Sandhill Cranes Doing a Two-Step

Sandhill Cranes Doing a Two-Step
on 13" x 18" archival heavy weight (90lb) fine art paper. $39 unmatted w/free shipping in US and Canada.
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18" x 22" foam-core backed matted print ready for framing $49.99 + $5 shipping and handling.
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As my wife and I entered Falling Water Trail in Jackson county for our bike ride, we heard the strange croaking call of Sandhill Cranes. I mentioned to her I’d never been close enough to Sandhills to photograph or study them. As if they heard me, we came upon this pair about a mile down the trail. Fortunately I had my telephoto lens and was able to get good photos.

Later looking closely at their red head markings I thought the photos I’d seen before of cranes were slightly different. Further research taught me there is at least six know subspecies of Sandhill cranes. You can read more about it HERE. The strange and beautiful birds standing here in the field gave a sense of primordial presence. The beauty and details demanded a larger format than my usual 5” x 7” size. Here is the result of our encounter. It’s one of my favorite images.

© Copyright by Paul Wolber
All Rights Reserved

Wind and Rain Bridge: Guangxi

on 18" x 24" archival heavy weight (90lb) fine art paper. $39 unframed w/free shipping in US and Canada.
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Matted print ready for framing $49.99 + $5 shipping and handling.
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The original painting for this print is a  30" x 60" acrylic painting. It was painted in Guangxi Province of South China in the region of minority people called the Dong culture. Every square foot of land in this area was cultivated to be productive farm land. The bridge is used as a foot bridge to allow farmers and their families to get back and forth across the river, but it is also used for protection from the weather and as a meeting place for the community.

To contact me or see past work in my daily painters gallery click HERE
As I continue to post new print editions I'll also try to give some interesting information about my travels in these cultures. If you have interest in a print of a painting in my daily painters gallery that is not yet developed into a print edition, please contact me to let me know of your interest.

© Copyright by Paul Wolber  

Wall I: Trompe L'oeil

 on 12" x 18" archival heavy weight (90lb) fine art paper. $39 unframed w/free shipping in US and Canada. Click below to purchase

Matted print ready for framing $49.99 + $5 shipping and handling. Click below to purchase

This is a print of a 24" x 37" acrylic painting. It is done in Trompe L'oeil or fool-the-eye style to be as realistic as possible.

To see past work in my daily painters gallery click HERE
I'll be posting more information about prints and my reasons for creating limited editions in future posts. Right now I'm trying to get the available limited editions posted so you can see some that could be holiday gifts.

© Copyright by Paul Wolber 

Karst Mountains

 on 18" x 24" archival heavy weight (90lb) fine art paper. $39 unframed w/free shipping in US and Canada. Click below to purchase

 Matted print ready for framing $49.99 + $5 shipping and handling. Click below to purchase

This painting was done in South China. Making prints available of larger painting is a way for a collector to have a smaller version of a larger painting at reasonable cost. For questions about other available prints of my paintings please email Paul.

To see past work in my daily painters gallery click HERE
I'll be posting more information about prints and my reasons for creating limited editions in future posts.

© Copyright by Paul Wolber

Three Dong Houses

 on 12" x 18" archival heavy weight (90lb) fine art paper. $39 unframed w/free shipping in US and Canada. Click below to purchase

Matted print ready for framing $49.99 + $5 shipping and handling. Click below to purchase

This is a print of one of my larger 36" x 48" acrylic paintings. It is the first in the series of limited edition prints I'll be posting here. For questions about other available prints of my paintings please email Paul.

To see past work in my daily painters gallery click HERE
I'll be posting more information about prints and my reasons for creating limited editions in future posts.

© Copyright by Paul Wolber

Why Limited Edition Prints?

With todays digital printing techniques it is possible to print multiple images with little or no degradation of the image from one print to the next, so why would an artist want to limit the number of copies printed from each artwork?

I've watched print technology develop over the past 30 or so years and today the print quality is better than at any time in the past. When making a print of a particular work, however, I've chosen to limit each edition to 120 prints for several reasons.

First, even though todays print quality is very high, and the print is almost indistinguisable from the original work, I want people to know this is a print rather than an original painting. In a limited editiion there will always be an edition number such as 10/120 and the artist's signature on the print outside the actual work. The 10 indicates this is the tenth print of an edition of 120 prints. After 120 prints are made, no more will be printed so the purchaser knows there will not be an unlimited number of these images made. This adds to the value and clarity of the image so you know this is not just a commerical run of thousands of images.

Secondly, even though the quality of todays Giclée print is of a very high quality, a printer can develop problems after long use and the print head may degrade or the print shop may upgrade or change to a different print technology and the quality could change over time. With a limited edition the purchaser knows what is being acquired and the artist has full control of the process.

Third, fine art printers trade organizations have over the years developed standards for quality art prints. While fineart.co.uk recommends limited edition size be kept under 850, I've chosen to be much more careful in order to have full control of the working process and quality of each image by limiting my edition size to 120 prints each.

Lastly, in my opinion only recently has the art and technology of Giclée printmaking developed the inks and ground bases to truly last over time. Early Giclée printing inks degraded in color within a few years and only in the last few years are inks of sufficient quality to reliably be warranted for more than 75 years. Todays inks should last for many generations if the work is protected and kept in a good environment. In preparing the painting image for Giclée printing, I use a Nikon Camera or scanner with at least 2200 dpi resolution and do color corrections using Photoshop CS5 which allows the most up to date software control available.

© Copyright by Paul Wolber

Resources

http://www.fineart.co.uk/Trade/Standards/Print_Standards.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclee

http://www.giclee-information.org/

What is a Giclée Print?

Giclée Prints

Giclée, pronounced "zhee-clay" or /dʒiːˈkleɪ, is the process of making fine art prints using digital ink-jet printing.  The term was coined in 1991 to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial “Iris proofs” from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.

Origins

The earliest prints to be called "Giclée" were created in the late 1980s on the Iris Graphics models 3024 and 3047 continuous inkjet printers (the company was later taken over by Scitex, now owned by Hewlett Packard). Iris printers were originally developed to produce prepress proofs from digital files for jobs where color matching was critical. Much experimentation was done to adapt the Iris printer to the production of color-faithful, aesthetically pleasing reproductions of artwork. Early Iris prints tended to show color degradation after only a few years. The use of newer inksets has greatly extended the longevity and light fastness of  prints.

Current usage

Beside its association with Iris prints, in the past few years, the word “giclée,” as a fine art term, has come to be associated with prints using fade-resistant, archival inks (pigment based, as well as newer solvent based inks), archival substrates, and the inkjet printers that use them. These printers use  multiple cartridges for variations of each color to increase the apparent resolution and color gamut and allow smoother gradient transitions. A wide variety of substrates are available including various textures and finishes such as matte photo paper, watercolor paper, or cotton canvas.

Artists generally use giclée inkjet printing to make reproductions of their original two-dimensional artwork or photographs. Per print, professionally-produced inkjet prints are much more expensive than offset lithography process traditionally used for such reproductions (a large-format inkjet print can cost more than $50, not including scanning and color correction, versus $5 for a four-color offset litho print of the same image in a run of 1000). However, since the artist does not have to pay for the marketing and storage of large four-color offset print runs, and since he or she can print and sell each print individually in accordance with demand, inkjet printing can be an economical alternative. Inkjet printing has the added advantage of allowing artists total control of the production of their images, including the colors and the surfaces on which they are printed.

Based in part on information from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia