the trouble with grey

This month I’ve been wrestling with a new printer.  It was a long journey to chose and make that investment but in restrospect, that was the easy bit.  You might imagine that establishing a new range of giclee prints from original work is slightly more complicated than: decide to do it, buy a printer, plug it in, buy some paper, and print.  But for me it is still complicated because of the colour grey.   I’m just going to outline the problem today, and dip back into the whole printer buying and set up thing as I get some resolution.

So: I do detailed line drawings in very smooth Bristol Board paper with an 005 pen. And I want to sell prints.  And Cards. And Gift Tags.  Cards and gift tags are relatively simple, they go to a printer. Prints start with a scan and then a simplified pallette of highlight colours for selected prints, starting with ‘default’ pale grey. Now that grey looks nice and pale on my screen, it’s a bit darker on my printed cards, and a drop-dead gorgeous colour on my little canon inkjet on slightly posh linen effect printer paper bought in town.

Enter an Epson 3880 with pigment inks and archival art papers which are most definitely not white but a most wonderful cream.  Between all of these new players, my prints look very different and too dark so I have a choice – fiddle with printer profiles so the grey looks like I’m used to, or work out what grey to re-colour my drawings slightly.  Neither is easy but I’ve chosen the latter.  Of course, without brightened paper, I’ll never get back to the original colours.  So here’s some of the experiments that will of course look different to you all because of your particular monitor settings.

    

In the left hand picture, top left is my original inkjet, and the rest are experiments with new paper and colours. Top right and bottom left are Epson 3880 prints from the same tif – you can see how different they look.

In the framed sets: the left hand frame is all prints from my little inkjet. Top of the right hand set is another of the same, but the lower 3 apertures are Epson plus archival paper tests.  Off now to find out what one of my customer prefers.