Printmaking Courses in Spain

A Few Basic Notions to Keep in Mind During Hard Times

Keep Working
Even if you don’t have the time and resources to paint or make prints, keep drawing. Everything and everywhere, at every free moment. This activity will not only hone your hand and eye, it will boost your morale. You know how low you feel after a couple of days without making art. Don’t let that happen. All you need are paper and pencil. The Spanish have a saying: “Feliz como un tonto con un lápiz…” ”Happy as an idiot with a pencil…”

Get into Printmaking, If You’re Not Already
Printmaking is the most viable medium for many artists when it comes to making a living. Printmaking has some setup costs—etching press, inks and papers, tools—and space requirements. If you’re a lucky you have a good open studio within reach. After the logistical problems are solved printmaking becomes almost a good business proposition, one of the best available to artists. Let’s look at why. Once the matrix—copper or zinc plate, solar plate, litho plate or stone, or digital file–is finished, you can pull an edition and offer the prints for sale in more than one place. And when you accumulate 20 or 30 plates you can mount exhibitions in various places at once. Serious editions on this (the eastern) side of the Atlantic are usually limited to 100 or fewer. On the American side much larger editions are accepted.

Fine-art prints are the most economical form of original art available. They are “serial originals.” Each signed-and-numbered print of an edition is an original. Your customer doesn’t need to be a bank to buy a print or a whole portfolio. This fact alone expands the market for your work by lowering the price barrier.

Fine-art prints can be sold in different types of establishments, not just galleries. For years I have sold smaller prints here in Granada in antique shops, upscale souvenir stores, home-decoration boutiques, etc.

Prints as Company Gifts
Prints are the ideal medium to offer to companies and institutions as gifts. They’re classy, inexpensive and universal, and you can sell whole editions. Just knock on the door and ask to talk with the proprietor or manager.  Sometimes the client will choose one of your existing prints. Others they will commission you a new image related to their activity. If you’re thinking about holiday sales, start contacting people in August and September. Whatever you do, offer people a preview on your website, your blog, and the social media. This is why it’s important to have an attractive, informative, professional website, and a blog. More on the creative use of Internet below.

This business is full of surprises. I have had a couple of commissions which entailed a year’s work. A few years ago a Madrid company which sold shooting galleries and electronic speed traps to the Guardia Civil, Spain’s militarized national police, commissioned me an edition of 60 prints to give as gifts to the corps’ top brass. To my surprise, the prints made a big hit with the colonels and generals—and their wives. The following year they commissioned me another edition.

The “Bon a Tirer”
The traditional printmaking canon required that editions be completed in one go. That is, if your edition was of 75 prints you were required to print them all up at once. Almost nobody does that any more except screen printers and people who do reduction prints on lino or wood. They have no choice. The former, because of the number of screens usually involved and the hassle of redoing the whole process, the latter because they destroy their matrix in the process of creating the print. Etchers and digital artists make a “bon a tirer” (“good to print”) print as a model for the entire edition, then file it someplace safe, keeping a record of the numbering in a notebook. When they want to make additional prints from the edition they just get out the BAT and make sure the new ones match it.

Go to Part III of III