As much as I love getting my hands dirty and working with cool junk, paint and other materials, I have truly enjoyed the flexibility that digital painting using Procreate has offered. For example, I was sick for a couple weeks in December, and then was busy with various other holiday events, football games, etc. This would have made it nearly impossible to get much work done in the studio, however I was still able to get an average of over a piece a day done in Procreate. Even when I was laid up on the couch, I was still able to find time to work on new paintings in Procreate. For the last week, it has been below zero in Minnesota where I live, and while it isn't impossible to work in the studio right now, it's probably not much over 50 degrees and frankly just a little bit harder to get into a state of flow in that type of climate, so again it has been super helpful to be able to keep up with painting every single day on my ipad in my much warmer living room.
The problem this creates is what to do with all this new work produced?
Up until this month, I had never seen a printed version of one of my digital paintings. That all changed about a week ago when I got my first test pieces in. I ordered prints of 2 pieces from VistaPrint to see what the quality looked like. One piece I ordered was an 18x24 on glossy paper this ended up costing about $14, and an 18x24 on regular paper but laminated, this was about $19. After shipping, the cost was about $45 in total.
I know that VistaPrint is not necessarily the best place for art prints. They don't offer Giclee or any fancy papers or anything like that. It's really not a service necessarily meant for fine art prints. I went with them for this test because 1. I have used them in the past for other things like business cards and have been satisfied, and 2. I thought it would be a good baseline for an average result. Sure, I could have spent more like $70 for one really nice Giclee print, and waited a couple extra weeks for production, but I was a lot more curious about whether a more average product would be good enough to hang on a wall.
Here's the Result:
Compared to the Digital Version here:
On a screen, you can barely see any difference at all. Up close, on the physical piece, it frankly looks WAY better than I was expecting it to. I would say the only slightly janky thing about it at all is just the size of the newspaper pieces I added - they are a little bigger than they should be naturally. This however is strictly on me and has nothing to do with the printer. I just need to make them slightly smaller when making a piece of this size - something that comes with experience.
So for me personally, I would have no problem at all putting this piece in a frame and hanging it on the wall. I think most people would actually be shocked to find it is a digital print because even the added media looks pretty real from almost any distance.
*Note, I didn't add a picture of the other piece because it came rolled up, so I haven't have a good way to take a picture of it yet. I will share that one later though.
The end result of this test was well above my expectations. This however posed a new question - how do I best sell prints? From what I could see, there were several different approaches -
1. I could use a Print on Demand service
2. I could order prints of select pieces and resell them in limited runs
3. I could invest in a printer and create the prints myself on demand
4. I could sell the digital files and let the customers make the print themselves
5. I could sell the print, then order it from somewhere like vistaprint and either have it shipped directly to the customer, or ship it here first, sign it and then ship it again.
I wrestled with these choices for quite a while because frankly I couldn't find anything convincing enough to definitively point me in one direction. Using print on demand seemed like the most easy and obvious, but it does result in less of a profit margin for me, I don't have any control over the quality, and had heard conflicting feedback over how much people actually liked working with a 3rd party in this way.
Ordering select prints and then selling them in limited runs seemed like one of the better options, as I'd be able to get the pieces here first and sign them all, however it seems fairly limiting, in that ordering a run of prints for one single piece would be fairly expensive.
I really thought hard about getting a high quality printer and making the prints myself on demand. The main issues I saw with this is that it would limit me a lot more as far as the size of pieces I would be able to create. 16x20 would probably be the absolute max without spending thousands on a printer. Additionally, after factoring in the cost of printer and raw materials, I don't think the cost would have been much different.
Selling just the digital file would be a really easy solution with no up-front cost and minimal labor, however I really didn't see any other artists doing this. This seemed to be much more common among people making AI generated art, or selling wall art prints using public domain sources. Not really any fine art people I could find doing this.
The last option is the one I had initially settled on - I could just list the prints for sale, factor in the cost of goods I would pay into the price, and set a 2-4 week delivery time. Then I would order the print myself after I received an order from a customer. I'd get the print here, be able to inspect and sign it, and then reuse the packaging I received it in to resend it. I spent several weeks thinking hard about this and saw this option as having the least downside - the main thing would just be the longer wait for shipping time.
Up until I was getting ready to add all my digital paintings to my site in preparation for launching this was my plan. Then recently it dawned on me that it really just doesn't fit with my ethos. One of my biggest priorities is creating sustainable art and reusing and recycling materials. If I were to sell prints in this way, I would be creating double shipping on each print, resulting in a ton of extra emissions that would offset a lot of the benefit I am trying to create by reusing materials. Additionally, I have to believe that a lot of people who order a print never actually end up putting it in a frame and hanging it on the wall. I know this because I see prints at thrift stores all the time still wrapped in their original cellophane and clearly never displayed. I don't know what the actual percentage is, but there are definitely people out there who do this.
Maybe most importantly, it was incredibly EASY for me to order with VistaPrint. This was basically a foolproof process that doesn't require any kind of technical skill.
All these things ended up leading me back to selling prints as a digital download instead of a physical print. Most importantly it removes the double shipping, and reduces a lot of waste. There are probably a lot of people that would be totally comfortable ordering a print from WalMart or CVS and picking it up on a shopping trip they would already be doing. This totally eliminates the shipping issue on both ends. Additionally, maybe you have a coupon for VistaPrint or some other online service - now you may be able to apply it to this order and save even more money. Or maybe you just want to price shop, or have a local printer you already work with. Heck, maybe you even have access to a nice printer you can use to print the file damn near for free. Maybe you need the print for a gift - today. You could literally order the file, then place an order at WalMart, go pick it up 2-3 hours later, along with a frame, all in the same day. There is really a ton of flexibility offered from price to delivery time, to quality.
Last but not least, maybe you're one of those people with great intentions - you order the print, but then get busy with other things and it gets put on the back burner. As much as I'd hate to see that happen, I'd be happy knowing that no emissions were used in shipping and no raw materials were wasted creating a print that would never be used.
Overall I have no idea how well this will actually work, but I have put a ton of thought into it and I think this method best fits with the way I like to do things, and it largely was made possible by how easy it was to order a basic average cost print, and how remarkably well the quality turned out to be. Hopefully this helps other artists out there who are on the fence about how to sell digital work.