We all want to create great works of art. We also want to sell them. One of the best ways to do this is to produce, or allow to be produced, cards with our art on them. Do we create special art for this, or use what we have already produced? Well, you can do both.
The key to making good art cards is in the proportions of the original painting, to use a size that will reduce properly and not be distorted or cropped badly. (The easy way is to use a proportion wheel -- see below.)
When starting a painting for an art card many people feel they have to paint the same size as the finished art card. This is not so. (And you never enlarge a painting!) Rather, commercial artist create art larger than it would be printed at, for two reasons: (1) It is much easier to work at a larger size. (2) When a work of art is reduced, the little imperfections disappear and the artwork appears better than it may be (good idea huh?).
Commercial artist also don’t erase: they use paint to clean up the ends and paint over any imperfections to correct work. It is no coincidence that whiteout was invented by a commercial artist! Thus, most art is produced at 150 per cent or more than the size it will be printed at.
How do I Decide What Size I Will Work At?
Good question. And there are answers. Say, for example, you want to produce artwork for a note card that will be printed by a commercial printer, and trimmed to a card 8 1/4” x 5 1/2" (21cm x 14cm), you want to create a painting that will reduce to this size without distortion. (I picked this size because I dug into my stash of cards and pulled one and it turned out to have these measurements.)
Note cards are rectangles of heavy paper folded in the middle to produce an opening. Each face of this paper is called a panel. You need to decide if you work will be on only one panel or will extend around to the back of the card. You can design a card that has art rapped around it. But for this example we will decide to have our work on the front panel only, and the inside blank. So, we only need one painting/design for the front panel.
With an 8 1/4" x 5 1/2" card, the front panel will be 4 1/4" x 5 1/2" finished size. For the painting to fit correctly, you will need to create it is this proportion.
Now, some design decisions need to be made. Will your art fill the panel, will there be a margin around it? Will it “bleed”? (Bleed is a printing term that means something is printed beyond the margin or edge of the page.) Whether you even can have a bleed depends on how you are printing your cards.
If you are using precut card in your home printer, most likely you cannot use a bleed as it won’t print right to the edges. In that case, you will need to design the placement of your art within the print margins of your printer. You want your art well placed on the page, not sloppily placed by the default margins. If you’re having the cards professionally printed, and the use of a bleed causes the printer to use larger stock and trim, this will increase the cost of the cards.
How to Use a Proportion Wheel
Once you have determined the final size of the artwork, what size do you create the painting? Now, we need to do some math. Quit screaming, Momma has an easy solution for you. It is a little device called a proportion wheel. A nifty invention by commercial artists who can’t do the math either. You will want to do you art at least 120 per cent larger than the finished panel, most likely more. How much larger will depend on your printer and your scanner, or on your commercial printer.
You want to work at a comfortable size, something that will allow the paint to flow and you to work freely. For most of us, that will mean at least 8” x 10” (20.5cm x 25.5cm) or larger. Most scanners will have problems with anything large. This should not be true of a commercial printer, so check with them.
For our example, we want our artwork to be reduced to 4 1/8” x 5 1/2". But this is not comfortable to work at, and we want to hide any little flaws in our work. So we will work on a larger canvas, but we want all of our work to show, and we don’t want any distortions in what we produce. Taking out our trusty little proportion wheel, we will easily find the answer.
This is a simple scale, available either in imperial or metric numbers allowing you to quickly determine how to adjust the measurements. Lets say we want to increase our artwork 200 per cent, a good amount. Our 4 1/8” becomes 8 3/8” and our 5 1/2" becomes 11”. Much easier to work with.
Or, if you have artwork you want to fit into a design space, you can find the measurement on the scale, and then find out how much reduction will be needed to fit it into the allotted space. Handy little device isn’t it. A proportion wheel will also let you know ahead of time if your work is the wrong proportion to fit in the space, and allow you to determine how it is to be cropped to fit.
