Every painting you create is unique. When your artist popularity grows, chances are that more and more admirers want a piece of your artwork - often enough , the same one. Thus, the option of creating oil painting reproductions comes into question.
There are many plastic artists who chose to create a digital art form of their original and have it printed on demand. You will find below a detailed presentation of the most performant options in these regards:
Your oil painting reproductions - do they qualify as the next best thing after the original?
There are many examples where is difficult to distinguish between the original and the reproduction of an oil painting. Most of the museums and art galleries in the world would exhibit a reproduction, often a giclée fine art print when the original was not available (for example during a periodic restauration process, or artwork in transit as part of an itinerary exhibition)
Of course, the quality of the oil painting reproduction counts tremendously in the professional world of art in order to recreate the important features of the original, such as:
● texture
● brush strokes,
● fidelity of the high resolution file (the result of the digital capture)
● color intensity and vibrance
How your original is digitized is your single most important decision in order to ensure the quality of the fine art reproduction process. If profesionnaly done, you will benefit of an effective publishing element to reinforce and add to the lifetime value of your original artwork.
Once you have in hands the high resolution file of the digital capture, there are several options to produce a limited edition of digital prints. Here below are presented three main technics on the subject:
1. Serigraphy or silk screening
Serigraphy olso known as silk screening is one of the oldest forms of printing. The screen, originally made of silk, is streched over a frame and placed on top of the paper. Areas of the screen are then blocked off with a stencil (a negative of the image to print) and ink is spred evenly across this stand alowing ink to pass trough the open spaces of the stencil onto the paper below. A different screen is used for each color in the print resulting in a print with great color saturation and texture.
Serigraphy was and still is used by artists and art institutions around the world to create limited editions of artwork.
Names like:
● Andy Warhol
● Roy Lichtenstein
● Igor Medvedev
● LeRoy Neiman
are representative for serigraphy printing and connected with the pop art movement of 1960s.
Nowadays, printing studios to employ this technique have two types of approaches; either with the help of an automatic screen printing machine or manual, made by an expert. For the reproductions of oil paintings, the colors could be laid down thicker to emphasize the textured effect, or thinner to create delicate shadows.
2. Gicleé – fine art printing
If profesionnaly done, this technique could illustrate the texture of the painting remarkably well.
The process involves a museum-quality high resolution scan of the original work and a fineart inkjet printer pigment based (often more than eight pigments are used ). Giclée fine art printing quality derives from its seemingly “flowing” imaging technology which contrasts with traditional prints offset dot patterns, detectable to the eye.
For the media substrates you can chose from a variety of rag premium fine art textured papers or canvases to match the original painting foundation.
A giclée reproduction also implies an image stability rating of tens of years due to the exclusive use of archival-grade pigment inks, acid-free media and high quality UV-protective liquid laminates.
The oil painting reproductions that you get through this process are virtually indistinguishable from the original artwork. Find more about this process.
3. Silver Halide
This technique uses a special photographic paper sensitive to light and silver-based chemicals as support for the printing of digital photos. No ink or pigments are used into the process.
When exposed to light (RGB exposure system) a latent image is created into the silver halide emulsion embedded into the photographic paper’s gelatine. The photo paper is then put through a chemical process to fix the image color layers on the paper.
The overall durability of silver halide prints is high as they are well protected against chemical degradation from athmospheric pollution and phisycal wear.
We talk about a continuous tone printing (the chemical reactions are having place at atomic level) able to recreate the sharpness and the vibrant colors of the digital image source. Also, the skin color tones are very well captured with this technique and is often prefered to print photos.
From these options we recommend the giclée technique which we think to be most appropriate for limited edition reproduction of oil paintings. You could contact us today to discuss further about your projects.