Scanning or photographing art - Best practices

irina

I was watching one of @Lee-White's Demos where he's working on a big format (looks like a2 or bigger) and as i have worked in watercolor on big formats myself i was wondering what the best practice would be to prepare for print. I have used scanners and stitching things together and photographs but both had drawbacks. The stitching is obvious (also, how do you make the grain not appear so bad in scanning? some people say scanning from both directions but then the overlapping of images is tricky) but when i photographed it seemed there was not enough detail or the lighting was not uniform over the entire page. Do you take the drawings to a photography studio or construct a setup to take photos yourself?

How does such a setup look like?

I am a very big lover of traditional media and don't want to get rid of it in favor of pure digital. When scanning big format on a drum my experience was bad as it didn't pick up pale nuances of watercolor and entire areas of information were missing and it all looked "burned".

Rebecca Dautremer also works big and i think a whole lot of artists, so, photography but can you do it yourself?

So, how do the masters do it?

(also scanning is so expensive in the UK omg. 40 quid an oversize a3 for an artwork)

Also, if you all have questions yourself on the subject, chime in. I really really want to get better at this.

Lee White

We have a whole big thread on this topic in the forums somewhere. Not quite sure how to find it. Can anyone help out with this?

Thanks!
-Lee

braden H

@lee-white Darnit, I KNOW which thread you're talking about. I found a couple of threads that refer to the thread you're talking about, but not the ACTUAL thread. GAH!

If someone could remember the actual thread title it might turn up in a search.

Thread bumped, I guess. Hope someone else can think of it because it was a super useful post!

gavpartridge

Found a bit on photographing work here: (hope this works.)

https://forum.svslearn.com/topic/6717/preparing-your-art-files-for-print-and-for-professional-clients

KathrynAdebayo

This one is great for learning about using a camera to get quality results:
https://forum.svslearn.com/topic/6384/size-of-traditional-illustration-if-you-plan-to-continue-digitally
@Zombie-Rhythm knows what he's talking about.

KathrynAdebayo

And here's @Zombie-Rhythm 's tutorial: https://forum.svslearn.com/topic/6209/photographing-your-art-tutorial

irina

Thank you so much