Sunday, November 01, 2009

Getting the elephants into print

In October I took the elephant painting to a digital printer in Clevedon, SkyBlue Digital, to get limited edition gicleés done of it. Because of the painting’s dimensions I didn’t want to reduce the image too much from its 36”x11” size as I fear it would lose it’s impact; so the first proof will be at a slightly reduced size. Once I see that, I can decide whether I would prefer it to be full size or not.

The process has started and I have now seen two different proofs over the last few weeks and have decided the slightly smaller size is fine, but some colour changes needed to be made and some shadowing from paint ridges ‘knocked back’.

My fourth visit to the printer’s has resulted in another wait for another colour proof. Whilst the other anomalies have been corrected, the one of the colour of light on the elephants remains. I’m hoping the printer can get it from the whitish colour, at present, closer to the warm yellow of the original oil painting. I am being a bit pedantic about this as it’s an important aspect of the painting in that it sets the time of day and the lighter colour makes the painting look too light and changes the mood of the piece.

Hopefully my next visit will be the last, except for when I return to collect the finished batch of prints.