‘Father Bear’ (first digital test print)

I just printed the first little test of ‘Father Bear’ and – for now – I am very pleased with the outcome ^_^… just have to decide on the paper. So here comes the story…

Since month (and month) I consider to produce some high quality, but affordable, archival prints from the ‘Awoke Series’. As with traditional printmaking I prefer to have control over the process, choosing different papers and playing around with colours. So I finally decided to invest some money and print myself, using a ‘professional’ printer.

The printer

Three things are really – really – important when you plan to print yourself:

• Using high quality, pigment based, light fast inks (rather than dye based)
• Being able to print on a variety of archival, high quality fine art papers.
• There is no such thing as too many different inks, the classical CMYK is not good enough.

In the end I decided to get the Canon Pro9500 Mark II, but the printer only gets you so far.

‘Father Bear’ (Aqylic on wood)

Digital Re-Production

How do you actually ‘reproduce’ an acrylic painting on paper? Usually you literally ‘reproduce’ the artwork, by either scanning or photographing the artwork in this case a painting. This somehow did not work for me, whatever I tried looked ‘artificial’.

So I let it be for a couple of month … and some more month… Yesterday night it came to my mind that actually I do not have to literally ‘reproduce’ a painting. I could produce a digital file from scratch for printing on paper.

I decided to start with ‘Father Bear’. I scanned the original sketch (ink, water colour and pencil on paper) and a selection of wood veneers.

‘Father Bear’ sketch (ink, water colour and pencil on paper)

I kept the lines and started to ‘colour in’ the drawing using a variety of Photoshop brushes and layer settings. Based on the different grains I decided on a walnut veneer, edited the colours and brightness to match the stain I used on the plywood, deciding to not go as dark as in the painting.

‘Father Bear’ digital version.

I still have to decide on the paper, I consider the ‘Hahnemühle German Etching (Ink Jet)‘, just because I use Hahnemühle papers for traditional print making and those papers are awesome…

The costs for printing will be between $10 and $15 NZ for an A4 print with a bit of white border. This is more expensive than going to a professional printer, but at least I can be sure of the quality of print, paper and ink… (trusting the promises of the manufactures ^_^…)

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