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Scanning and Saving Your Art

Merchandising Your Art - 3 weeks ago - admin

Once you know which art you would like to start merchandising for yourself you will need to know some of the best practices of scanning and saving the art as an image file to upload to a custom photo company, such as, doodlesnshots.com.

If you have not read my first article “How to Make More Money from Your Art” please read it before continuing with this one.

Size of your creation will determine how to make it into a digital file. If you create art between 4” to 8” x 6” to 11” you can use a home office scanner. If your artwork size fall outside the size of a home scanner then you can either take a good lighted digital picture of the art – the camera needs to be set at its highest resolution (sometimes the setting will be the dimensional size over resolution). The other option is to locate a local office supply, graphic design, or a Kinko’s near you that offers large format scanning. This option of course will cost you a little upfront expense.

When scanning either on your home scanner or from a local service the resolution should be no less then 400 dpi. The standard for press quality is 600 dpi yet a home computer may not be able to handle the file size to well so 400 dpi will be efficient.

There is all short of image formats to save your scan as, but for the master scan/file you will want to save it as a .tiff file in the lossless option. The main reason for saving it as a .tiff (tagged image file format) is if sized down or cropped it will not loose quality. Just note that .tiff files tend to be larger is megabytes then other image formats. Incase you desire to sell the original art in the future save it on a rewritable CD or on a zip drive.

Now that you have your master file to work from it is time to save it again in a file format the custom photo companies prefer. They prefer .jpg, .gif, or .png. Also if you have a photo manipulation program, such as Photoshop, you can crop the master file to fit products better. Cropping allows better control on how that art is placed but it is not always necessary at doodlesnshots.com since they have a moving feature in the edit/create design mode the other like companies do not offer.

Jpg or jpeg is the file format the most widely used and accepted. The resolution can be lowered to 200 or 300 dpi so it will not take forever to upload but still give good quality printing.

Gif is a file format where you can control how many colors are in the image and this file format allows for a transparent background. A transparent background is important if you have a word type of design. The trouble here is this file format was designed to use on the web and does not have resolution control and thus a lot of the image information is lost. I would not suggest you use this for quality printing.

Png is a file format that captures more of the original information, slightly better then using .jpg/.jpeg but like with .tiff it actual megabytes size is larger. Png allows you to create transparent background image files with out loosing much quality/resolution of what is still seen. Of course, to create the transparent background you will need a photo manipulation program that offers this option for your files or you will need to learn how to do this if you have Photoshop.

So to recap:
1. Scan the original artwork at no less then 400 dpi

2. Save the scan in the .tiff format

3. Save this .tiff file to a rewritable CD or zip drive

4. Change the master .tiff file to a resolution of 200 to 300 dpi as a jpeg/jpg file to make it more upload friendly and save it somewhere on your computer.

5. Upload the .jpg file to doodlesnshots.com in your “file manager”

6. Add products using this file and then use the “design” feature to move the art and/or size down the art to see if this one image will work on all the products you want to sell or buy.

7. Crop the master .tiff file to fit the products that the full image will not fit, save the cropped image in the .jpeg format at 200 or 300 dpi and upload it to your doodlesnshots file manager. You can find image sizes and templates for doodlesnshots products at http://www.doodlesnshots.com/Member/RecommendImageSize.aspx . If you do not have a photo manipulation program to do cropping I suggest only selling the products that work with your full image.

How To Make More Money With Your Art

Merchandising Your Art - 3 weeks ago - admin

Are you an artist making an okay income from selling originals or painting commission pieces? I was like that and today I’m going to tell you how to make more out of your original art in the long run on autopilot.

After being a traditional artist for most of my life, professional artist for nearly twenty-five years, I started thinking how to create art, or computer generated art, that could be reproduced to make more money. One piece of art sold over and over again for an “x” amount of dollars.

As a case study, I’ll use a theme series with dog breeds where one of the originals sold on an online auction for only $35.00. Using a high resolution scan, I cropped the art to fit multiple products such as: wall clocks, mugs, tile coaster, wristwatches, and so forth.

My net profit from selling each product ranged from $1.00 to $8.00. Over the past three years I have sold around one hundred unique gifts thus making a net profit of about $ 500.00 from this one piece of art. I made $465.00 and I can still offer the gifts until I die or retire without any additional effort.

If you are wondering, what about finding an art agent that could do this for me? Can’t they? Becoming represented by an art argent has the same odds as winning the Powerball lottery, especially if your art falls into a niche. From experience I can tell you could submit your artwork to over forty agents and still may not get that representation.

I am not suggesting not to keep trying to get that art agency, but in the mean time to start making extra money from your creations. Creating your own customized gifts and reselling them on or off line is hard work and does take time and dedication but in the long run it could prove to pay off.

Many artists say they do not have the time or have the knowledge of creating gifts or merchandise from their artwork; that’s why I am here to guide you and help you to become your own merchandiser.

1. The substrate needs to be painted on a smooth surface or the canvas primed heavily so little or no canvas texture will show in the high resolution scan.
2. If you have a main subject in the painting, such as a bird, it is best to leave plenty of space/bleed around the art to fit products when cropped, since not all products are made equally. Here is an example of what I mean.

3. If you create art no smaller then 4” x 6” but not bigger then 8 1/2” x 11” you can scan your work from a home office scanner and thus having less overhead costs.
4. Quality depends on the resolution you save your scanned image at. For example, if you plan to offer door mats that are 16” x 32” and your artwork is 8” x 10” scanning the art at no less then 400 dpi and saving it as a .tiff file will be more then good enough to fit this large product. I will discuss the resolution, file formats and size cropping in another article.

Once you have the artwork scanned and the image saved to your computer, rewritable disk or zip drive you are ready to find one of those companies that offers custom photo gifts.

I have tried most of them: Cafepress, Zazzle, WinkFlash, Shutterfly, and so on. They all share common problems, however what turns me away the most is the lack of product variety. They all basically offer the same things flooding the markets for these items.

Today I want you to take a look at: http://www.DoodlesnShots.com, where they offer over 200 products to place your art on. They share the same problems like the others, but offer a much wider product variety. For some items base prices are 5% to 20% cheaper then the other guys.

DoodlesnShots.com offers artists a free online store, a store with your own domain, and a resellers program (which shaves off the base price, so you can earn more profit and even drop ship the items to your customers).

I am not here to blow smoke; DoodlesnShots.com manufactures the items at their Hong Kong location and ships the products worldwide via Hong Kong first class mail.

Hong Kong! This may turn you off, I understand that, but I ask you to do a little research about those other custom photo gift companies and see what all of them printing on; Made in China, Taiwan or Japan. The difference is they claim American but do not tell you “well the mug is made in Taiwan” until you get the mug and see the little sticker on the bottom.