HobbyHorse's 2D, 3D, sketches and Wips

My resolution for the year..one of them ...is to figure out my printing issues. Would like to print some of my work out to put in a local sci-fi convention to sell.

Have done some online research and think I have found the main problem. My monitor is set too bright, though this is never mentioned in any article or book. When I lowered it all the way down (even though most books and sites say about 25% is good, but this is still to bright,) but if I lower the brightness down all the way, the printed work matches what the screen looks like.

With the brighter screen it's as if I was painting with direct sun on the canvas surface. The colors I choose are darker to compensate for the brightness.

Once I lowered the screen brightness and did system preferences color calibration, I made a duplicate and tweaked the lightness and color vibrancy, then printed the image......WOW it worked the colors matched.
Have yet to try on different papers...started with gloss photo paper and would like to try matte papers as well....but I feel more confident that I can get it to print well on those as well.
It may not be a problem with other printers and computers but I thought I would pass this along so someone else might find it helpful.

Good to hear Hobby, I very rarely print anything these days but when I was working as an interior designer a lot of my work was printed for clients (before the days of video conferencing when I had to actually drive around to see various breweries and club owners!).
The biggest issue I encountered (apart from setting up colour matching between monitor and printer) was the colour fastness of the majority of inks.
The large format printers (A0+) normally work on inks with good colour fastness as they are mainly aimed at the commercial market however most home printers are terrible, or at least the inks are. Its worth spending some time, if you dont want to have to buy a commercial printer, researching suppliers and inks, especially for the kind of market you're looking to sell to.
Wish I could recommend some inks to use but I've been away from the industry too long and I'm sure they've moved on by now.
Good luck with the convention, let us know how you do.

Thanks Atto, the printer I bought was fairly expensive because it is for photographers and artists. It was actually reviewed in IFX a year or two before I decided to purchase it. It's a Canon Pro 9500 Mark II using Lucia inks. The inks are rated fairly light fast and the printer can utilize RBG or CMYK because it has 10 different color cartridges. It also is capable of large paper sizes. That's why it was so frustrating to not get the colors I saw on my screen...but as usual it wasn't the printer's fault just the ineptitude of the operator.

Of course I have a cheap printer to get documents printed on (It's also faster)
The conventions in May so that gives me time to work on some new pieces or more likely finish older pieces to get the color corrected to the new settings of the monitor. I will let you guys know how it goes.

I've been some what absent but I have a good reason...Just finished setting up an Etsy shop to sell my carvings. It was one of my New Year's resolutions, have been working on it since Oct.

If you want to check it out, the shop's name is FeathersFurandFlyingManes no spaces. Have 12 pieces on it for now but hope to put a few new ones on each month.

Now to work on some old digital art pieces to get them ready for the SF convention. Will post as I get to them.

Yes, I'll second the idea of a direct link.

All these sell-your-own-stuff sites seem a bit beyond my comprehension. I did just have a look on Etsy (for the first time ever) but was sadly unable to search for ... well, anything at all!

Charlotte- I had forgotten that we have that section...rarely get down that far in the forum. Now about that 'linking' ..I'm ashamed to say I don't have a clue how that's done...is it so easy that any idiot could do it? I have heard of it but have never tried linking anything to anything, shows my lack of skills with a computer. Any tips would be helpful as I think it would be a useful piece of knowledge....I could even ask my nieces, I know they would know

Valence- the first time someone told me about Etsy I was a bit overwhelmed...how do you search through all that stuff. It helps if you know what to call what you're looking for...what material is it made of, subject matter, 2D or 3D. They even sell digital media, as one of the questions when setting up the shop was whether your product was real media or digital. So there is probably a section for digital art, or probably patterns or plans that are digital files rather than hard copies.

Thanks to both of you for checking it out.

Linking?

First go to your website (or whatever site you're linking to) and select all the text in the address bar and press CTRL-C to copy it.

Now come back over here and just paste that into the text box (where you type your post) by pressing CTRL-V. The forum "should" (?) turn it into a link automatically.

If you want to be a bit clever then instead type some text into your post such as "My Website" and select it, then click this little icon...


... you can then paste your website address in the URL box that appears and click insert. You should then have a neater looking link in your post.

Yay, I've finally found your shop, after much searching.

The site seems to shorten the name so it only comes up if you search for FeathersFurAndFlying.

But I got there in the end and there are some impressive pieces there.