Selling Giclee Prints Online

[Donald Maier]

I have spoken about this before, selling high quality giclee prints on FineArtAmerica.com's Print-on-Demand program. Briefly, for $30 per year you can sell prints of your work on a variety of materials, papers and canvas and have them framed as well. You get to set the prices and once you have uploaded your images, all you have to do is sit back and wait for the checks to start coming in. I join in Feb 2009 and since then have sold 13 prints.The first print I sold paid for the program for the first two years.

Recently I was told that I sold a print and was notified that the image that I had uploaded when it was enlarged and looked at carefully, was blurry. This is a good thing since I would hate it if they printed just anything and not be concerned with quality. The technician there gave me detailed instruction on how to photograph my artwork using a 10 Megapixal digital camera. So I got the watercolor from my sister, removed it from the frame, but instead of photographing it, scanned it at a high resolution (450dpi). When I sent it to FAA I got an email back saying that the quality was fantastic.

Since then, I have been spend hours going through my catalog of work on FineArtAmerica and re-scanning and replacing the image online with much higher qualitly images. Here is a plein air oil I painted recently. It is 12"x12" and it is scanned in two pieces and put together in photoshop. The resolution is 450dpi and below is a comparison between what was originally online from the photo I had take to the new image rescanned. I think you'll agree the difference is well work the effort.

this is the original resolution from the digital photo.

This is the same area scanned at 450dpi.

I you would like to sell prints of your work, I can recommend FineArtAmerica enough for the way they do business. I have also compared prices to others and for me to buy my own work as prints is much less than others. Do check it out. Go see my site at: http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/donald-maier.html.

Something new, they are giving us our own site not visibly connected to FAA, but giving us all the bells and whistles they have. See for yourself:http:http://donald-maier.artistwebsites.com/

They are always coming out with new programs. For instance, recently they announced a deal with ABC/Disney to allow their staffs to shop our print catalog for images to be used on sets for TV and movies, thus allowing a shorter turnaround to keep pace with the fast production schedules of the industry. Previously, they needed to locate the image, get the artists permission and then ship the artwork. With the print-on-demand program, this can all be done in about one weeks time. The artist still has full control over what is sold and get full commissions too. By the way, the artist gets 10% on material costs over their markups for canvas/ paper and framing. Not bad.