Types of Digital Prints for Artists
What’s Digital Printing
There are many types of printing, like the screen printing shown in this photo.
There are many types of printing that an artist might consider. Your art practice may involve block prints, lithography, riso, or some other artisanal process. You may have seen screen printed or letter pressed items. Maybe you ordered a big stack of booklets that came from a commercial offset printer. Do you offer laser etched ornaments or UV Printed coffee mugs? If you had a show at a gallery, you might have worked with a sign printer and used a vinyl cutter to put your artist statement on the wall. If you are a photographer, you might have used a dye-sublimation printer to do transfers onto metal.
The digital printing we are talking about is from an inkjet or laser printer to make paper prints. These are the prints you get from your desktop printer, your office Xerox, Office Max, or a fine art print shop like Assist.
What do we mean by print quality?
Quality in an art print means a few things. Most obviously, it’s cut straight with even borders with no major flaws (like smudges, creases, banding). Beyond that, we’re talking about resolution (can you see pixels or does everything look crisp?), color gamut (can the print reproduce most or all of the colors from your original), paper (thickness, texture, durability), color accuracy (how closely does it match your original), how good is the source file (not blurry, no glares, even lighting) and ink (how long will it last without fading).
What are the digital printing options for an artist?
To start at the low end, you can get bulk digital prints from a source like Office Max. These have their place of course. Office presentations, flyers to hand out, and the like. Anywhere that quality doesn’t have to be super high and cheap is the name of the game. Some artists use this sort of thing for their art prints, but most consider it too low quality.
Some artists make their own prints at home with an inkjet printer.
A step up would be your home inkjet printer. These vary widely, but you can control a lot more of the process. This sort of thing is great for greeting cards, but would be considered the minimum acceptable quality for an art print.
The next step up would be to use an online SWAG shop like Printful. They are super convenient and have some great mid-quality options. Depending on your art practice, you may find this to be the perfect landing place for you. It’s more expensive than the copy machine at the FedEx store, but a lower price point than specialty art print shops. If you get a sample and are happy with the quality, great! (Note: Some online places try to pass off their prints as “giclee”. Make sure to find out what paper and printer they are using so that you can know what you’re getting and accurately advertise it to your customers).
The highest end digital printing is what you’ll find at fine art print shops like Assist. It’s called giclee printing. The type of ink and paper allow for incredible longevity (100 or more years with proper care) and the widest color gamut available. This is usually what people mean when they are thinking of a “fine art print” and this is what you’ll see in museums. If you’ve been disappointed with other prints' ability to represent your artwork, give these a try. A fine art print shop will also work with you on your files to do editing and proofing as needed.
This is an Epson P20570 60” printer. It uses archival inks and has the widest color gamut on the market today. It’s the printer we use at Assist.
This post is part of a planned series that will eventually be the ultimate guide to offering art prints.
