Year ago when I first took the plunge into the professional art world I started out creating screen prints in runs of up to 100 at a time with home-made equipment in my Garage.

I figured it would make sense to be able to distribute my wonderful works as widely as possible, and what better way than producing a ton of copies and then selling them to eager buyers.

At the time I was inspired by some local artists who seemed to have their work in every framing shop and exhibition that I saw around town. I figured that these guys were making it big, as their work seemed so popular. They were themselves creating prints, both regular four colour process and handmade screen prints. Since the cost of a run of 1000 4 colour process (poster style) prints was many thousands of dollar and ‘Giclee’ colour inkjet printing was a mere twinkle in technology’s eye at the time, I opted for the home-brew screen printing approach.

Well, after a short while one of the local artists that I’d admired so much spotted my work in a shop and gave me a call. I was excited!  He wanted to represent me himself and use his connections to get my prints into the outlets that he had access to. This made me even more excited. He only wanted the very reasonable sum of 30% of the wholesale price as commission, and since my prints at that time retailed for the absolutely enormous sum of $100 each (Framing Shops like to make a 100% markup) that meant that I would receive the princely sum of $35 for each print, and therefore $3500 for a complete sell out of a print run. I was almost salivating at the thought. It actually seemed like a lot of money to me at the time.

I was feeling pretty cocky. After precisely 6 weeks in the business I had an art agent (of sorts) with connections. Gee, I thought. My art must be pretty good, obviously I’m a genius. With the benefit of hindsight I now realise that youth also comes parcelled with a delusional state of mind. I guess we’re designed that way by nature so that we strike out into the wilderness into adulthood without a thought as to the fact that we actually have the life experience related decision making capacity of a small rodent who has lived all his life running on a wheel in a hamster habitat. I digress.

Anyway, a week or so later I received another call. My new agent no longer want to be my agent, as his own agent now wanted to be my agent instead. Agents with agents? This could get confusing. It was revealed to me that my current opportunist artist agent in fact owed his own agent a big money type favour, and, in order to pay some of the debt I had been placed on the transfer list and been parcelled up as part of a deal.

I was even more excited. Now agents were trading me, and haggling to secure my services. In my mind I was a legend in my own lunchtime.

So, off I trundled to meet my new, and slightly bigger time agent, prints in hand and really without any clue whatsoever about how anything, including the art world, actually worked, or the reality that it entails.

The same deal was struck. 30% of the wholesale. I asked for some kind of contract agreement. Blank look. I asked again. You see I had read all about the art world in various ‘how things are officially done in the artworld books’ and knew this was the proper way to go about it. I expected to come away with a typed contract detailing who would do what and pay whom when. I actually left the agents abode with a note scribbled on a piece common-or-garden  spiral bound jotting pad paper stating “I will take 30% commission and pay you within 30 days, signed, Ms Agent”. Fair enough.

Over the next few months  I waited patiently for my agent to do her stuff, dreaming of the river of dollars potentially flowing my way. All that nasty selling stuff was being taken care of by ‘my agent’ (oh how I loved the ring of saying that phrase  in idle party conversation, because everyone knows that if an artist has an agent then that artist ‘must be’ absolutely brilliant.)

Time came, time went. There were meetings, strategising and plans. I was going to be huge. The agent told me so. My work was going to sell like hot cakes. My Agent told me so. She actually sold precisely 5 prints. The agent reluctantly told me so, and then handed me a cheque and the remaining prints and wished me luck. I was relieved.

I was relieved because all of the time I was with the agent, the spoken agreement was that I would not try and sell prints myself, and by this time I was eager to actually get a return on my long sweaty hours spent in the garage. Undeterred I went out the next day and sold five prints directly to the local framing shops and small gallery’s. The shop owners gave me cheques directly in the hand. I liked that even better than the agent giving me a cheque. There was something very satisfying and direct about it. I made these things and people were willing to give me money right then and there.  I still like that feeling today.

So, after all this, did I learn anything?  Do I think art agents are good or evil for early career artists like myself as I once was?

My agent wasn’t evil. She had the best intentions. She just couldn’t sell my work to her clients. End of story. One of her other artists (the one who originally wanted to be my agent) was doing extraordinarily well with her, and making a handsome living out of it. My art just wasn’t right for her outlets.

If you can find yourself an agent who actually does have the skill and capacity to sell your stuff then this is good.  It does have the advantage of allowing you more time to actually create your artwork, but, remember, your agent is going to have to sell a whole lot in order keep you in the manner to which you would like to become accustomed, and you can’t get go out there and sell your artwork directly by yourself when things get a bit slow, because that would be undermining what your agent is supposed to be doing for you.

If your agent is  handling your original work as well as your prints, and representing you into proper art galleries, then remember, after gallery commission and agents commission, you might only be left with 35% of the retail value, so your art had better command a very respectable price, in order that you might make a decent profit.

I also learned that you can read all the ‘how things are done in the artworld properly’ books you like, but, at the end of the day if you can’t trust the person you are dealing with (ie they are evil) then a contract is not going to count for much anyway.  Are you really going to sue a person if they don’t do what they said they would? Probably not,  at least not early on in your career when the money is small. Life is too short. Move on.

Upon reflection I think I went with an art agent too early, before any kind of demand had been established for my work. If I’d done more direct selling for myself at the time I would have known fairly quickly whether there was enough interest to keep both myself and and agent well fed and watered. If the prints were actually flying out the door as fast as I could make them, and there was no time for me to process the sales then an agent would have been a wise move. As it was, my prints sold quietly and steadily over a number years as most print runs do (which was good).

So, if you are just starting out, maybe you should relax and be your own agent for a while. You’ll directly enjoy the thrill of people putting money in your hands for the things you make and you’ll experience the artworld first hand at the coal face. When you get so busy successfully selling your work that you don’t have enough time to make it, then, and only then it might be worth taking on an agent to do all that messy sales stuff for you.

Now you need to put down your brushes and read some stuff on how to close a sale.

You’ve created a brilliant artwork.

All your friends want it but of course they don’t want to part with the vast sums of money required to prise this gleaming jewel of paint and canvas from your hot little hands.

They ask “is there a print available?”

The trouble is that making large high quality prints can a very expensive process, and full colour gloss inkjet prints from your MegaCorp Mutlifunction Centre can go through your printer cartridges quicker than a Hummer sucks a Gas Station dry. You need a cheap attractive alternative.

Have you thought about making  Mini Art Prints?

What is a Mini Art Print?

In my case, the mini art prints I made were little full colour prints of my own artworks, no bigger than a business card, which I matted up, framed and subsequently sold to passing tourists at the markets. I personally signed and titled the mat of each print and popped them into neat little cellophane packages which looked irresistibly collectible. Since I had a series of artworks along a similar theme (Queenslander style  houses in fact) this just added to the collectibility factor. You can make you prints bigger of course if you want to, but they are most economical if you keep them to around the size of a regular photograph or smaller.

Photography or scanning

In order to turn your artwork into a mini print you are first going to have to convert it into a digital picture of some kind, either through scanning for smaller works or photography for larger works. It’s important to know that the better the quality of the digital image of your artwork is, then the better your end result is going to be. You can’t skimp on this step or your print will look distinctly below par. Nobody wants a fuzzy, off-centre, strange coloured print no matter how astounding your original is. A photo taken with your common-or-garden domestic mid priced digital camera will be fine for creating  mini prints, especially if you are a dab hand with Photoshop so you can crop it to size and give the colours a bit of a boost where needed to make the image really pop and sing.

Okay, so you’ve got yourself a digital image of  your artwork. How do we print this thing?

Here’s the secret. Did you know that your local mega-electrical store or photo processing shop is a great source of high quality printing? Yes, really it is!  New fangled digital photo printing kiosks are popping up in these establishments like mushrooms. Just pop your USB flash drive in and go.  These machines  do produce nice clear prints on real photographic paper and the quality  is plenty good enough for reproducing art (in a mini way). Not only that, there’s often the bonus of choosing either a matt or gloss paper in a range of different size, at a price that’s very hard to beat.

Yes of course you could print your mini prints on your own high quality ink jet printer, but the cost per unit is way lower at a digital photo printing kiosk, and much faster if you are producing your mini prints in bulk quantities. You only have to contend with the strange looks from the Shop assistants who wonder why on earth you would print 100 photographs of the same thing.

“Archival Quality”

Now, before you scoff at the thought of creating an art print on photographic paper that you would actually sell to people, just think about it a bit. These machines can produce prints that will last potentially a very long time. In my local electrical superstore the Fuji paper that they use in their digital photo printer kiosk has a spec that is designed to last for around 70 years. I was  downright cynical about these claims so I decided to do a little test for myself and took a sample  photographic print and stuck it in the front window of my studio. It was exposed to the full on heat of the Australian sun for three weeks. Afterwards I examined the results and was surprised to find that fading was almost negligible, when compared to a ‘non exposed equivalent’.

Off to market we go

Feeling confident of the product I then had some little frames specially made up in which to mount my mini prints and set off to the local tourist market to sell my wares. I  did quite well with them for a while. I enjoyed those art market days, though all that lugging about of tables nearly did my back in on a number of occasions. You can’t beat it though for direct customer sales experience though.

To Frame or not to Frame…that is the question

You don’t have to go the full hog and mount your mini prints in frames. I’ve seen other artists do similar things and just mount them on a single mat with a backing,  wrapped in cellophane to complete the package. It makes for a  quite attractive as a little gift item. Custom sized mini mats and backings can be purchased quite cheaply in bulk from a picture framing shop, but make sure you go to a framer with an automated mat cutting machine.

Things to watch out for

Some older style digital photo printing kiosks produce prints that look a bit washed out and green. Avoid. Go to a shop with the latest technology installed if you can.

Also, remember that these machines are calibrated mainly to make happy snaps of people look good. Reds may look richer,  blues may look bluer, greens might glow more. This is all designed to give people the illusion that the beach  holiday they’ve just returned from was more of a paradise than they remembered when they photographed it. Do a test first before submitting a large print run.

Photographing art… For me F-stops and exposure times are alien concepts, however, that does not prevent me from making a relatively decent job of taking snaps of my work to pop on websites, brochures or those snazzy little gallery exhibition cards.

I admit it. I’m not much of a photographer. Maybe like me, you concentrate on being a painter, draw-er, printer or whatever-er, and photography in all it’s modern digital mega pixel glory comes fairly low on the list of things that need to be thought about.

Hey, there’s only so many things in life you can concentrate your attention on, and for me photography is not one of them…until I need to take a photograph of an artwork for promotional purposes that is.

The following tips I’ve picked up myself basically by trial and error, so maybe you can save a bit of time by reading them so you don’t have to go through the same trials and make the same errors!

Okay already! On with the tips…

Your camera – big lenses work better

I’m sure actual real photographers will be able to bang on endless about why a camera with a big lens works better than a camera with a little lens, but in my experience of using domestic grade cameras for photographing paintings, the ones that seem to produce the most acceptable results had bigger lens areas. Yup, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but  your do-everything-including-wash-the-dishes smart phone has a lens that is just too weeny to cut the art photography mustard, even if it does create images containing enough pixels to reach to the moon and back if they were placed end to end at a distance of one micron.

Tripods steady your trigger finger

Ages ago I picked up a decent quality Velbon Tripod at a garage sale for next to nothing.  I’ve used it so many times that things are starting to fall off, yet nevertheless it hangs in there, and gets used over and over again.  Even if I’d paid full price,  I think the investment would have been well worth it. It just makes the whole process much easier, and more importantly, means that I don’t need to have a steady trigger finger when I shoot. I just set up the shot, lock the tripod adjusty thingies  so that they don’t move, and off I go. The good thing about the Velbon is that it’s relatively sturdy and the controls are easy to adjust.  When I move the head of the tripod around, everything is smooth as silk. This makes it easy to use.  I do have another very cheap tripod too, but that one is not nearly so good…in fact it’s just a pain in the proverbial, and I’ve consigned it to the back of the cupboard, only making an appearance when the Velbon is in need of a little repair. So when it comes to tripods, I’d say get a good sturdy well built one. If you make lots of art you will use it again and again.

Time delay

Read your camera manual to figure out how to set the automatic picture delay timer. This will allow you to delay the taking of your shots by a couple of seconds and avoid your big clumsy fingers causing the camera to shake when it’s mounted on the tripod. Just press the ‘take a picture button’, remove your hands from the camera and let your camera and tripod do their magic. Shake free images are a joy to behold.

Don’t varnish or frame your painting yet!

It’s much easier to photograph and artwork if it’s not varnished yet. Shiny varnish will make for shiny highlights in the photograph, which don’t tend to look good when reproduced.

Similarly, if your artwork is under glass it’s really hard to take a picture without getting reflections. When I’ve been faced with that problem I have solved it by poking my camera through a hole in a large black cloth, held in such a way so that no reflections are seen. It’s a pain though and I don’t recommend it.

My recommendation is to hold off on varnishing or framing until your photography is complete.

Lighting your artwork

I very rarely use any artificial lighting when I take a photograph of my artwork. I prefer instead to use normal daylight. For me I’ve found that a cloudy day is best if I’m taking a photo directly outside.  Diffuse cloudy mid-morning light seems the most ideal. Afternoon light is second choice, but the middle of the day starts to be way too bright. I live in Australia though so I rarely get diffuse cloudy days…it’s pretty much blue skies from the get-go in the morning, so instead I tend to take pictures on our covered Verandah where the light is not so harsh, and the reflected light provides enough illumination.

The key to getting the lighting right in my case is to actually LOOK through the view finder (or digital display)…not just a cursory ‘is my image in the middle of the frame’ look, but an actual ‘what is the quality of the light’ look. Sometimes it’s hard to see the quality of the light, but after a few goes at doing this you’ll start to appreciate how the light is falling on your painting, if there are any annoying shadows, and more importantly, whether the image will turn out any good.

Things I look for:

• Is the light even all the way across the image? Any difference in light from one side of the painting to the other will stick out like a sore appendage when you view the image later.
• Can I clearly see all the detail? If the light is too bright all the colours wash out. If the picture is too dark it will lose detail when I try and brighten it up in Photoshop later.
• Does the weave of the canvas show? I create mostly paintings that use almost perfectly flat areas of colour. I generally like my photos to look similarly flat. If you catch the light on your painting on the wrong angle, then the weave of the canvas appears as tiny white highlights all over the photo. Not the effect I want.  I move the painting around a bit until the lighting is as even as possible.
• If the painting is textured I check to see that the highlights created by the light are pleasing to the eye.
• Is the painting straight? I like to get the sides of the canvas as straight in the frame as possible. The straighter it is, the less I work I will have to do later when I crop the image. Move your tripod and camera up and down to find the point of  maximum straightness (if your paintings are in fact squarish in shape that is)

Take lots of pictures using auto picture mode

I’m very lazy when it comes to setting up my camera. I generally just use the auto mode and rely on the trial and error approach of taking lots of pictures in the hope that one of them turns out to be ‘just right’… and you know what? usually they do (just about every time). When I review the pictures there’s always one version that stands head and shoulders above the rest, so I use it. Digital cameras these days are pretty good at figuring out what to do on my behalf, and I guess there are software engineers out there who have worked hard to program my camera so I don’t really have to think too much about the process. It works for me.

Focus

I also let the camera do all the focussing for me, and generally don’t have any problems when photographing medium sized works as long as I’ve made sure that the artwork is straight in the frame (ie the artwork is a parallel as possible to the camera lens). For larger paintings (say 1.5 metres wide) I do have to consult the manual on ‘multi-point’ focus to make sure everything stays sharp. For smaller works which I have to get very close to  I use the macro lens mode, usually indicated by a little tulip on the camera. Mostly though the auto-focus mode does the trick every time.

Turn off the auto flash

A direct flash makes everything look, well, erm…flashed. It’s not nice. So turn it off.  Sometimes though you’ll see a dreaded ‘LOW LIGHT’ indicator on your camera viewfinder. Don’t ignore this warning as the camera will not take good pictures if there is not enough light. Move to somewhere else where there is good light (I suggest Australia)

Use Photoshop to fix up your photographs

I use Adobe Photoshop for all manner of things. It’s an essential item in my toolbox. Yes it’s expensive, but if you are doing this stuff on a regular basis it’s the software to have. There are other cheaper programs that do essentially the same job though, but I love my Photoshop and don’t really look at anything else because it works for me.

When I’ve taken my images and look at them on the computer, generally I’ll need to do a few things with them…

• Straighten up the image using the distort tool
• Crop the image
• Adjust the brightness, contrast and colour
• Create versions at different resolutions for web and print distribution
• Tweak anything that needs tweaking to make the picture look as brilliant as possible!

So that’s all there is to it. You can get acceptable results with minimal equipement, at a quality that is fine for web or small postcards using just domestic grade equipment and a bit of experience with Photoshop.

I’m sure if you invest extra time learning the mechanics of photography it would pay you handsomely, and maybe one day I myself will get round to it, but until then I’m just happy to point and shoot.

Having said all that, if you want to create large high quality art prints, posters or giclees it pays to have a professional take the shots for you. I have in the past had professional shots taken using both large format photographic film and super hi-res scanning. The results are far superior, but for most applications the cost can be prohibitive. A decent mid-price domestic digital camera plus a bit of improvisation and experimentation can get you a long way though

Happy Snapping!

(BTW if you want to see how my snaps turn out have a look at my Creativity Pro Art gallery.  Some pics on there are taken by my own fair hand using a domestic grade digital camera, others are professionally snapped images, some images only exist in the digital domain, and there is the occasional image which I took with an old style film SLR…see if you can spot which is which!).