what we talked about, their paper is archival and would work pretty well. The only thing about White House Custom Color is, I don't know how many inks they use, I don't know what printer they use. Their prints might not specifically be giclee because as I said, giclee has very fine art specifications be classified like that. But they do offer fine art prints at a high-quality and they don't say giclee anywhere here. Probably when I offer my prints, I don't say that they are giclee, I just say they're high-quality fine art prints, and I think that that works just as well. The thing that I really loved most about White House Custom Color after ordering from them is their pricing. They are a little less expensive than other places and was still high-quality paper and archival ink it works for me. Like if I go to the pricing here for fine art prints, if I go down to size, I go to 8 by 10, which is the size that I most often when I order prints, the smooth matte hot press paper is $3.57, the velvet paper is $4.95, and the torchon watercolor paper is $5.87. These options are pretty inexpensive, that is for one print. As you are pricing your prints, it's good to know that this is how much it would cost to purchase one print on your end and then whatever you wanted to charge additional to that is how much your profit would be. We are not going to go a whole lot into pricing in this video. But I will say that normally a fine art print at an 8 by 10 goes for at least $30. That's something to think about. Then it looks like down here they also have various mounting options. If you want to mount it on a map board, make it good for framing, if you know anything about framing, they have a few options here as well. This is White House Custom Color, I really like their services. They've done a pretty good job. Before you order, you have to make an account with them to become a client. As you do that, they offer you I can't remember if it was free for or if I had to pay $5, but they offer you a few prints to test out before you go ahead and order, so that was nice. Anyway, so this is the vendor that I use. Then in the next video I'm going to go through some of the other keywords that we've talked about to select a vendor if you don't want to use this place or if you want to do some more research. Now we've taken a look at White House Custom Color, which is the vendor that I use. You might still want to do some shopping around, mostly because White House Custom Color didn't specifically say that they use giclee. If you want to use the phrase giclee when you're selling your prints, then you might want to do a little bit more research. I'm going to show you what that looks like for me when I'm looking for a vendor because when I first started, that was the hardest part, was figuring out what even to look for and what was going to be the best. How to know the difference between places like Costco prints or like real fine art prints. If I type in the phrase Giclee fine art prints immediately pops up this Mpix Giclee photo printing place. I'm going to take a look at what they offer. I will say I can't remember if I mentioned this before or not, but Giclee prints, photographers also use Giclee prints to sell their work as well. That's where this is going right now. I want to see, it says in details right here, that Giclee printing process provides higher image detai and traditional photographic printing seven dye-based inks, okay, they already have the amount of inks prerequisite. They need seven dye-based inks, except they're using dye base instead of pigment-based. That's maybe not something that we want. Because dye-based, remember, is more likely to smudge, more likely to if it gets wet, to reactivate. Giclee prints offer a vibrant color reproduction, enhanced image clarity on your choice of Archivo quality, Demat, fine art, or high gloss paper. They offer high archival quality paper. But the dye based is something that would turn me off because we want pigment-based archival inks, not dye-based. Maybe not Mpix for fine art printing. But let's take a look at this white wall store. Giclee and fine art printing. They have a testimonial right off the bat, looks like down here. They offer a Hahnemuhle fine art print. We know that Hahnemuhle is a good paper. Maybe, let's see what this Hahnemuhle Fine art print has to offer. It's 1395, which is expensive. But if it's a Fine Art Prints and you feel like you can turn that at a profit then that's not like out of the ordinary. Let's look at these details. Nine color print using Epson ultra Chrome pro pigments. They're using nine pigment-based inks. That is exactly what we're looking for in terms of classifying it as a Giclee print, so that's really good. Let's look to see what other things that they talk about. I think that the Hahnemuhle have some sizing down here. So 8 by 12. They don't offer 8 by 10, which makes sense actually if it starts at a higher price. So noting those sizes is going to be important. But we know that a Hahnemuhle is a pretty good paper quality. We're relying on that. But I do want to see if we can find archival paper or 100 percent cotton paper anywhere on Hahnemuhle Authentic art paper is regarded as top of the line. We offer five different options. Oh right, I didn't see these down here. They do have a photo Rag which is 100 percent cotton, and then torch on, which is the same option that White House custom color offered, and some other nice high-quality papers. It looks like these probably you would be able to classify as Giclee. Again, it is a little more expensive than White House custom color, but you might have to pay a few extra dollars in order to ethically used that term g clay print as you're selling it. Those are just a few things to look for. Maybe let's take a look at this old town additions place, which I mentioned in an earlier slide, that old town addition is a local print shop in my area. Local print shops could be a really good way to go. If A, you're looking to source your stuff locally and B, if you want more of an intimate person-to-person experience as you're learning about prints and how to print your artwork. Like this old town additions place gives a lot of information about people who are new to printing and professional artists. It looks like they offer photo restoration and they talk a lot about what it means to work with them. They also have the option to make an appointment. It looks like during COVID-19 , appointments are required, but it's nice that they do things called print consultations, so, you can make an appointment with them to go over like what is a Giclee print and what is their process? If you want to learn a little bit more about that from people who have been in the field for decades. I would recommend going local if once again you want that kind of person-to-person feel and you want to have a little more help guiding you through that process. Now before we go, I do want to take a look to see if we can find the keywords in Fine Art Paper printing that we have learned to look for to make sure that it is the kind of fine art that we know about. It looks like they have varying sizes here. Right off the bat. It's not super easy for me to find what stuff they use and that might be because they are kind of taking control of teaching you what a Giclee Print is. Okay, but in the middle it says, our main lines of paper are Hahnemuhle, Arches and Summer sets, which I know all of those are watercolor paper, professional watercolor paper brands. That is a good sign. This is the kind of thing where especially because you need to make an appointment before you order with them, you could ask about what kind of printers they use, how many inks are used? Are they pigment-based? The kinds of questions that you know you need to ask that they don't really share right off the bat with their on their website. But because you know that information, because they would likely be talking to you about this anyway in their consultations. You can show them that you know your stuff and even be willing to learn a little bit from them as well. That wraps up this video on researching vendors. Now let's take a look at how I use White House custom colors platform to order my prints. 10. Ordering Your Prints: Now that we've gone through the different vendors and researching a vendor, you know that I use White House Custom Color. White House Custom Color has their own platform that you download onto your computer so that you can upload your artwork to their system and then you can purchase right from this platform that they have. I'm just going to open it up right here and show you what it looks like to go through this process and order a print from them in case you're interested in working with them or in case any of the other printers that you might work with have similar processes. We're opening up this ROES platform that they have and off to the side here you can see you can order products and view your order and show uploads. Then this is my account and it will show all of the prices and allow you to rotate things in the platform. We're going to click on Products and then right over here on this drop-down menu, I want to go to Fine Art Prints. I'm going to click on Fine Art Prints right here. Then I'm going to click on the kind that I want. We know that they have three papers. They have smooth matte, which is 100 percent cotton cold press paper. They have Torchon, which is Hahnemuhle watercolor paper, smooth matte is hot press, not cold press, Torchon watercolor paper. Then the velvet rag, which is also 100 percent cotton, but it's a little more delicate. You have a little bit more texture there. Typically when I start, when I do prints, if I'm just starting out, I would do this smooth matte option because it's still archival paper and It's definitely high-quality. Torchon or velvet, you would do if you wanted more of a texture to your paper, which is a good option as well. All of these are pretty good options. If I'm doing the smooth matte option, I'm going to just check this box that is 8 by 10. It brings up a blank piece of paper. Basically, I'm going to upload any of the prints, any of the digitized graphics that I have. How you do that is when we did the digitizing process, we saved our digital versions of the paintings into a folder called To Print that I keep on my desktop. I went a little bit over that in the digitizing video. But just to make that clear with this particular platform, you need to put your graphics, to put your digital versions of your paintings in a folder in order for this system to recognize it. That's why I made the folder To Print right on my desktop and that's where I save them. I also note that on this platform you have to upload JPEGs. You can't upload PNGs, which is different from if you are trying to put your print on a product or sometimes even other platforms use PNGs instead of JPEGs. But that's why when we saved this out of Photoshop, we saved it both as a JPEG and as a PNG. First, let's click on this gouache mountain scene that I digitized in the earlier video. It's upside down, it looks like. I can just click these arrows to rotate the paper. I do want to say that even though it looks upside down, it's not going to stay that way. [LAUGHTER] You can turn the paper right side up when you get it, but you can also use these arrows over here, it looks like when I clicked, to rotate the actual painting. These ones down here rotate the paper. Then these ones up here, once you click on the painting, rotate the actual painting. Here's how the gouache landscape will look when it's on this Size 8 by 10 paper. I can choose to zoom if I want to, to see, to go inward like that and then clicking that lock symbol just locks it into place right there. This option turns the image into its original size, which crops it. Then if I click it again, it zooms up and enlarges it so it fits the paper. You can manipulate the graphic how you want. If you want your prints to be more like have a turn of white space on the edge, that sometimes is a fun way to go or you can just zoom to fit so that it will fit on the inside. This gouache original painting was smaller, even if your painting is a little bit smaller, if you did save it at 600 DPI, then you should be able to zoom in to twice its size and still have the clear crystal content without it getting super blurry. But if you are worried about that, then just make sure to use the right size painting when you digitize it. I like how it's zoomed in like this. I like the smooth matte Size 8 by 10. Then after the side you have some mounting options. I have done a map board before and what this does is if you click map board as an additional $4.50 and they basically just glue a foam mat board to the paper, so it is all ready for framing. You can offer that as a premium option if you want. I'm not going to offer any of those when I order this. Then you just go ahead and click Add to Order and it adds to your cart. Then if you want to add something else, if just delete that and then add the autumn tree that I did before, I can use the rotate button to move this around and move it around on the paper and I would do the exact same thing. Just click Add to Order and there are my prints. If I go to check out over here, I can make sure that I have all the options that I want. It's smooth matte, 8 by 10, the right pictures that I uploaded, and then I can change the quantity. Then once I'm done, you just click Complete Order down here and it uploads it to the server. You can also click this color correction option, where the printers will actually go in and make sure that the colors match the printer. I think that this is a good option in order just to double-check your basis to make sure that your prints come out looking really nice. That's what I would do. I would press Complete Order and then you're good to go. 11. Digital Printing: Before we go, I do want to spend just a few minutes talking about other ways to use digital printing. If you aren't sure if you want to go the fine art print and G clay print route, that's totally fine. There's definitely a market for you spending a little bit less money for a little lower quality, but that will make it more affordable for other people to buy your artwork and it opens the door to other fun and quirky things that you can put your artwork on and sell yourself. For digital printing, I'm thinking of things like lesser quality digital prints that use maybe dye-based ink, not the high quality printers or not necessarily the archival paper, but that's still are fun pieces of artwork that people can buy, and frame, and use in their house without having the pressure of maintaining this really high quality print. You can also make things like greeting cards or bookmarks or stickers or enamel pins or put your designs on clothing, etc, anything like that. Most objects actually you can customize. You can use the digital design that you created by digitizing your artwork and put it on something that you can sell at places like craft fairs or online on an Etsy shop or on your own shop or anything like that. Those are obviously things that you should look into and think of for yourself. Here are some of the vendors that I know off the top of my head that sells these things. I have sold bookmarks before and not just crappy bookmarks, but bookmarks that have some nice silk print on the outside, so they're really sturdy, heavy-duty bookmarks. I've used UPrinting for that. I've also used Sticker Mule to print stickers. Printed Mint has a lot of different options that you can use to sell things like [inaudible] and T-shirts, and bags, and other things like that. Printed Mint is a little more expensive, but they do have some pretty good quality stuff. RedBubble and Society6 are two very similar places where you can have your own shop. They handle all of the shipping and they handle all of the production. All you do is upload your work onto their platform and then decide what options you want to sell in your shop that's on their platform and then you make a small commission from it. The downside of places like RedBubble and Society6 is you don't make a ton of money off of every sale. But the upside is you don't have to do basically anything except for a little bit of advertising. Society6 and RedBubble are good options. You could also look more into licensing, which we're not going to cover basically at all in this class except for what I'm talking about right now. But licensing is when you essentially give other artists or other companies permission to use your artwork on products that they are going to sell. Some places have a good way for you to license your work in a lower-pressure environment. Creative Market is one of those marketplace platforms where you can upload your work onto Creative Market and people can purchase your artwork, purchase licenses and that can continue to make you money. Or you can even license your artwork on Etsy directly and just sell your digital art with a caveat of this is how many products that you can sell with it and etc, like that. If you're interested in learning more about licensing, again, we're not going to talk much more about it in this class, but there are a lot of options for licensing your artwork as well. That about covers, I'm going to say, about digital printing. Since, again, this class is mostly about making a fine art prints, like making high quality prints of your art that you can sell. But you can sell and you can make a really good and fun living and have some fun options to your shop if you look into some variety of products to sell as well. This really just [LAUGHTER] marks the beginning of products that you can sell at craft fairs and in your online shop. I would definitely do some more research, look at other shop owners that you know and love that are selling things, and see what you think might fit with your aesthetic and your brand, then put together what you think you would like to try. I do want to say that selling things to people, being a business-to-customer business model is a lot of trial and error. Sometimes you might try something and nobody bites, nobody buys it, and sometimes you might try something else and you're completely sold out. You really never know. There are a lot of factors that go into it, but I wouldn't be afraid to give something a try. I also would not put your eggs all in one basket. I've been burned more than once by spending a lot of money to buy a lot of product of one specific thing thinking that I was going to sell out and then nobody bought it and I just had like a bunch of inventory of products that I wasn't sure if I was going to sell it or not. There are pros and cons to having physical product and inventory in your shop. For that reason, I might consider pre-sales or things like that. But mostly I wanted to bring that up so that you know selling your art is not an exact science. It's going to take some bravery and some courage and also it's going to take some failure along the way to figure out exactly what that means for you. But don't give up, keep giving it a shot and keep experimenting with it. 12. Tips for Selling: Finally, I just wanted to give you a few tips on selling your artwork. Once you have the prints, once you've done everything that you need to do, how do you actually get people to buy them? It is a question millions of people have asked before you and millions of people will ask after you and it's definitely something I still have to grabble with. But here are some things I've learned along my journey of selling my artwork. Number 1 is I would definitely recommend diversifying the kinds of things, the places that you put your artwork. I wouldn't put your eggs all in one basket, so to speak. What I mean by that is if you sell on Etsy, I would recommend branching out and selling other places as well. Maybe having your own shop or selling some things via Instagram stories, like having one-off flash sales or doing Etsy and Society6 or basically just looking for more places that you can put your artwork. The reason I say that is because the most successful artists that I know, at least in the sense of this as a side hustle turned a full-time business, or you're just trying to make some extra money, or even the big time artists that are six and seven figures in, they have multiple streams of income. That's advice that I've received from all of my business and research into business is the more income streams you have, the more chance you have of turning your creativity into a livable wage. The more you diversify your portfolio in that way, like putting your art in lots of different places, the better chance you have at really returning, getting a nice return on your investment. Use Etsy, like I said, don't just use Etsy, try to put your art in lots of different places. That could include going to craft fairs and asking local shop owners if they'd be willing to sell your art and other things like that. I think that it can be scary to think of ways, think of places where you can sell your art, but it's definitely worth it. Diversifying where you sell is probably my number 1 tip to finding places to making enough money to make this investment really worth it for your budget and for your lifestyle. I think it's also important to diversify in terms of what you sell. I know that a lot of people will tell you to niche down and I think that that is important. But before you can niche down and figure out exactly what it is you're good at selling, you need to throw some paint to the wall. I think that for me it was a lot easier to pick my niche to figure out exactly what people really loved buying from me and what I really loved making after I'd already made a bunch of stuff [LAUGHTER] and figured it out that way. I think that there may be a little more eloquent ways to niche down and home in on what your superpower is, what your specific brand voice is. But if you're just starting diversifying and trying out a lot of different things is a sure-fire way. It might take a long time, but it's a sure-fire way to figure out what your audience is saying. That leads me into listen to your audience. I think that one myth with artists and making a living as an artist is that if you make stuff because people want you to make stuff, that means you're "selling out." While I think that there are some cases where if you're making something that you're ethically opposed to or morally opposed to or you just hate doing only for the reason of making a whole lot of money, maybe that is selling out, but is selling out a bad thing? That's a debate for another day. For this specific class, I just want to drive home the point that listening to your audience, meaning listening to the people who are going to buy your art, is important. It's important to make stuff that people will buy because otherwise who's going to buy it? One way to listen to your audience is to build an audience. Whether you're on social media or whether you are out in your community really talking to people who might be buying your art, it's important to notice what they like and what your customers pay attention to and to focus on that data and use it to keep making the art that sells. Not that you need to have that limit where you go creatively, but if you want to make a business out of selling your art, I think it's important to know your audience. Really your business is comprised of you the creator and your audience funding your creations. It's a give-and-take, a dance between your creative vision and the people who constantly are just eating up your creative vision and need it in their life. I find that the more you figure out how you can serve your audience, the better your practice is going to be. Another tip for selling is to create urgency. This is something I learned a little bit farther along in my business journey. But if you're trying to sell something to someone and they feel like they could take it or leave it, they could come back later if they wanted to, that's not necessarily a bad way to go. But if you create some urgency in your offer, if you have some launch or early bird discount or if you're making prints and you only have a limited number available or whatever you're selling is only available for a short time, putting some kind of limited number on the amount of time that they have to purchase or the amount that's available for anyone to purchase it all creates some, I really need to do it now if I'm ever going to do it in your audience. That's just one tactic that I've used in the past when making art prints. Creating a limited series of prints is a good way to do that and just to refresh your memory, a limited series of prints is when you have an original piece of artwork, but you only print a certain amount. If you have a painting and then you only print 50, you would go back onto all of those 50 prints and number them and market it as you're selling those prints that you only have 50 of them and you're not going to print anymore. You're not going to make any more prints and that makes them more valuable because there's not an unlimited amount. That's one tactic in the art world that you can use to create a sense of urgency and to tack on a little bit more value onto your art prints. The only thing about that is then you would have to commit to not making any more prints or to making it a big deal when you do another round of prints or something like that. It's one option that I think is nice, especially if you create more complex fine art paintings as opposed to one-off really quick designs. Anyway, just something to think about. Creating urgency is another tip for selling. Another tip that I have and this is more of a pricing philosophy, but important to mention here too I think is if you want to uphold the value of your art and uphold the value of other people's art or selling art in general, one important rule that I heard was either sell something full price or free. That means whenever you put a discount in your shop, then people are going to see the discount as the real value of your artwork. I know that it's really tempting to run shop discounts and I've done it occasionally myself, but honestly, I am trying really hard to stick to this rule of full price or free because I know that when I shop for things, once I know that a shop sale does discounts, then I don't shop full price anymore. I usually wait for the discount to come around. When it comes to art, I think it's really important to uphold, know your own worth and your own value and hold to that. That also comes to family. I know that sometimes people have family or friends discounts. When it comes to family and friends, I do the free route usually. Either I charge them full price what I would normally charge anybody else or I give it to them for free as a present. That doesn't mean that you have to give away your art for free always when people ask for it, but it is a useful strategy when you're selling your art. If you want to offer some incentive, instead of offering a 20 percent discount, you could say, buy two and receive an extra gift or something like that. I've done that before, where if somebody buys two art prints, then I will throw in a few stickers or I will throw in a third art print for free or something like that. I know that that makes it seem like that technically is a discount if you do the math, but even the way that you reframe it holds to the value of the original two art prints. Finally, let's talk just a little bit about SEO and copywriting. SEO, if you didn't know, is the acronym for search engine optimization. It is basically learning how to use keywords that will help your shop, help your product pop up higher in search engines. Then copywriting is very similar to that, where using words that sell. Any copy really is just any words that you use in order to sell something. I'm not really going into copywriting and SEO strategies in this class. Mostly I encourage you to look and do your research because those things can really help you sell the art that you have just made into prints. I will say though, that SEO and copywriting is a lot of getting into your audience's head. It hearkens back to that listening to your audience and figuring out how to write what you're saying and how to use keywords that your audience would also use so that you can mirror your thoughts back to them or mirror their thoughts back to them so that they are more inclined to see how your product can fit in their life and how they really want to purchase your product. SEO and copywriting strategies are important and I would definitely recommend doing some research into them. This was obviously not a comprehensive everything you need to know about selling. This class wasn't really about selling in the first place, it was about making the prints. But I hope that these few tips were helpful and let's move right along. 13. Final Project: Flatlay Template: For our final project for this class, we are going to learn how to create a template for a flat lay that you can use to showcase all of your paintings that you're turning into prints without having to take pictures of every single one. We can do this because we have digital files of those prints. The objective of this project is to use a blank piece of paper and take a picture of it in a nice array and then use Photoshop or other editing tools to drop that digital file right onto the photo after we've taken the picture. Just a few tips for flat lays, I like to use art supplies as my objects strewn about on the desk. That can make the photo have some character, make it look fun. But having objects in your flat lays is also a good idea to showcase the size of the print that you're offering. This watercolor block that I'm using a size seven by 10 inches, so it's almost eight by 10 and so it would be a pretty good approximation of what an eight by 10 print would look like a range next to all of these objects. You can also use different size papers. Like if you cut a size five by seven, or if you have a watercolor card, if you're trying to sell greeting cards, this is a size five by seven greeting card, you can use a blank card to showcase that as well. The only really prerequisite is that whatever template you're using is blank and it's white. It doesn't have to be white I guess, but we're going to put our PNG with a transparent background of the watercolor painting right on here in Photoshop. Presumably, you're going to be selling your prints on white paper. Anyway, just arrange your art supplies around the painting. I do it strewn about haphazard and not really in a specific style. You can move different paint brushes around. It doesn't really matter. I sometimes even just like to drop my supplies and see where they land and then move them around as I see fit. But once I have those supplies arranged, then I'm going to take out my phone because I use my phone to take most of my photos. Now I'm going to take a photo of my flat lay. I'm just using my phone here. I'm going to hold my phone so it's pretty much flat with a birds-eye view on top of this array of stuff I have on here. I'm going to take a few photos. I'm going to do at this horizontal angle just so I can get a wider shot there. But you can also do it vertically like this. I would snap a few and you could even arrange the objects in a few different ways. But here are the photos that we just took. I'm going to use these in Photoshop as a template for my art print so that I can list them in my shop pretty easily. I'm going to show you how to do that next. Now that we have taken a picture of our flat light template, I have opened it up in Photoshop and now I'm just going to edit it, make some quick adjustments. I accidentally pressed Auto Tone but didn't really do anything, make some quick adjustments to the photo so that it's a little brighter and more ready to present in my shop. When you're editing photos, as opposed to editing watercolor, I lean more toward making editing a little bit more in the brightness and contrast area and not so much in the hue and saturation area. Even just increasing the brightness and the contrast brightened this photo up a lot and you can see it made the shadows more pronounced, made the contrast between colors a lot more clear and beautiful and it made the wider part of the paper more white which is also important. Now that we have the edited photo of this template that we're using, let's go back to libraries and grab the saved graphic that we put there earlier. That's another benefit of using the library's function is you can go back and grab any of the files and use them on other projects like we're doing now. I don't have to go anywhere on my computer. If I saved it to my Creative Cloud library, then I can just grab it and manipulate it so I can center on the page and then hit "Enter" and it places it right on this template. I can go ahead and save this as a JPEG and use it in my Etsy shop or any other places where I'm trying to sell my art prints and have a really nicely laid out flat lay to showcase this art print. One more thing though, if you don't have your photo saved in the libraries, you can place it onto the photo from your desktop. If you go to File and then you go to Place Embedded, you can find your digitized artwork and then just place it right onto the photo that way. I'm going to place it horizontally for this case and just make it really big. Then when I place this photo in my shop or wherever I'm going to sell this, obviously, I would flip the photo so that you can see the painting right side up. Then I hit "Enter" and easy as that. Once again, that's File, Place Embedded, and then you just find your painting and it will create a new layer and you can export that way. Easy-peasy. Photoshop is a great all-in-one tool to do all of this with. Now that we've completed our final project, let's go on other to the final videos. 14. BONUS: Creating a Digital Print: As a bonus video, I wanted to show you a quick and easy way to make a digital print. First thing you need to do is find a template for whatever size you're looking for. Because one of the big things with digital prints is you can size your painting but how do you know that the people purchasing your digital download will be able to print in that same size? One thing that I like to do is to just find a blank 8 by 10 a label template and some places like this onlinelabels.com has them for free. You can just download the template straight to your iPad or straight to your computer and then use this 8 by 10 template which has these lines around it that your customers can print their paper on an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper and then cut on the line, so it's 8 by 10. Then once you have that template, open up your PDF reader. If you have Creative Cloud, you can use Adobe Acrobat. But I know that not everybody has the full Creative Cloud subscription. I use PDF Expert, which is a free PDF reader and editor just in the App Store. Once I downloaded that template, I saved it as my 8 by 10 template and so here it is. On that we have the full 8.5 by 11 sheet and then the black lines indicate that that's where your customers need to cut to have their 8 by 10 framable art piece. Then you just need to click Image so that you can drop your graphic right in this template and you can make it bigger. If it's a PNG with a transparent background, then it's not going to cover up any of the lines. Then once you've done that, you can go ahead and click the three dot menu up here and hit Share. You want to share a flattened copy so that people can't take your graphic, your PNG. Then when you hit Share on your iPad, you can save to files, or you can share Save to Dropbox, or you can mail it to yourself. Whatever, you just need to save the PDF and then once you've saved that PDF, then you can upload it to Etsy or upload it to other places like Gumroad where people can purchase digital downloads from you. You can also save these and send them out as freebies on your email list or anything else like that. It's pretty easy if people are just printing at home and don't really care about having that high-quality G clay print that you can offer. They just want something fun to have printed at home. Then this is an easy way to give them that digital download where it's still high-quality and easy for you to put together for them. That wraps up this bonus video and now let's head on to the final video in this lesson, where we recap what we've talked about. 15. Recap: Thank you so much for joining me for this class. I hope that you learned a lot about how to turn your artwork into prints, and I hope that it demystified some of the scarier aspects of this. Keep in mind, I am not a trained artist. I have taught myself, this is all research that I've done myself and have gleans together from various sources on the Internet. I'm sure there are a lot of other places where you can learn these processes even more in-depth if that's the route you want to go. But this class and the methods that we learned in this class are the ways that I have successfully made and sold art prints, and I hope that it has been helpful for you. Before we end, I wanted to show you some of the prints that I have on hand. This is a print that I printed with White House Custom Color. It's on the smooth matte paper. It's pretty thick and it's smooth hot press paper, so it's smooth to the touch, but it still looks really nice. Then I have also printed on their Hahnemühle Torchon paper, so this is real watercolor paper. On this paper you can see the texture on the actual paper. That is a really nice detail to add if you don't mind spending an extra $1 or $2 for that. Then I also wanted to show you what these prints look like on a mat board. If you choose to spend the extra $5 to mount them onto a board, that makes them stiff. It's just this foam board right here and the paper is just glued right onto the board, and this makes your prints super easy to frame for your customers. But I will say if you choose to go this route, these prints should definitely cost more upfront, they should cost more for your customers than the prints without the mat board. But, I just wanted to show you that I've used those who options. I'm yet to purchase the Velvet Rag paper version which is the third option at White House Custom Color, mostly because I've been really happy with the smooth matte and the Hahnemühle Torchon paper. That sums up this class. I hope you learned a lot. Once again, if you really enjoyed this class and felt like it was helpful for you on your creative business journey, one of the best things you can do to make sure other people can see this class as well is to leave a review. I would be really grateful to hear any feedback. You can leave some feedback, interview, or you can even start a discussion in the discussions and the community of the Skillshare platform, I would love to see that. As you're creating your flat lays doing your final projects, I want to see your results. If you go ahead and post those to the project gallery, I will definitely show you some love and some of the other students can show you some love as well. If you post about this class on Instagram, make sure to tag me, my handle is this writing desk. I would love to see any of your progress and that's about it. Thanks once again for joining me. I'll see you next time.