…if you haven’t already got a decent flatbed scanner.
What kind? As long as it’s tabletop scanner with a decent sized image areas (must be able to at least handle 8.5×11″ image area) with good reviews, you get them in various brands from $40 all the way up to $1000 or more. You’ll pay extra for more features, so work out what you want your scanner to do. Quick and dirty documentation or printing for digital art pieces? Go cheap. Trying to do your own fine art prints on printable canvas? Go as high as you can afford.
Or save money if you’re not doing it often, and research local printers in your area. In Phoenix there are several really good printers, but I love ImageCraft.com (and so do a bunch of very famous photographers who wouldn’t send their negatives or image files anywhere else.) You’re outsourcing for the company’s expertise, rather than spend the time learning how to do it all yourself.
But if you absolutely MUST print high-quality art, start looking at products like this one and higher price ranges, and pay attention to reviews and features.
Do not bother with handheld ‘wand’ or ‘pen’ scanners, since they add more work to your day, not less. You’ll have to ‘stitch’ all those separate image sweeps together, and the digital matching on wand and pend scanners is never quite good enough for art purposes.
Next, get a great camera. One friend swears by Cannon, another by Nikon. As long as it’s digital, you’re in great shape. If you are old enough to remember when darkrooms were the only development tool, and not a boutique antique craft learned by hipsters…congratulations. Now stop looking backward and get a digital camera!
Get image manipulation software like Photoshop and Painter. (These will be hideously expensive for the full versions, but if you are eligible you can get an educational program with most of the features for around $100.
Get a computer system beefy enough to handle the resulting workload. Make regular on and off-site backups of your data.
Most important? Take great pictures and/or scans of all your work. Here are the three reasons why:
1. Provenance. With good pictures of in-progress stages, you can keep a record of art processes and your participation in them. Handy in intellectual copyright disputes and show jurying! You can prove to galleries, museums, private collectors, and grants committees that, yes, you did the actual work.
2. Image editing. With the tools mentioned above, your art no longer has to be limited to what it was. Colors, proportions, crop sizes, etc. can be digitally manipulated to better fit your current needs and the artwork’s potential.
3. Monetization. If you are any kind of visual artist, you owe it to yourself to manage your catalog with an eye toward future profit. With new, powerful Print-On-Demand services, old original pieces long since sold can become prints on a variety of substrates.
(No matter how bad or goofy they are. Even terrible artists have flickers of accidental genius. Monkey Jesus wasn’t the first art mistake to become a cultural icon. It’s certainly not the last.)
I didn’t follow these rules, so I am missing documentation of the first fifteen of my thirty-two years in fine and commercial art. So much potential poster and image license income…lost. Sure, if I can remember the art I can make it again, and probably better. But the original is effectively gone.
I am much more diligent about documenting my work now.
New visual pieces get shot or scanned at 300 dpi and large sizes (it’s always easier to scale down to smaller images).
One new side benefit is the Print Sales feature on SaatchiArt.com. Within reason, I am now my own curator. I can choose, manipulate, and upload older pieces to become part of Saatchi’s on-demand print catalog. Pieces that never got traction with my previous art publishers (even though I still believe in those artworks) can now be given a fair try in a huge market.
Jury’s still out on whether this is a good marketing strategy, or just another display site. But I’ve decided it’s worth a year or two of trial. I have nothing to lose but the storage space.