Have you ever made a mistake when you first ventured out to sell or market your art? Sometimes being self-taught can have its pitfalls. When I think about it now, and it seems like it should have been a no brainer, but a decade ago when I just started doing Arts and Craft shows I had missed this fundamental concept.
In the beginning I loved (and still do) drawings with coloured pencils, markers and paint. I would randomly doodle and draw in sketchbooks, on Bristol board, toned paper, or anything I could get my hands on. Occasionally I would create something that I thought was worthy of sharing or maybe selling, or making into a greeting card or an art print. This is where I would sometimes run into difficulty.
It turns out that dimensions matter. Especially when turning works into art prints. It is so much easier to print if your work was made to fit the the standard sizes, which for me in North America are the 4”x6”, 5”x7”, 8”x10”, 8”x 11 1/2”,11”x17”, and to a lesser extent squares. Non-standard sizes are much more difficult and can be expensive to work with.
Problems arise when you go to get the works printed. You end up with either random white spaces around the art or you have to crop out parts of your work in order to get it to fit on the standard printing sizes, which is not ideal. Yes, you can resize things with a computer, but it will still end up warping the original image.
Now I realize that custom print sizes are an option, and you can manually crop prints to make them fit better, but that still leaves the difficulty of framing. Custom mattes are frames can be costly. It will make things difficult for your customer, and you don’t really want to create this kind of barrier for them.
I recommend to always keep size and ratio in mind when creating, especially if you are planning to make prints of your work. This will save you some grief in the long run.
Have you ever made this or a similar amateur error in the past?