Thomas Kinkaid is the world's most successful giclée producer. His collections of cozy cottages in pastoral Victorian settings sell in the gazillions. A small edition for Kinkaid is 5,000 copies, each an ornately framed, signed piece. They are even sold on TV where their claim to fame is the 'artist's touch' that brings out 'magic' highlights that seem to glow in the dark as the lights are dimmed. The magic is that people believe it enough that they flock in droves to buy his stuff.
If you are in the giclée business as I am you can see the P.T. Barnum in Kinkaid's come-on. Anyone in art knows that dimming the lights suppresses blues and greens and favors warm tones and highlights... but most people fall for this trick, believe it or not. No matter.
What matters to the customer is that the Kinkaid 'painting' they bought is not simply a 'print'. Customers believe that prints are cheap and easy. That's hard for a dedicated giclée prepress artist to accept because we known how much time and effort is put into squeezing every last drop of image quality out of our inks and media. People have no idea how much giclée printing is like custom darkroom work where the deft skills of master printers can make or break a picture.
There is no question about the quality of the Kinkaid product line. Theirs are masterfully printed pieces and not all of them are easy pieces print. But no matter how good a print is it's still 'just a print' in the mind of the customer. That is where the 'artist's touch' comes in and why it is so important. Simply by adding a dab of paint here and there changes the picture from a print to a 'real' piece of art, as far as many customers are concerned. Each of those dabs adds more value... value for you as well as your customers.
If you are an artist 'a little dab will do ya' as the Brylcreem® folks used to advertise. Your pictures can be as 'slick' as their hair by simply applying a little dab of 'real paint' instead of their cream. It doesn't matter whose hand applies the paint as long as the giclée customer thinks it's the artist's. As far as business is concerned, the 'artist's touch' is the Midas touch.
Some artists actually use giclée as a base for a totally 'original' work whereas others like Kinkaid just dab a bit here and there. The more you dab the closer you come to being an 'original'... the Holy Grail of Art.
Limited-edition art producers can benefit from the Kinkaid technique. I have done it myself on some of my own illustrations, and complimented the dabs with 'creative varnish' that adds even more value. These are described in detail in my book Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée (www,gicleeprepress.com).
If you have a giclée printing company like my own shop, Vashon Island Imaging, you can offer your artist customers an additional service... call it 'Dabs of Value' or whatever you like. Remember 'Bowling for Dollars?" How about 'Dabbing for Dollars'. Laugh if you want but it's those add-on items that provide profit in the printing business. Busy artists appreciate it, too. Who wants to spend all their time dabbing in something when they can be out there making new originals to expand their limited-edition collections?
Those dabs of value can also earn you money doing retouching work and super-fine finishing on giclée prints for yourself or your most demanding customers. We use primarily oils and 'pigmented' watercolors (Doctor Martin's dyes) for such work at Vashon Island Imaging.
Working on an un-coated giclée is a tricky business and I don't recommend it. The inks are water based (with glycerin). We use Epson technology so I can only speak from experience about their inks but I am reasonably sure that any water-glycol ink system is 'fragile'. The ink pigments lie on top of a 'ground' applied to canvas or paper, inside of being 'inside' of the coating like in a photograph. The colors are also water soluble and even though manufacturers like Epson try to make them 'water resistant' they damage easily when hit with a brush loaded with watercolor dyes. One solution is to add some neutral tempera paint with transparent water-based dyes like Easter Egg colors to make a 'paste'. Here too, 'a little dab'll do ya'. The idea is to have a semi-opaque paint in the exact hue and shade required for the touch-up. You get one shot because there's no going back to 'find' the right color by blending, as there is with oils and acrylics.
Oils are the colors of choice for many artists and acrylics rank second. Both allow artists to work up the right colors by 'brush-blending' right on their canvases. Water-colorists use on-media blending with an entire different effect, one that would be disastrous on an un-coated giclée. Although you can use oils right on a giclée, at Vashon Island Imaging we put on a 'ground' of varnish or liquid laminate and then do the retouching or dabbing on top of that before applying the finish coats of varnish or laminate. Oils must be allowed to fully dry before the finish coats are applied and that can take some time. Acrylics dry faster and are great on the liquid-lam surfaces and not so great on varnish. The water-color 'paste' paint described earlier works on lam surfaces but not on varnish.
Let the retouching and/or dabbing dry thoroughly and apply the first topping layer of coating carefully so as not to disturb the work you have put in so far. Spraying is the best application method, but rollers work well too. It's all described in detail in the book and fully illustrated with more than 477 color pictures.
'A little dab'll do ya'. Maybe I'll adopt that as my motto for this blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment