EB Forum

Celsius wrote:

holycow wrote:how do people bring prints this big into the framers? i'm afraid if i try to bring it in flattened, it'll get damaged in the process. maybe best to just give it to them tubed and let them flatten it?

Who ever said this thing will not ship flat?

holycow wrote:how do people bring prints this big into the framers? i'm afraid if i try to bring it in flattened, it'll get damaged in the process. maybe best to just give it to them tubed and let them flatten it?

heathunter881 wrote:passed up on this image mainly because of the huge size. this is a much better image than Sowers though. good luck to those that grabbed one, two, or three directly from Keyes

ironjaiden wrote:We got Peacedog here. He just looks at a poster and it slides into one of his frames like pudding down Kirstie Alley's throat.

ironjaiden wrote:

heathunter881 wrote:passed up on this image mainly because of the huge size. this is a much better image than Sowers though. good luck to those that grabbed one, two, or three directly from Keyes

You came so close to making a post without a 'HEE-HAW' in it, so close.

Generally speaking making a print is pretty straight forward.... take a picture of the artwork, diddle with it in Photoshop and then print it out on a nice printer. Now all the detail between "photograph and print" varies depending upon whose doing the "diddling" and what the client artist expects in the way of results. In the ten years I've been creating print masters for artists and producing their fine art prints I can only think of one project more challenging than Stampede. The steps to create Stampede will give you a pretty good idea of what's involved. Here goes:

Stampede required a custom frame to "scroll" the artwork so that it could be photographed in overlapping segments. I took eight photographs with a Digital Hasselblad and merged them into an 8500x20,000 pixel panorama. Josh's work has unique characteristics in that his are acrylics ( which have a reflective surface that can cause glare on the image ) with extremely fine "nearly whites" against a "pure white" base. Ensuring all the detail he painstakingly puts into his pieces must be painstakingly worked back into his print masters ( the image file used to print the editions ).

The Photoshop work progressed in stages. The first step was to build what is called a mask to separate the white background from the painted detail, then go back by hand to ensure nothing was lost in the process - like translucent feathers in the tails of each bird for example. Next comes color matching to the original, followed by fine tuning or "translating" unprintable colors into the available pigments reproducible with ink. There are paint pigments that cannot be printed with inkjet ink (highly saturated reds or blues like cobalt - Josh likes to use unprintable blues! ). The last step is to create a proof and make "adjustments" to breath life into the final print, a rather subjective but truly important step. My goal in creating prints is to make editions that recreate the heart of the original - so far I haven't found an automated tool for that. By far the hardest step in the whole process is showing the print to the artist for his reaction...

Lest I wear out welcome I'll keep this short... hope this gives you the flavor you were looking for. Statistics wise, Stampede took an hour to photograph, 26 hours in Photoshop, four proof cycles on three different printers ( to assess which printer/ink characteristics best reproduced this particular piece ) followed by 96 hours of printing ( we won't talk about hand deckling ). Was it worth it? We await the verdict of the jurors...

who10 aka Hooten at PixelPoint

In the ten years I've been creating print masters for artists and producing their fine art prints I can only think of one project more challenging than Stampede