Encountering Hiccups Along The Way

Well, having waxed lyrical about setting up my own Etsy store in previous blogs, it appears I've already encountered my first hiccup! After visiting a number of established Etsy stores of similar ilk it appears most digital artists there have their work professionally printed on archival paper. This makes sense given that most professional laser printers are of better quality than anything most folk could afford to have in their own homes, often using six colours instead of the more usual four, and integrating a higher DPI (dots per inch) quota. Simply put, if you have a higher DPI, you tend to get sharper images with more defined detail. The use of archival paper ensures that your images have a longer 'shelf life' and are less likely to fade over time, but of course, all this ups the price of the eventual sale.

Having found a local professional print shop I decided to do a test run last week and armed with several of my images on a memory stick I waltzed off in something of an upbeat mood only to have it hastily dissipated when met by the miserable indifference of the person left in charge of the premises. I'm not sure if I hit her at a particularly bad time, but she couldn't have given the impression of being less interested if she tried. I suspect I was viewed as small fry in the league of things, but having had my images printed off and hastily thrust into my hands, I paid and left the shop with the resolute determination never to go there again. Having got home I noticed that none of my photos had been sized properly and all took on something of a reddish hue which suggests either my monitor or their printer needs to be calibrated slightly differently. So now I'm left with something of a dilemma. Do I fork out more money with another professional printer, perhaps several times over until I get the colour thing right, or do I buy a cheap laser printer and experiment at home until I'm satisfied with the end result? I confess I prefer the notion of having absolute autonomy over the work I produce, and having my own laser printer also means I'll be able to transfer my images onto things like polymer clay myself, but the downside is obviously the fact that any image produced in that manner is likely to be less defined than those printed off professionally. Decisions, decisions!

In other news, I've been experimenting with sepia again. As any reader of my blog will probably have noted, I have a 'thing' about old sepia photos, so I decided to try and recreate some of it for myself using some photos of mine you've probably seen before;








I can't decide whether I prefer the slightly browner hue (1st photo), the greyer one (2nd photo) or a combination of the two (3rd one)...........I wonder if producing purely sepia images for the time being would resolve my printer dilemma and ensure my work remains competitively priced?!